The Future of Veritasium [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
He's very much "selling out" but meh, he was never really a "high brow" creator anyway. Still managed to cover lots of cool things, but just not trying to make good content. They were optimizing for profitable content.
However, the couple of discussions around "how to think about electricity" and "how do sails work" he participated in and somewhat spawned were great, and showed how actual productive discussion among people genuinely trying to come to a real understanding works. Lots of groups chimed in and actual experiments were run to support arguments and the end result was essentially "eh, there's nuance"! Wonderful outcome.
It was clear for a very very long time that he wasn't doing it for the same reason as most of the good people: A desire to share learning and lust for scientific inquiry.
I also think the new animation style is mediocre, but that's just opinion.
Get out of the way, enjoy the life you have left, and let someone else blossom into the space you left!
This really isn't a defense of Veritasium, but this has become the case with most videos where the creator makes a living off their channel. Everything is poorly named like this just so they can at least continue getting the same amount of views, because most views come from Youtube recommendations. It's only anecdata I have, but I've heard a lot of creators say that these days recommendations is the only way they get views, even channels with tons of subscribers. I personally rarely get recommended content from channels I actually subscribe to. It's really a lamentable state.
Veritasium irks me more than others somehow, because it often seems like their clickbait titles are complete fabrications and don't even match the video content, but also because their eventual non-clickbait titles are pretty good themselves, and often catch my curiosity. I know I don't respond the same as the general audience though.
I'm much more sensitive to clickbait on science related content, because when GameGrumps make a clickbait title, it's not an issue. Nobody cares if they lie about what happens in a gameplay video.
It's too bad, because the videos are often about fascinating science history that isn't given an enjoyable narrative in other places, but the original title that pushes me away will be something insane like "THIS EXPERIMENT NEARLY ENDED THE WORLD" and it sucks. As I said, when the titles are changed to the more sane versions, I usually end up watching because it is interesting.
Like right now, their newest video: "There IS something faster than light". It's actually not as bad as they've done in the past. But eventually that title will change to reflect the actual video content and it will be much more obvious what it is about and I will likely want to watch it.
So, sure, they deserve criticism for the "all possible paths" brouhaha but by and large, I think it offers access to physics in a consumable form for many lay people while trying to maintain rigor better than most.
What was the many paths fiasco?