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Comment by ninkendo | Hacker News Reader

I noticed this with one of my favorite channels, Vsauce… they were one of the pilot channels to be “upgraded” to YouTube Red, back when that was a thing; the series was called “Mind Field”. I never subscribed to it when it was premium, but when YouTube Red shut down it all became free.

I tried watching a few episodes of the ostensibly “higher quality” format of Mind Field, and it was demonstrably worse in most aspects. Bloated, way more filler, way more pointless behind the scenes stuff of the host interacting with the guests, and an overall much slower pace of interesting material. It felt a lot more like a cookie cutter Nat Geo show instead of the denser, faster paced material of Vsauce.

Overall I think that the smaller, self-produced (or minimally produced with small teams) format is the future and I’m glad to see that YouTube is failing to change that despite their efforts.

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To be fair Vsauce ruined itself a long time ago. Obviously the next step for a popular channel is to turn it into a company that churns out content for money, but it kills the charm and quality.

Should just stick to (relative to big orgs) low budget and take in those views.

Phillip DeFranco's stuff was good until he started a million offshoots and it wasn't personal anymore. Then it was just mediocre unorganic (as in how pop bands are formed by talent scouts) stuff.

This is also probably just survivor bias at work too. I will say that vsauce still made some good content even after mindfield. I just had to avoid the mindfield stuff.

I thunk vsauce has still put out some great content after mindfield but it has been pretty sparse. I think Michael could totally reclaim it but it would take time.

YouTube has been pushing garbage "woke" videos into my feed. I have been having to click not interested on them. I just want to watch the home made construction videos like Essential Craftsman in peace without an ideology being shoved down my throat.

All channels will eventually burn out and fade, but the youtube model guarantees that there will always be new shiny content.

Which is another way of staying that YouTube will leave a wake of burned out and faded creators behind it.

Just like all social media

Just like all human art and celebrity culture.

We loved the Bee Gees, then we hated them, then we loved them again...

My favorite band from that time is ABBA, if only because they totally rocked these cat dresses, which would have made a killing on etsy if the internet existed back then.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/apr/27/abba-announce-...

I mean even if love art and artists from thousands of years ago, their celebrity did fade away. But we can still enjoy their best works, same with contemporary artists who produce good shit for a while and then decline (or revert back) into mediocrity.

I mean Pewdiepie still mostly just makes dumb videos of him and gets an absurd number of views, and has over 100m subscribers.

and it's great. Imagine if he had created an incubator for the next generation of let's players or tried to make a media company. It would have been terrible (see: Casey Neistat's 368)

He stuck to his usual content and his margins just keep increasing since there's no added costs for a higher viewerbase.

I don't really understand why some YouTube people go off doing this. What is the value proposition exactly, their success is due to themselves, how do they commodatize that and scale it to a company

This typically comes from chasing after higher sources of recognition/prestige/clout, and it's especially prone to happen when you have a background in the "traditional" industry and saw the whole endeavor of producing Internet content as a stepping stone. "Finally, I can run a proper show with real production values", they say. Emulating an idol is the goal, but there's often no particular benchmark guiding it and their creative role suddenly shifts towards managerial elements, so the final product is invariably worse than whatever they did before. Plus the impulse to do it is pretty much always an indulgence running counter to market trends.

> What is the value proposition exactly

Having a career.

It's very rare for someone to last decades as a performer in the entertainment industry, and online content moves faster than most. You don't want to suddenly have no audience age 35 with zero skills or experience outside making potentially niche YouTube videos.

I thought Mind Field was really cool. Obviously a very different feel to the normal vsauce videos but … I dunno, I don't see what's wrong about going that route.

Derek of Veritasium is trying to go that route by himself. He released some documentaries of his own (which actually were of lower quality than his regular material, I thought).

Wendover is also releasing some long-form documentaries. He's much better at it, actually.

What's interesting is maybe the different incentive structures. I don't know how Derek is doing it, but Wendover seems like to get the funding mainly from Nebula/other sources. In the case of Vsauce, YouTube Red probably has agreements to let outside people manage it to be more "commercially-safe".

I watched some Mind Field and thought it was ok, but thought it was not as engaging as vsauce regular content.

I figured that vsauce is good at making videos he makes. They gave him a cable format & crew and it didn't really translate his appeal.

Someone like Veritasium or Wendover might be able to get very proficient in a documentary format, it sounds like they might have good ideas.

I think I have watched more Alex (French guy cooking) and Guga (Sous vide everything), than I have watched real commercial studio-produced cooking shows.

Babish is a go-to when I need to learn to make something new.

Make sure you check out Epicurious and Ethan Chlebowski

>Chlebowski

what a fitting name for a cook!

Means bread, isn't it?

Yeah, MacBread for a bad English equivalent.

Check out my name is andong, his Presentation style is incredible.

I know what you mean. I loved Vsauce when it originally came out. I remember getting an “oh! Wow!” reactions with amazing first season when Michael would explain things. Later when it moved, it was all too much fluff and little core material I originally loved. I completely lost touch eventually.

Yeah, many of the YouTube premium series felt overproduced. I wouldn't exactly describe modern YouTube channels as "home video" but it's certainly a different feel from the network TV shows many of the premium series tried to emulate.

There were a couple premium series that did work out pretty well though, in my opinion. The Slo Mo Guys had a bunch of episodes which were basically just their usual content, but with a higher budget and a team of people available to set up the scenes they were filming. Those videos were excellent.

I wonder if someone here tried all of the premium stuff like CuriosityStream, Nebula and whats that other one?

I think that's just a result of trying to be more inclusive towards a general audience.

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