How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
I personally have benefited enormously from so many of his YT videos. I wish this is how Mathematics was taught in high-schools, Engg schools.
<3 <3
I love both 3b1b and SineRider, both have had more impact on my intuitive understanding of function composition than anything else.
Still impressive work :)
But as you said, it can be taken to an unproductive excess.
I managed to calibrate myself out of that, but it took longer than I'd have liked.
Brilliant, I’m stealing this phrase. :D
Never heard that term. Love it. Definitely has described me on a few occasions.
The fact that he knew the place, the reason, and came up with a workaround live demonstrates that he invests time into improving his toolkit. And not occasionally, but actively.
I still believe it is cool.
EDIT: Looks like it's completely bespoke workflow: https://github.com/3b1b/videos?tab=readme-ov-file#workflow
It’s also weird when some of these creators swap with somebody else, like veratasium has had his producer do some of the videos instead.
The big reveal would be AvE.
In light of receiving new information that goes against your own tenants against poorly researched misinformation, changing your opinion isn't really a noteworthy response.
Framed in an insane way by someone looking to denigrate someone they don't like. I have no idea who you're targeting but you obviously have a chip on your shoulder.
As somebody in the same boat as AvE, watching people who you knew and respected turn against you the way so many people did is pretty brutal and fucks you up pretty good. Honestly it was scary as fuck how so people completely lost their minds after being fed non-stop fear porn and propaganda. Lots of parallels to some pretty fucked up atrocities—I can now see how “normal people” can turn so evil and corrupt they’d kill their neighbors and families. Multiple people I knew and respected wished me a horrific death for expressing my opinions… I’m sure if we continued this conversation and it was allowed on this forum you too would verbally wish at my death. Scary fucking shit.
I mean god forbid anybody express any disagreement with perhaps the most authoritarian, unscientific power grab in human history. The shit that went down was pure evil. Thank god some people had the courage to speak out against it even if it cost them so dearly.
People who thought we should just ride covid out were, more often than not, simply unaware of the nuances of covid vs a cold or something similar. People who thought we should hide in our homes until it was eradicated were similarly unaware of the implicit harms of that choice.
A healthy discourse with people willing to concede and compromise would have landed us somewhere sane. Disagreement would have been part of finding a sensible conclusion.
What failed was our ability to do just that. Somehow we totally blew it.
And if we didn’t follow their edict’s or if we were to express any doubt of any kind, we were evil alt-right grandma killers who deserved horrible Covid deaths.
Heathy discourse was absolutely not allowed. You were either 100% on board with whatever crazy shit your local politicians threw against the wall or you were a pile of shit sub human scumball. Didn’t matter they had no definition of success, no long term gameplan, no acknowledgment of the harms they were causing… in fact it didn’t even matter that these experts and politicians didn’t follow their own policies, you were told to suck it up buttercup this is the “new normal” and it’s forever.
I don’t think this is a “both sides have a good argument” kind of deal. What the Covid “side” did was abhorrent and history will not look fondly on them at all.
History will look on this the same way as it did on Spanish Flu:
Barely at all, even when it has valuable lessons for the next pandemic.
The former told me that people would stop wearing masks very very quickly.
Humans are social animals, I find a lot of things makes a lot more sense through that lens — shooting the messenger included.
In her case, if there were indeed comparable cases of people repeatedly refusing to follow medical isolation, it's the others who were unfairly given freedom to continue to infect and kill innocent people.
I only form my opinion from the current Wikipedia article, and this is how it looks to me.
- Mary Mallon, herself, was just as innocent, yet she was treated as a criminal, which is unfair.
- Her treatment was "hectic" as per Wikipedia. I'd say it was unreasonable and dangerous, with a big pile of negligence.
- Communication and information given to her was inconsistent at best.
- She had all the rights and reasons to disbelieve and dispute all conjectures made about her. Contemporary state-of-the-art knowledge and practices in medicine and "public health" was nowhere near conclusive and confident. She had a good shot at collecting evidence to prove her case, but to my understanding she was denied a fair judgement - case was dismissed before hearing. However, I believe that her continuous isolation could not be justified "beyond reasonable doubt" even by our modern knowledge and standard of proof!
- The demands put on her were unreasonable and excessive.
- He name was dragged through media, forever tainted in the process.
- She was never given appropriate consideration/compensation for all the conditions of her treatment and limitations of release. They could have offered her a lifetime pension which would have removed the need for her to work as a cook. They could have recruited her for research program, compensated accordingly. Instead, she was expected to bear full cost of all conditions put on her. The best shot at compensation was a promise of royalties for yet-unwritten book dragging her name through more mud. Which only added insult to injury, understandably, as it would absolutely do for so many of us.
- My understanding is that other similar cases were not "refused requests to isolate", but such requests were not even made, making Mary's case unfairly singled out.
- Last but not least, I absolutely disagree with your chosen turn of phrase that others were "unfairly given freedom". Freedom is not given, it is a default state of being. To take it away requires extraordinary justification, which in Mary's case was awfully deficient and remains so to this day.
No, you were told to out aside your opinions and allow people educated in epidemiology to guide a rapidly changing situation. It turns out the there were too many people with a chip on their shoulder to make the policy recommendations effective.
> if we were to express any doubt of any kind, we were evil alt-right grandma killers who deserved horrible Covid deaths.
Pointless hyperbole.
> no acknowledgment of the harms they were causing
Such as?
> What the Covid “side” did was abhorrent and history will not look fondly on them at all.
Reading between the lines it seems like you have many baked in assumptions that distort your perception of the event.
There was no oppressive regime forcing you to do anything. There were common sense, effective public health recommendations for mitigating a novel virus that spread faster than anything we'd seen, whose death rate was not known, and for which we had no vaccine or mitigation except for masking/distancing.
No one was forcing you to stay indoors. You were asked to wear a mask around other people, and most private businesses chose to require customers and employees to wear one, as is their right.
Im frankly pretty shocked that HN, which usually has a relatively educated user base compared to most other sites, is allowing this kind of drivel from people who have no idea what they are talking about.
I'm really sorry I did bite on this provocation, but hope your post stays up for everyone to see and make their own judgement.
What you describe is the idealistic picture of how it, perhaps, should have unfolded. You may even genuinely believe it is what actually transpired, and sure as hell you want us to believe the same, but reality disagrees. We remember how it was and we "have receipts".
In Victoria (AU) people were definitely not "asked" but very much demanded to perform all these theatrics. I remember watching some news with police wallowing in pride of scolding and ultimately fining a man who they "caught" sitting in his own car "outside of property boundary" after curfew, apparently needed to escape a heated family situation. By sitting alone and unmasked in the car he would surely cause a mass-spreading of your beloved "virus". We were, in fact, forced to stay indoors. What is the other meaning of "curfew"?
In other multiple examples people were jumped from behind by police, tasered, hand-chocked and even rammed by police cars - again, for being found in "non-compliance" with this nonsense. There was no lack of footage showing people forcibly masked by police. Other measures included arresting people in their homes for "inciting" on social media, large scale deployment of armored vehicles, helicopters and drones to spy on those having BBQ "over allowed number of visitors". Tear gas and rubber bullets for transgressors. Mounted police "kettling" of protesters of such "measures". Care to quantify anti-viral properties of curfews?
We knew all there was to know very early in the show. Diamond Princess was perfect in-vivo experiment. A sardine can full of old farts had 700 out 3700 "infected". Pardon, "tested positive" - I imagine with a PCR test. I wonder was the PCR test at the time used at 40 cycles, which is enough to find traces of this "deadly virus" in orange juice and machine oil? Apparently 14 people later died "from" the "virus". Interestingly, both "tested positive" and "died" were reported after half- to one-and-half-months since vessel was fully abandoned. I can only conclude that those poor 14 were ventilated to death, as it was a preferred method of disposal at the time. Is it even so much over the "baseline" for 3000 septagenarians regardless of covid or any other malaise?
Epidemiology has proven itself to be full of it and unable to take on any new learnings. I suspect it was always like that. "People educated in epidemiology to guide a rapidly changing situation" were even unable to follow their own "guidance"! When they were "blowing off steam" in underground orgies or similarly unable to hold their urges. Do you need reference for that?
There was no justification for anything. Masks were mandated on a whim. Premier of the state went from "wearing a mask for this virus is a waste of mask" to "you are an extremist and far-right if you don't wear one" in one day. Some "health advice" was cited, but request to release that advice later on was denied, and denied it stays to this day. Apparently, it was "not in public interest" to release. Yeah, sure. I totally believe it wasn't pulled out of.. thin air.
On a personal front, not showing unbounded enthusiasm was branded "conspiratorial thinking" and "actively wanting 10% of over-60s dead". By people I considered friends, not less.
So, who really engages in revisionism and newspeak here? Who is an extremist - the one who shuns a useless mask or those who point a (rubber bullet) gun at them or break into their home with handcuffs? What is this derogatory, offending rhetoric spouted from highest level of political and bureaucratic power, if not gaslighting? Who is "spouting full throated delusions as fact"?
I cannot possibly fit all my points into this HN post, or I won't have any time left to work today. But for every bit of nonsense we have a pile of receipts completely refuting it. Even if some "measures" in isolation could be argued reasonable, the whole well was so deeply poisoned that it is absolutely impossible to look at it positively. My most charitable interpretation is that they wanted the measures to be first and foremost visible, and effectiveness or even necessity was not a priority. But my appetite for being charitable went away too, as the stench of their BS was overwhelming. It probably does not matter for establishing the truth, as the trenches have been dug out and the war is declared for many decades ahead. Covid enthusiasts' camp "won the battle" - we were all subjected to all these outlandish orders and demands. Did it help in the end? I do not understand. Not only they were successful with inflicting the maximum pain, but they also now demand us to remember it fondly??? Why? How twisted one's mind has to be? Or is it intoxication from the high of righteousness? Righteousness is a hell of drug, indeed.
If I may address the "such as?" insinuation in the GP post. I'm sure they aren't really genuine in wanting to hear the answer. Otherwise their claimed "education" would have allowed them to see at least some of reasons. If "education" doesn't stand for "brain-washing" and "indoctrination", as it mostly does these days, unfortunately. But I would like to point out at least some political harm. Prior to 2020 I didn't care about politics at all. I do not "consume" news, I didn't know my state's Premier name, and only know our federal PMs for the laughing stock they are, "left" and "right" alike. I can say I was largely onboard with "consensus" on "climate change" and an "ally" on most cultural "issues". But living through the stress of three-year-long torrent of vile, unadulterated lies not only broke my physical body (I developed a condition which will finish me much sooner than I would like), but also made me feeling so incredibly dirty for even remotely associating with that camp. If anything was "baked into my perception", it was by this experience only, not by my apriori position or any media influence. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to wash off this filth, but the only way I'll be able to live with myself and not to finish myself off before my condition does it for me is to deny, defy and sabotage every initiative of everyone who sits atop of this pyramid or wants to climb up to it. No matter how "educated" they are, it is now proven to me that they have less capacity to reflection and learning than even the worst LLMs of today. In fact, calling them "bots" or "NPCs" is an insult to bots or NPCs. In my opinion all they deserve is Nuremberg trial and guillotine, and by association all others who are willingly singing the same song.
Fundamentally, COVID public health recommendations revolved around minimizing transmission and preservation of medical resources while awaiting development of treatment options. No amount of ranting about being forced to sit in your house, other people being mean to you, or political gamesmanship changes that. No amount of complaining about imperfect solutions like masking or distancing detract from the overall validity of why they were recommended.
As a doctor I have had to have this kind of talk with people over and over. The underlying biology cares zero for your schedule or convenience in life. Given how noncompliance is a constant problem on an individual healthcare level, it's not surprising that we ended up with millions of people just like you who can't follow simple instructions and formed communities in support of their collective failure to do so.
Righteousness is the most potent drug of them all, is it not? No need to answer. Have a good day.
Yes, absolutely. You just don't see how it looks from the outside, so it all appears normal to you. It absolutely isn't normal and makes you look unhinged.
(In the following paragraph "you" is mostly figurative, not personal)
Yes, I let a lot of anger and emotion into the reply to the bunch of diatribes which, themselves, were unsubstantiated attempts at gaslighting, full of derogatory rhetoric. This - hooking up on provocation - I consider a mistake on my part. However, if we omit my venting (the posts I was replying to would be reduced to zero without it), every point I made stands true, as it was observable reality at the time. Its "incoherence" is just a reflection on the described phenomena. It is not my fault that nothing in the "pandemic response" had any rhyme or reason. No matter how many times you repeat your aposteriori-constructed "presentation" which you wish to be true. That you don't care or dare to engage with my points makes me even more confident that they are valid and makes me care even less about what you may think of me. In fact, I wear "not normal" and "unhinged" badges from you with pride. And you wouldn't want to hear me speaking about it all in my mother-tongue, which you (personally) and me are likely to share - now, that would be "unhinged", but surely "coherent". Unfortunately I'm not equally mastered in English, which makes it another mistake to pick fights with local purveyors of "truth". I've been one of your political/cultural/intellectual "tribe" only few years ago, but your actions and words made me not able to associate with it forever anymore, under any circumstances. I invite you (personally) to recall the relevant saying about not wanting to do certain private business on the same field.
Putting a lid on it now, as I'm, probably, walking on the edge of HN posting guidelines, if not over it yet. There's certainly no "intellectual curiosity" or "good faith" expressed here by any participants, myself included.
One person is clever, two can talk, a group is clueless and a crowd is an idiot. It is only expected that any non-standard regulation will meet all sorts of resistances and division across axes most of which will make no sense even.
Personally I believe that the best way to handle it is not an open information, but total social manipulation into FUD with proper control points. But that’s incompatible with democracy and all. It’s not because I’m an inherently bad anti-humanist, I just don’t see how that could work cause it’s absolutely naive. A crowd is a separate being from a human that stands in it, and it requires non-human interaction. Treating it as just a set of humans to whom you speak directly is an error.
I was more disturbed by how individual people handled the situation, even with people they were close with. It was remarkable how rapidly relationships fell apart over covid. And slightly beyond that as well, into the “crowd” category, but like you say… That’s arguably more predictable.
I like to think I know better now. But, I’m also reminded that I’m still young. I was 35, and way too accustomed to quiet Canadian life. The biggest news we saw over on this side of the country for a long time was a hockey riot, otherwise things happening elsewhere (generally speaking).
Then again, maybe the hockey riot was all I needed to know going into the pandemic, haha. I should have learned more from that.
Someone here took exception to me saying that I have never had any trouble with wearing masks, went and left a generically threatening comment on my blog.
> I mean god forbid anybody express any disagreement with perhaps the most authoritarian, unscientific power grab in human history. The shit that went down was pure evil.
Are you still talking about the wearing masks during a global pandemic that lowered global life expectancy by about 2 years, or to put it differently "killed between 1 and 3 times as many as the literal Holocaust"?
Because that's way out of touch if so.
And forcing people to wear completely useless cloth masks for years did almost nothing to change those numbers. Same with virtually every single other non-pharmaceutical intervention.
Virus is gonna virus. You can’t stop it and even if you could it doesn’t make the means to do so ethical, legal or moral.
And we literally can and have made interventions that work on viruses. Even non pharmaceutical ones — that's one reason why condoms are so promoted.
Several non-pharmaceutical interventions have been demonstrated to be effective for covid, specifically. Real masks — N95 for example, not generic 'cloth' — were one of the ones that reduced probability of infection, with different probability depending on if your were measuring "person has virus and wears mask, probability they infect person at 2m distance in 5 minutes?" or "person wearing a mask and doesn't have virus, chance of them being infected when standing 2m from an infected person without a mask for 5 minutes?" and all the other combinations and variations because stats is hard.
They also work like this on influenza, IIRC, but not the common cold. That (not the imperfections) is on purpose, and is why medical staff wear them as standard.
Hand sanitizer, which sold out, as I understand it that didn't help at all with covid, but the memes around it probably reduced something else.
> even if you could it doesn’t make the means to do so ethical, legal or moral.
I have yet to meet a militant nudist — you are, after all, objecting to being forced to wear something you dismiss as "cloth", which is what your clothes are made of — but PPE seems to wind up a lot of people. Condoms, to use a previous example, but also seatbelts.
Do note they don’t wear N95 masks so they can’t filter smaller particles like viruses. It’s just to protect you from their saliva and breath droplets and spreading larger bacteria.
N95 masks are fairly effective if worn precisely and close fitting, but barely anyone used those because they are harder to breathe in.
A cloth mask or thin medical mask does practically nothing except protect others from larger droplets.
Do you think it might be personal rather than anything to do with your opinions?
Despite all that, people still cling to the fantasy that it was comply or be complicit in the death of anyone who died from covid.
You're absolutely right. It was and remains scary as all hell.
If Covid were to wipe out 10% of the population, all the draconian measures make a lot more sense. Slow it down as much as possible, reduce pressure on hospitals and give scientists time to make a vaccine.
But it turns out the death rate from Covid wasn’t that bad - and Americans would, in hindsight, largely prefer a 1% (or whatever) mortality rate over the inconveniences of masks, staying at home, and so on. But a lot of things weren’t obvious early on like they are now. We didn’t know that.
If there’s another pandemic in our lifetime, there’s almost no chance society takes those preventative measures a second time. Let’s hope we don’t get something a lot more deadly.
Studies on the coronavirus circulating showed this at the very beginning of 2020. And that’s just one of the anti scientific measures that were taken.
This is only "obvious" with the benefit of hindsight. There was a mountain of rushed studies early on reporting all sorts of conflicting "facts" about covid. Of course using what we know now, you can look back and cherrypick a lot of great stuff from the pile of early results. But that doesn't mean you could have done the same thing in early 2020. How could you tell which studies to believe? Everything was rushed, had small sample sizes and nothing had been replicated yet.
At the start of 2020 it wasn't clear how long viral particles stayed airborne, and whether you could even contact covid from breathing it in, or if you needed physical contact of some sort. I remember one scare where people were worried you could catch covid from the cardboard used for amazon packages - before we realised covid dries out and dies if it lands on materials like that. Thats not true of all viruses.
Government policy, science and software share something in common: They can happen fast or happen well. You can only pick one. Rushed science gets small things wrong. Rushed software is buggy and brittle, and rushed government policy makes mistakes.
Its easy to forget, but the start of 2020 was a madhouse.
Also covid and other diseases spread well in open air summer festivals where UV is at its peak. And for covid specifically, we had peaks in the summer, where, again, people tend to get out and UV is high.
There's basically 4 categories of people that fucked up the discourse about lockdowns:
1) Health professionals who in a well-intentioned way recommended what _would actually work_ to stop the spread of the disease: ie -- a complete draconian lockdown, without considering what would happen if that draconian lockdown wasn't actually complete (that it would still spread quickly and widely)
2) Paranoid conspiracy theorists and anti-science types who believed that the lockdowns were part of some nefarious agenda.
3) People who wanted (and still want) a permanent lockdown for their own reasons -- whether for the valid reason that they have some kind of immune disorder or because of crippling social anxiety or introversion or because they just liked working from home
4) Professional doom sayers and rabble rousers who got engagement on social media from pushing apocalyptic scenarios (on both sides of the issue)
---
They were all so loud that like the rational voices in the room (ie: People who supported a lock down early and then wanted to open up more quickly as we learned more about how it spread and how it got treated) just got shouted down, with really negative consequences -- like how all the far right crazies got voted into school boards on this issue and then got into all kinds of stupid shit (banning books, etc). It was crazy to keep schools closed even after it was clear that the virus was in a pandemic stage and kids weren't really affected by it and schools weren't a major vector for transmission, and it was especially crazy to keep them closed after the vaccine came out.
Somehow people got in their mind that the goal was an eradication of covid and that _was never possible_ once it escaped Wuhan. The goal was the slow the spread until it was endemic in order to give us time to learn how to treat it effectively and to stop hospitals from being overwhelmed. Once it's was endemic, we were never going to stop it.
We figured out very quickly, that mainly old people were at danger.
The lockdowns happened, when this was known for sure.
"If Covid were to wipe out 10% of the population, all the draconian measures make a lot more sense."
And no one even claimed back then, that a unhospitalised 10% death rate was expected.
In my understanding as a parent - the old in charge freaked out and locked everyone in, to protect mainly themself - yet the young generation suffered the most of it, despite not being at danger from the disease as well. So trying to prevent the collapse of the hospitals did made sense - but not the way it was done, at the expense of the younger generation.
I think history will look at the COVID years and see a remarkable and worldwide pandemic, and society made some rules to try to deal with it, some of the rules may have been a bit much, or poorly informed, but after a few years things were back to normal.
I don't see COVID being more than a blip on any radar. If future historians analyze the history of authoritarianism, there will be lots of things more significant than the COVID years I think.
I didn't make that particular leap, but it does also explain why none of the people "worried" that Gates put a microchip in the vaccines seem fussed about Musk developing an actual brain microchip.
Still, maybe I've missed something ( I don't watch AvE Usually, and watched only a few of his videos in general).
I love that people like this exist.
Content creators like this deserve the recognition
Had I known about Manim back when his Summer of Math Exposition[2] was happening, I def would have dived in!
As with blogs, a lot of this effort is wasted unless you get lucky. But with blogs, at least you have multiple good shots at visibility. Maybe you'll make it to the top of HN, maybe on X, maybe somewhere else. Even within a single platform, you usually have multiple tries. If you don't get noticed right away, there's still hope that someone else shares your content down the line.
In contrast, on YouTube, an algorithm essentially decides once. If you don't already have a zillion subscribers, it shows your video to a couple of people, more or less at random. If they don't engage, that's the end of the road.
Plus you have the built-in audience of YouTube and the algorithm that can help with discovery..
"Build it and they will come" has never been true, for videos or blogs...
YT is a fairly closed ecosystem that's both insanely resource-intensive to participate in, and that doesn't give creators too many second chances. My specific claim is that it's more of a crapshoot than running a blog. There are so many great science visualizations with 50 views.
Just create clips from your video and post them on insta, tiktok, twitter, FB, etc. That's the internet at large. If people are interested, they'll watch the full video.
It doesn't necessarily translate to sales or lasting attention, but if you're after brand recognition or SEO, it's great. Spend some time on /newest to see how many organizations are desperate to get a piece of this.
Last time I saw stats, it was five million monthly visitors. It's small as a platform. It's smaller than Reddit or Facebook, but those aren't discussion communities.
There aren't huge numbers of subreddits larger than five million people and last I looked the largest tended to be about trivial BS.
Last I checked, HN is the largest serious tech discussion board on the planet.
- HN is ~100x smaller than twitter which is itself not even in the top 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...
Twitter works completely differently from most platforms and isn't a unified community.
R/programming is currently 6.5m, which doesn't matter because it doesn't invalidate my statement about the last time I checked.
If you want to claim r/programming is actually larger now, you need a current citation for HN traffic which you may not be able to find.
And keep in mind it's going to be tough to compare because Reddit members isn't actually a comparable figure to MAU, as noted elsewhere.
I do my best to account for that.
I remain mystified by people who compare HN size as a community to Reddit or Facebook or Twitter (aka X) which are platforms, not communities.
And on top of that I also find YT content through social media, blogs, forums, etc..
So I hear you, but I guess based on my own experience, I disagree! But that's cool, we can do that. :-)
The best blogposts do get shared around, and for worse ones, is it that much of a loss that only few people find them ?
Link aggregators aren't good at "long tail"... So your good stories are only really discoverable when they're hot, and get progressively harder to discover over time.
Google search just sucks now, it's all shopping links and SEO trash, even if you search for fairly specific subjects.. You can still find what you want but you have to wade through so much garbage...
Plus there's no discovery. Like pretty much all search engines you can typically only find what you're searching for as opposed to finding new unknown things that are within your topics of interest.
For better or worse I find that YouTube is one of my best resources for surfacing new and interesting things pretty often, and quite regularly from channels big and small that I've never watched before. YT is great at long tail..
So it has become a major source of discovery for me, in many of my areas of interest (which aren't all tech).
Of course some content I don't like consuming as video, so I do sometimes find videos that cover interesting subject matter, which I'll then go search for articles or text-based content on instead.
But what I meant is that people share links around, whether in public like here, or in one-on-one discussions (and blogs do have their own recommended lists), so it's quite possible that you would still have found out about them without any kind of algorithmic prodding.
For instance, to put this in practice, here's a science education focused personal website that I like a lot :
We all find content in ways that suit our time/resources/network etc.. I do get lots of links and recommendations from friends and co-workers (and on places like here), but I also get a lot of it from platforms, and I think that's a good thing.
I'm not anti-algorithm (not saying you are) and I believe it's one of many great ways to discover content, in this case in video form. And I think having it all in one place is a huge benefit.
Considering all the resources required to host video, I don't think it would be realistic for everyone to host their own stuff in that medium..
Not to mention how much of a creator economy exists thanks to the centralized platform that is YT. Tons of creators probably wouldn't even bother making their content if they didn't have somewhere with a built-in audience to post it to.
So I disagree with the idea that it's a negative for everyone but Google. Tons of people make a living thanks to that platform, with content they'd likely never be able to make a living from otherwise.
People were making videos even before YouTube started to become commercial, and they will keep making them after YouTube is gone (hopefully soon, considering how enshittified it became, but I'm afraid that with Google's money it will take a while). I disagree that th That you're calling it 'content' is a symptom of that corporatization.
Platforms are evil (and discovery algorithms are a big part of the problem), and especially the people not just using them, but particularly making a living from them are bad people (especially today, they had more than a decade to be aware of the issues). (This is on top of other qualities or faults they might have, of course.) And if there were no platforms, there would still be people making a living from the Internet (and the video format included), the possibilities are just too gigantic.
Content creator is a blanket term for the writers, videographers, researchers, comedians, speakers, musicians, scientists, programmers, artists, architects, singers and every other profession making a living uploading videos to YouTube.
I certainly didn't want to type all of those, so I used the common shorthand. Even you knew what it meant. Not everything is sinister or evil. Sometimes it's just words.
99% (probably more) of people who use YT have never heard of PeerTube. I've heard of it and I've never once tried to use it, and I'm quite technical (I've built a video distribution platform).
You're delusional (sorry) if you think anything out there even comes close to the reach or ease of use of YouTube for the average person.
Look I'm not saying it's perfect either, or that there aren't problems with Google and the rest of big tech, and some of their products have drawbacks and downsides..
Anyways, I just realized I'm trying to have practical conversation and you're having an ideological one.. So maybe that's where this ends, we'll agree to disagree and move on...
As some counterexample anecdata, the YouTube algorithm is being quite generous to me lately, often giving me relatively low-view videos from years ago, some of which have been quite good. Maybe I'm just in a small a/b test, but it seems that videos do get multiple chances.
It's also a chicken and egg issue too. People simply watch more than they read most of the time. So videos target more people who gets more ad money who gets better ad rates etc.
This sounded like a wild statement, until I remembered how many people still watched TV for hours every day.
Agreed. I once heard an estimate of 1 hour of editing for 1 minute of video, and I find that to be an extremely low-end estimate in my experience. And then, editing is only one part of the process. I spend possibly more time on writing (from outline to prose to revisions) than on editing, even when including basic motion graphics.
> In contrast, on YouTube, an algorithm essentially decides once.
This contradicts the experience that I have with YouTube as a creator. For reference, this is my channel: https://www.youtube.com/@XyrillPlays/videos - Just a silly little gaming channel. Ignore the bulk of the videos that are just VODs; if you sort by "Popular", you can see that practically all the views are on a handful of edited videos.
There is one edited video there early on, which currently has 7.6k views, even though it was posted in a phase of the channel where videos got single-digit views. If it were true that "an algorithm decides essentially once", this would needed to have happened right then and there, except that it didn't. This video got 42 views "on its own", without any promotion of any kind. But here's the thing, as you said yourself:
> But with blogs, at least you have multiple good shots at visibility. Maybe you'll make it to the top of HN, maybe on X, maybe somewhere else.
The same applies to YouTube videos. When I posted another edited video later, I put that previous video as an end card. And just that miniscule click-through traffic alone was enough to have the older video get picked up by the algorithm.
And why did the newer video get picked up? Because I posted it to the subreddit and the Discord for the game. Video analytics on YouTube give a breakdown of where people are coming from, and it was very obvious how the first 100 or so views came from those places. Then after that, something clicked in the algorithm, as though it had become attuned to who might be interested in the videos, and it started recommending the video to people. From one moment to another, 85% of views are coming from algorithmic recommendations, which was 0% before.
With the most-watched video on the channel, which is nearing 200k views as of right now, it actually gained traction with the algorithm right away because I had for the first time a pre-existing subscriber base to get the video off the ground on its own, but it has not really stopped accumulating views. It has certainly flattened off a bit, but I've definitely benefited from the game in question having its 1.0 release recently. I'm also seeing people share my video on the subreddit every once in a while in the same way how people repost old blog posts to HN every now and then.
Perhaps something like Pyodide can bridge the gap and make it easier to bring into the browser as well.
Or would it be more cumbersome and the tools be a distraction or impediment to understanding?
But students who do try to do that will definitely have a deeper understanding on average.
Imagine having close to an unlimited amount of money at your disposal and a media platform which is capable of reaching close to every person on this planet. To give people a voice in a community, if they dare to or if they feel the need to.
The only thing you then lack is a platform for organizing communities instead of sowing the seeds of hatred, to use the tools provided by people like Grant Sanderson, Derek Muller, Grady Hillhouse and others, in order to help communities to improve their communities, towns, cities, and so on. To help them solve their problems, make them understand how problematic corruption, greed and abuse of power is.
While I was born in Germany, I lived for around 20 years in Peru, since I was a child. People are poor, but very kind hearted, politicians and the wealthy are corrupt.
This is what makes me feel so sad about Elon Musk, specially knowing that he grew up in South Africa.
>>> x = "hello"
>>> def test():
... print(x)
...
>>> test()
hello
irb(main):001> x = "hello"
=> "hello"
irb(main):002\* def test
irb(main):003\* puts x
irb(main):004> end
=> :test
irb(main):005> test
(irb):3:in `test': undefined local variable or method `x' for main:Object (NameError)