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Comment by yakk0 | Hacker News Reader

looking forward to see Action Retro's shenanigans on YouTube with this.

I've watched his previous videos on Haiku and haven't been impressed with him. He doesn't seem to have in-depth knowledge of how software and drivers work, which is especially important given how work-in-progress it all is, and that the lineage of Haiku goes back to BeOS. The community has done a lot of good work, and he doesn't grasp it fully.

Yes, you have seen a video and you have seen them all. It can be resumed to "will it run minecrafts (or one of its clones)".

I guess he figured out the short 10-15min format is better for engagement bevause people brains have been destroyed by tiktok and instagram reels and barely anyone can concentrate for 30min on a subject but really it makes for very uninformative vids.

Sometimes there's just not more than 10-15min of content that even a (significant) niche audience would find interesting. There's also only so much time in a day / week to produce. The machine demands novelty.

At some point your channel can only collapse when your content is resumed to:

And today's sponsor is a brand I will lie about for 2 minutes...thank you for watching, please click and subscribe!

It is only a matter of time.

Is that inevitable?

I personally welcome creators moving to rely more on patronage systems (Patreon, Supporting Cast) from consumers, to gain/retain their independence from sponsors and platforms alike.

Full disclosure, I work for Supporting Cast ;)

I never joined patreon (nor ever heard of supporting cast) because most youtubers are either very unspecific about what do they really offer or the value doesn't seem to be there. Some do not seem to offer much more than early access which seem like a really silly offer. I mean, we don't need to see everything the day of their launch. Sometimes they offer bonus videos but since you don't really know what they are, you aren't really missing them. Ignorance is bliss.

Plus these are additional accounts to setup/manage + payment to setup so it is a bit annoying. I hate subscriptions.

> He doesn't seem to have in-depth knowledge of how software and drivers work

I don't really think the point of his videos is to go into that level of detail. I think I'm someone who could understand that level of detail but I still watch his videos anyway since they're fun and engaging (same with others like Michael MJD), and have other YouTube channels that I might watch for more technical dives.

It's genuinely possible to do informative, fun and engaging videos on a niche OS; it does require a lot of skill and effort to pull off he does not have. His content has been way too shallow. There's a lot more to an OS than just the Desktop Environment being different, and 'Can it run Minecraft' (with missing/broken drivers he doesn't understand).

Perhaps it’s too much of a reoccurring gimmick but his videos are squarely in the “tech-aware consumer” user profile, not a pro developer or editor. It’s like how LGR does retrospectives and deep-dives on hardware from a purely hobbyist-enthusiast customer perspective.

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