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Comment by JCharante | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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