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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

> This suggests that dumb luck plays an increasing role.

Nah. It’s not luck. It’s charisma. And skill at performance & in many cases clowning. Some people just have that certain something that makes people enjoy listening to them. It can be learned, but like programming it takes a lifetime to master. And like programming, some people are naturals at it.

I know because I’ve been training in improv theatre and clowning for the last 6 years. That’s enough that I could tell you in detail what people like the Primagen or Joe Rogan are doing. But I can’t replicate it. I’m way better than I was, but I’m nowhere near their skill level as a performer.

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I don't agree with this position. Primagen worked at Netflix. This is already a massively significant luck component. I watched a video of his where he describes how he got his job at Netflix and it sounds like he got very lucky, by his own account. The brand recognition and network effects of having worked at Netflix cannot be underestimated. I'm sure he also got lucky in other ways. When you really dig into stories like his, you can find so many cases where they got abnormally lucky... Many cases where you're reading and think "wow, that's just not plausible, this does happen in the real world." Like reading the Steve Jobs biography, there are so many things that don't make sense... Like when Steve Jobs was young and he called the CEO of some company asking for some electronic component and they sent it to him... I did a lot of this cold calling when I was younger and nobody ever did that for me, even for much smaller companies and asking for much smaller favors.

There's no doubt the Primeagen has a popular channel (459K subs at last count), but his videos are super annoying to me. Many of them are just him reading a blog post and adding some light clowning to it. To me it feels like a waste of time...I can just read the article myself a lot faster and the clowning doesn't add any value to me.

I feel the same way. I don’t think you and I are the target audience for him. My read is that his content is actually pitched to a very junior audience - or an audience who don’t really want to read or engage with the blog post themselves. They want to feel smart and entertained without doing any actual thinking.

That sounds like I’m a snob - but I really get it. I’ve been watching Inkmaster lately with my gf - which is a reality tv show about tattooing. It’s super fun sitting on the couch judging all the tattoos they do. It would be nowhere near as much fun if I had to actually think, or do work while watching the show.

I think primagen is like that. It’s kinda like a trashy reality tv show about programming. If you don’t know any programming, you’ll probably learn a thing or two along the way. But you aren’t going to become a great software engineer by watching his channel. Not any more than I’m going to become a great tattoo artist by sitting on my arse, eating chocolate and watching ink master. I still do it. But I wouldn’t call it educational.

> But I wouldn’t call it educational.

Edutainment perhaps?

Yeah, I really do think "edutainment" is the correct classification for this type of content. A lot of tech influencers have figured out the formula for success on YouTube. In order to hit the sweet spot, the content has to be a mile wide and an inch deep to get the engagement metrics necessary to make the channel profitable.

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