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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

The problem of web content is the search and recommendation systems have no opinion on skill, effort, scholarship or accuracy.

They do, but only through the proxy of 'likes' and 'followers'. This leads to a bigger problem with web content, especially with video - people conflate the quality of the video production with the quality of the content. Someone who can make slick, glossy videos full of effects will almost always have a far larger following than someone who makes videos with better content but worse visuals. The same goes for a well-designed website. People literally believe that the loading speed of a webpage has an impact on the quality of what it says.

You could put 30 years into learning, understanding, and explaining a complex topic, but if you can't use AffectEffects or you haven't paid attention to your Core Web Vitals the chances are that YouTube and Google are going to rank you lower than someone who can.

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On average production quality seems to correlate inversely with accuracy and actual knowledge on Youtube. It kinda makes sense, most Youtube channels seem to be one-man-shows, if the production quality is good, the dude doing it is basically an A/V person at that point and you're looking at P(A/V person AND knowledgeable in X) vs. P(knowledgeable in X).

Considering the channels I follow, I can't see the correlation you mention, or we have a different definition for "production quality".

> Considering the channels I follow

No way for that sample to be biased.

It can be completely biased. This is why my definition is probably different than yours in the first place.

On the other hand, your sample may be also biased, so it goes both ways.

Personally I see three bands of content:

1. Produced-for-broadcast-TV content has the highest production costs, and the lowest technical detail. Example: Scrapheap Challenge / Junkyard Wars.

2. Midrange youtube has medium-low production costs, and medium technical detail. Example: Project Binky.

3. University lecture youtube has low production costs, and high technical detail. Example: Look up 'laplace smoothing'

Of course, it's far from an absolute rule - clearly, you can find low-technical-detail content in any production cost band :)

Channels that get big for the sake of having amazing quality tend to pick up production quality at some point, probably by hiring people. So if you're watching older/larger channels, the correlation won't be as obvious. On the other hand, we can time warp! This is the oldest video on YouTube from Veritasium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU2dZz18P0c

I'm sure there were plenty of even gankier ones prior since by that time he already had his nice logo sorted out, a pretty good broadcasting setup, and more. In any case, here's his latest video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1bSDnuIPbo

Not only YT, this applies to almost everything. If a website is basic black-on-white HTML with little or no styling, it usually has high-quality content.

So you’re saying us Backend guys are geniuses huh :D

I know it's a joke, but it's not a front-end/back-end thing, but a form/content thing.

I wonder if it's more of a U-shaped curve - one-person/smaller shows follow the trend you suggest, but larger channels can do well in both areas, as they can afford a team of people rather than requiring someone to be proficient in multiple areas.

That would tend to fit with what I've seen, but that's a pretty small/biased sample.

> You could put 30 years into learning, understanding, and explaining a complex topic

If you put that much time and effort into a topic, please invest a month into learning how to make slick visuals! The amount of knowledge that's lost due to abhorrent presentation is probably astronomical. This includes papers and books about complex topics!

I don't know where we got the inane idea that you have to be extremely dry and boring to present a complex idea. Bob Nystrom's book Crafting Interpreters is not only a joy to read, it also teaches an incredibly complex topic. 3blue1brown makes amazing animations that explain very deep topics.

If you're going to invest a large portion of your life into learning, it might behoove you to learn how to present that material in an interesting way. Seriously, just take 1 maybe two months to partially work on improving your presentations and the world will benefit so much more because of that.

Stop writing obtuse and dry papers, books, and scripts for videos. Start learning to present well!

It is also the exact same thing with text. Articles that are well written will be much more liked by readers

I agree up to a point but what is "well written" depends to some degree on the reader. You'll find plenty of people here who basically resent literary style of writing and storytelling and would much rather have a dry paragraph or two synopsis.

> People literally believe that the loading speed of a webpage has an impact on the quality of what it says.

Or if there is a progress bar [1], which was discussed on HN back then [2]. The top comment in the HN thread is so utterly ridiculous it hurts.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/why-s...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16289380

It is funny, but most of these points almost equally apply to research output.

Given enough eyeballs, all content is shallow.

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