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Comment by jongjong | Hacker News Reader

Why do only a handful of developers get all the views these days? It used to be a lot more decentralized and interesting. Nowadays, there are a few somewhat junior people you keep hearing about over and over and they're usually talking about boring mainstream tools which are mostly mediocre. They're clearly being artificially pushed onto us by algorithms.

Early in my career 15 years ago, I was getting all my info from experienced old folks like Douglas Crockford, Don Norman and Alan Kay.

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> Nowadays, there are a few somewhat junior people you keep hearing about over and over and they're usually talking about boring mainstream tools which are mostly mediocre. They're clearly being artificially pushed onto us by algorithms.

The primary audience for software influencers are either junior themselves or non-devs aspiring to join the industry. It's not the same thing that Douglas Crockford or Alan Kay were doing back in the day.

I agree with this sentiment, but I'll note it happens on forums/reddit/HN as well.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I've lost count of how many times I've seen people say things that are obviously not great. They generally make sense in theory but not practice.

The audience is vastly different, the median computer person used to be far more passionate and got into computing earlier in their life, knowing better who created interesting things and therefore who to look up to. Today people are used to consuming highly image and audio doctored videos and tend to follow whoever spends their time doing that, favored by recommendation algorithms.

I have seen blog posts calling terrible names some of the great figures in our industry such as Richard Stallman, Robert C. Martin and Kent Beck. So there is no surprise those who "teach you to become a senior developer by learning this one liner trick" get more audience and praise.

Sometimes you get what you ask for.

I mean, RMS has done plenty to his own reputation

RMS is neurodivergent and a certain segment of people went after him purposefully with a lot of misinformation.

If anything, I'd say he's a perfect example of what it looks like when cancel culture makes its way into technical circles.

For example, he got lambasted for having a sexist joke on the whiteboard on his door... he didn't write it, someone else did.

Yes, it feels like all the greats of our industry have mostly faded into the background. Sad.

YouTube's algoritm will only show 1 or 2 content creators per search query. New creators won't be found, old creators are lost.

It's not a good platform for discovering anymore. You only get pushed mainstream stuff that their ads do well on.

There are the ones who clickbait, and the ones who do not.

Could you recommend any channels to diversify my watching?

NoBoilerplate, Aarthificial, CodeAesthetic, SimonSwiss, Chris Biscardi, Planetscale, Freya Holmer, and Sam Selikoff are all great.

tsoding is pretty great too if you are interested in c.

Thanks for these, I had no idea about majority of the channels and I subscribed to all.

My recommendation: Jon Gjengset - https://www.youtube.com/@jonhoo

Freya Holmér is fantastic. Discovered her a while ago while doing some basic gamedev.

NoBoilerplate is fantastic thank you for your recommendation.

You don't get popular, (as popularly defined,) by having radical, or out-of-mainstream opinions, quirks, or other dangerous forms of personality.

And YouTube et al show the public what's mainstream/popular, or bound to be - not geohot.

Yes, it is partially algorithmic, but it's primarily because this is a brand new generation of content creators and streamers. The audience for streamers like t3.gg and Primeagen primarily consist of relatively new developers seeking knowledge and entertainment, as well as seasoned developers seeking infotainment. It's not solely the information being conveyed that attracts viewers; rather, it's the holistic experience of live streaming on platforms like Twitch and YouTube, complete with humor and entertainment value. While these streamers do provide some valuable content – for instance, Primeagen's insightful series on Neovim configuration greatly assisted me during my transition to Neovim – it's important to recognize the significant contribution of production quality and entertainment value. The most successful streamers are not necessarily those with the best information, but rather those capable of delivering a comprehensive package, maintaining a regular streaming schedule, and so forth. However, if their content consistently lacks quality or spreads misinformation, their viewership would likely diminish. Conversely, it's also untrue that viewership is solely determined by the quality of information provided; you could be the most knowledgeable person, but if you suck at streaming, if you have a dry personality, etc. you likely won't get this level of view. The streamers who do well invest considerable effort into their streams, including editing and other production elements. So, comparing them to individuals like Crockford doesn't make much sense as this medium offers a unique platform for content delivery that was previously unavailable.

All that being said, there's thankfully some more niche YouTubers, or whatever you want to call them, who don't put much work into the stream per se, but their teaching and information is so good and valuable within their domain that they have decent viewership. People like Jon Gjengset who has far less subscribers both because a) he's covering more nich topics, e.g. 1.5 hour streams in depth on Rust language concepts and b) he just streams very plainly. People love his content, but it's a smaller pool and he's not going to get the hundreds of thousands of subs that t3.gg or Primeagen get.

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