Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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