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Comment by ly | Hacker News Reader

In case the author of the video reads this: I tried to watch it but after 2 minutes I just had to turn it off as I couldn’t handle that music anymore. It’s extremely distracting when you try to listen to what the narrator is explaining. It’s not that I don’t like background music in explanatory videos, but this music is way too loud and complex to not distract.

Also, considering the video is uploaded to YouTube, I would remove the moving white “stars” in the background. The model itself is very detailed already, which makes it noisy after running it though YouTube’s compression, but the moving stars cause there to be even less bandwidth available for the visualization itself, resulting in more compression artifacts.

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> It’s not that I don’t like background music in explanatory videos

And I'm totally against it. It is always distracting to me. If I'd want to have background music I could play it myself, and it would match my choice. The only videos that should have background music is where the music is in any way an important element of the story, e.g. if the topic is the work of an artist or composer. Otherwise, it is distracting.

A catchy intro is nice tho.

Intro != background

true

(two can play at this game)

noted.

Cool. Thanks for the suggestion- i'll pass it along. You can mute the audio and still read the titles. Same info.

Also, i'm pretty sure those are other distant atoms, not stars.

Fwiw, another user experience report: I managed to overlook the existence of the video, until seeing it mentioned here in comments. A white video arrow, overlaid on the white center of the poster image. My fuzzy recollection is I classified it as a decorative title graphic, as I skipped past it while reading.

Also, stop making the text box slide in and out. This adds nothing and is distracting. Just make it appear and disappear.

noted.

I liked the video the was it was.

thanks!!

Same! Whatever its didactic virtues, as a piece of art it's marvelous.

thanks. love!

Opposing anecdote: I liked the music. It made the video feel nostalgically educational, which is the feeling I get from the whole site.

Thank you. We want to make science beautiful and full of possibility.

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