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Comment by JonnieCache | Hacker News Reader

There was a time when TED talks were mostly academics squeezing their usual hour long presentation into 20 minutes by simply talking really really fast. Those were fun.

After the first couple of ones that were public and on the internet, the usual self-promoting psychobabble-spouting androids moved in and now it's entirely worthless. Someone spins 30 seconds worth of insight out for half an hour, and you still somehow feel stupider when you've finished watching it.

In one of the recent Gladwell threads, someone on here coined the phrase "insight porn". TED is basically insight dogging.

EDIT: to be fair, if TED is insight dogging, this place is a sticky floored insight dungeon in some godforsaken soho basement...

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A sunny and very cold Friday morning, while waiting for the bus, I overheard this conversation between two elderly women. They were talking about how the sky used to be bluer when they were younger and the cold used to feel better. They were arguing that the cold nowadays is too cold, and how the old cold used to be more forgiving.

The difference being, we can travel back in time and see what TED was really like 5 years ago:

http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_full_on_animal_movement.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEZrAGdZ1i8

Notice that I still picked a heartwarming personal story for the second one. See how different it is in delivery and intent to the heartwarming personal stories you get on there today.

Let me reiterate: I don't care about the audience - they don't affect me. It's the type of speaker which is attracted by the new, larger demographic that I don't like. The talks aren't written for the room any more, they're written for youtube, and by extension, the speaker's resume and lifetime earning potential. Compare the speakers' eyelines in those talks vs the new ones.

Thanks for pointing out the Robert Full talk. He gave a talk at Pixar during production of "A Bug's Life" and it was fascinating. And, yes, these older TED talks were better.

I think both nostalgia and going mainstream contributed for the quality (at least seem) to go down.

Couldn't it be that early Teds harvested low hanging fruit? By that I mean a backlog of 20 years worth of under exposed idea people? Once you've done Frans de Waal (etc.) you can't just go find another.

There is still the occasional gem where an actual scientist shares actual new insights (for those outside of his/her field) that are exciting and fascinating, and for a moment you feel like you're watching the old TED, but even that's not what made TED stand out for me at first. When I first watched the talk by Clay Shirky[1] giving really good arguments for why the internet already has changed and will change everything, it wasn't inspiring or just "insight porn", it was educational, and it ended with an open question for us to solve.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_...

There is still the occasional gem...

"Filmed Jul 2005"

Eh, yes, that was my point?

8 years ago is _very_ occasionally

Oh, that's how you read what I wrote. What my comment actually was meant to convey (and what I still think it actually says) was "there's still the occasional good talk now, but back then we regularly had truly excellent stuff like this talk by Clay Shirky (which admittedly is one of the best TED talks ever)."

Back in the day when TED's internet presence was pretty new and Google Reader still was alive and kicking and had a social sharing aspect (remember those golden years?), almost all of the TED talks were shared and debated heavily among my friends. Then we started sharing less and less of them, to the point were one friend shared a talk saying "finally, a good one again" and we all chimed in on how it got too popular and big for it's own good.

This is his original claim to fame, from 2003: http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...

Shirky was one of the original thought leaders of the social Internet. The value of his talk isn't that it's on TED. It's that it's Clay Shirky.

> actual new insights (for those outside of his/her field)

The added value of TED was that I got introduced to all kinds of thought leaders that I never heard of before.

For me it was Sir Ken Robinson's talks. Those were thought provoking

I thought they were appalling. The very essence of everything that is shit about TED. This one in particular http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...

Well you are entitled to your opinion but IMO he made some valid criticisms regarding the schooling system. What parts did you disagree on?

That's not the question. The question should be: what did you learn? I don't think I learned anything new in Robinson's talk. I enjoyed the talk in the same way as I can enjoy a good Holywood movie, but I didn't learn anything new.

Exactly. It's a near perfect example of brand dilution; the quality controls started slipping pretty fast, and TEDx just dropped the floor. You cannot maximize both content production and quality at the same time -- 99.9% of ideas out there are not really worth spreading.

The OP itself is as good example of a "self-promoting psychobabble-spouting android" as it gets.

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