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Comment by kkoncevicius | Hacker News Reader

I got interested after reading this and retold the story about the chef to my wife, in passing, and she replied with a good point, which basically is:

"This is not surprising, the video of a house wife making food is accessible to a higher number of people. A lot fewer people would be able to follow someone who is number one in the world."

Might that be the answer at hand? It certainly seems like it applies to programming videos. If we measure by view counts the things that are around the mean in terms of skill will be more popular.

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I would presume that the peak would be closer to 1 std deviation above mean, since improvement usually means looking at things you can’t do but aren’t scared to try.

The woodworking videos I watch are often things I can’t do.

I assume a bit of opposite - that the number of potential viewers decrease as the quality and skill necessary to follow the content increases.

Basically: people with skill level 1 std above the mean are still able to follow content that is 1 std below the mean. But the opposite is not true.

The average person will find a video about grilled cheese to be condescending, and won’t enjoy watching it at all. Watching a video about roast lamb or soufflé might inspire me to go to a restaurant instead.

Having done quite a lot of it professionally once I can say that the details of high level cooking are both mostly understandable to a lay person and incredibly boring to someone who isn't specifically invested in the process of cooking.

> If we measure by view counts the things that are around the mean in terms of skill will be more popular.

I would instinctively have thought material conveying the basics would be the most viewed in the long run - since skill is cumulative, everyone at some point will have had to learn the basics, and only those who succeeded would go on to view intermediate content

If you’re looking at an online course I agree the basics will be watched more often (as well as due to people not completing the course). But if you’re looking at something like cooking videos I’d expect the videos of people cooking cool things would get more views. People love food porn and want to watch something exciting about cooking but probably won’t watch a video about knife basics because it’s not as engaging to most people. That’s what I loved so much about Alton Brown and especially Good Eats, he makes so many mundane kitchen things exciting. Compare that to Thomas Keller’s Master Class, which is incredibly informative and I’d recommend it to anyone, but also significantly lower energy and you really have to want to learn the stuff to watch him julienne carrots for 5 minutes.

Good coincidence. I'm about to subscribe to Master Class (International 2 for 1 offer) and was looking forward to watching Thomas Keller among others. Watched 2 of Massimo Bottura's lectures with a guest pass and found it useful and informative, looks like I'll enjoy Keller as well...

Seems he does mac and cheese so no? Seems accessible. Maybe people don't know this guy is the best chef in the world, I didn't so I would not have searched him out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEDcWd78U1g

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