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Comment by jarenmf | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised when people don't even know more mainstream science YouTubers like vsauce or veritasium. I've asked a class of ~20 college students whether they know vsauce and I was surprised no one knows him.

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I think a factor is overestimating just how many people 'get into' YouTube culture. Only roughly 74% of American Adults use YouTube[0], and the average daily watch time is only 42 minutes[1], not much time to explore and watch videos outside of your own interests. Vsauce's videos are great (including the recent ones), but they're mostly a remnant of YouTube culture past, and 10-20 million views a video[2] is not a lot in the grand scheme of YouTube's 2 billion strong user base[3].

0: https://www.journalism.org/2021/01/12/news-use-across-social...

1: https://www.emarketer.com/content/us-youtube-advertising-202...

2: https://www.youtube.com/c/vsauce1/videos

3: https://blog.youtube/press/#:~:text=Features-,YouTube%20by,t...

Exactly.. i watch youtube for "whatever i'm searching for", which has never been a science video. Cars, computers, music, other random interests sure, but not science.

Generally, I'm the same and I'm also probably only on YouTube a few days a week and often just to watch one or two short things, e.g. to see if there's a review of something that would benefit from watching a video.

Ya, I’m a heavy YouTube watcher (a couple of hours a day maybe?). I’m aware of vsauce and clearly I retested in tech but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a full video. I mostly watch conference talks when it comes to tech videos.

> I mostly watch conference talks when it comes to tech videos.

I think I have watched literally >30 hrs of programming talks during the last month. Conferences just are more entertaining than most other content lately.

For me, vsauce exists in the mental zone I have assigned to things that are clickbaity popular science. Sort of the same place as the "I fucking love science" network. Likewise, I've never actually seen a single video, so I suppose it's possible that I'm just inferring that it's bad on the basis of the fact that it's popular. I don't know that I've ever seen a really good Youtube channel with more than a few million subscribers: to be that popular, you have to paint with too broad a brush. Even 3Blue1Brown has fewer than 4 million.

To be fair, I think vsauce is one of the 'old guard' (heh, being like 5-10 years old as a channel gets you there).

Those channels are loved/hated (or at least known) by most of us who were on YouTube in earlier years (2010s), but YouTube has grown and grown, and even the most popular channels like Mr. Beast and Pewdiepie are unknown to many.

Take my wife; she watches her subset of videos, YouTube promotes similar videos, and she'll never hear of any of the 'pop' YouTube channels unless she accidentally goes to the trending page.

You’re probably massively overestimating how relevant YouTube is for most people.

And even then, Youtube has so many sub communities. For example, in some parts of the internet, people like Jeffree Star, James Charles and the rest are huge, but I'd wager most people here don't know them.

Similarly, a lot of people here may be familiar with English edutubers, but did you know there are a ton of massive creators in other non-English countries? How many of these [0] do you know?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_YouTubers

I had literally never heard of James Charles, despite the ridiculous view numbers he got and constant placement on the Trending page, until the grooming incident.

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