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Comment by epidemian | Hacker News Reader

Have you also found other videos by the author to be "10 minutes of tiddly little bits of information"?

I think Veritasium makes some of the most valuable and informative videos out there. Definitely not the kind of channel that i would consider "baiting" with titles and then disappointing with the video content itself.

His views on video titles' "clickbaitiness", given the state of affairs of Youtube recommendation algorithms and the "competition" for viewers' attention, seem pretty on point to me.

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Veritasium is good but it's definitely on the fluffy/filler content side of things. I wouldn't exactly call it the most valuable and informative videos out there. It's more breath than depth.

Here's an example of someone low-key having really valuable and informative content, with very little fluff: https://youtube.com/channel/UCGKe6VmbFOX-3C30JjEsV-g

Veritasium has about 2800x more subscribers than the linked channel.

I wonder if removing all the engaging "fluff" and just listing information reduces the impact of videos. Like, maybe the trade-off is between having a shorter, denser video so the few people who watch it can get their information in less time, versus having 10x more people watch and learn the information.

Probably as simple as the linked channel (Reflective Channel) has about 40 videos over the past 7 years, and Veritasium has more than I can count. So Reflective Channel has just had fewer videos to promote, and thus, a smaller audience.

I know that he makes good videos, but he seems to give a free pass to clickbait here. We know how clickbait works from SEO: thousands of articles with same clickbait titles, which ends up in content mattering less and less, creates SEO farms, leads to content makers having to buy ads to feature their content etc. Also, even the title of this video becomes confusing: this video will now show up for someone searching for Wigner's famous speech with the same name, plus the title is factually incorrect, clickbait is reasonably effective, not unreasonably.

He specifically said in the video that he hasn't been doing this in the past, but plans to "get better at it".

I think one of his videos that qualifies as pure clickbait is "Can a Wind-Powered Car Go Faster Than The Wind?". It was 20 minutes, and nearly completely devoid of any real information. Certainly not 20 minutes worth, and very different from the rest of his videos. It did spawn more videos about how the car actually worked that were worth watching.

> It did spawn more videos about how the car actually worked that were worth watching.

Yes, including one by him, in which he specifically addresses the shortcoming of the video you are referencing and notes it's an example of what he considers a failure of him providing enough information in the video.

I never understood this type of reasoning, where just because the creator(s) acknowledge their shortcomings, you're not allow to not like the video because of it, or complain about it. So I'll repeat, "I didn't like the video", don't take it personally.

If it's a criticism of the video in isolation, then that holds merit. It sounded to me like it was a criticism of his technique and how he does things. That he acknowledged that as a mistake to rectify makes it less valid as a critique of that as long as he actually changes.

The person I was replying to asked for a specific example, I provided one. I still like his content, still subscribe, and have watch most of his videos since. Seems like some people are just taking this as a "hate on Vertasium" post.

I understood that he's been doing more clickbaity titles for the past year or two, but maybe i misunderstood.

For the first video about the wind powered vehicle, yes i agree. It was more of a story and spectacle than any actual information. Still quite entertaining i think, but maybe disappointing if you wanted to learn something, which is usually the spirit of the channel.

> It was 20 minutes, and nearly completely devoid of any real information.

It's entertainment, not a scientific lecture. As entertainment, it contained far more information that the vast majority of competing entertainment.

> and very different from the rest of his videos.

I must disagree here, I think most of his videos contain very little information as well. Less than I would like, in any case.

> It did spawn more videos about how the car actually worked that were worth watching.

How is this not a good thing? It's great for people who actually want more information, and it's great for the creators who provide said information. It makes the creator community (I hate that term) healthy.

A shame he doesn't name them properly to make the "most valuable and informative" videoes more easily accessible to those in need of information on the topic

> Have you also found other videos by the author to be "10 minutes of tiddly little bits of information"?

Yes. His videos are personable and pleasant to watch, but information sparse. They are more likely to leave me with the feeling of learning something than they are to impart lasting knowledge (ironically, I believe this is a problem he has discussed before, I guess that much stuck with me at least.)

It's not just a problem that he's discussed before- it is the central motivation behind his approach of "person-on-the-street interviews".

His view (supported by his grad research) was that the default approach of presenting information allows viewers to gloss over how the video's information differs from their pre-existing mental models. After the video is done, they can go back to their pre-existing models without actually updating with info from the video, because as far as they're concerned, there wasn't conflict between the pre-existing model and the video's info.

His hope in showing interviews with people off the street is to get people to think about how they might answer the interview question. Get people to remember their pre-existing model. Then hit them with the contrast between their pre-existing model and the truth, so the viewer hopefully makes an attempt to incorporate the truth.

Now, this doesn't say anything about the information density of his videos. I don't think they're very information dense. This reply is just about his attempt to increase the viewer's retention of the information that is presented.

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