Have you also found other videos by the author to be "10 minutes of tiddly little bits of information"?

I think Veritasium makes some of the most valuable and informative videos out there. Definitely not the kind of channel that i would consider "baiting" with titles and then disappointing with the video content itself.

His views on video titles' "clickbaitiness", given the state of affairs of Youtube recommendation algorithms and the "competition" for viewers' attention, seem pretty on point to me.

Veritasium is good but it's definitely on the fluffy/filler content side of things. I wouldn't exactly call it the most valuable and informative videos out there. It's more breath than depth.

Here's an example of someone low-key having really valuable and informative content, with very little fluff: https://youtube.com/channel/UCGKe6VmbFOX-3C30JjEsV-g

Veritasium has about 2800x more subscribers than the linked channel.

I wonder if removing all the engaging "fluff" and just listing information reduces the impact of videos. Like, maybe the trade-off is between having a shorter, denser video so the few people who watch it can get their information in less time, versus having 10x more people watch and learn the information.

Probably as simple as the linked channel (Reflective Channel) has about 40 videos over the past 7 years, and Veritasium has more than I can count. So Reflective Channel has just had fewer videos to promote, and thus, a smaller audience.

I know that he makes good videos, but he seems to give a free pass to clickbait here. We know how clickbait works from SEO: thousands of articles with same clickbait titles, which ends up in content mattering less and less, creates SEO farms, leads to content makers having to buy ads to feature their content etc. Also, even the title of this video becomes confusing: this video will now show up for someone searching for Wigner's famous speech with the same name, plus the title is factually incorrect, clickbait is reasonably effective, not unreasonably.

He specifically said in the video that he hasn't been doing this in the past, but plans to "get better at it".

I think one of his videos that qualifies as pure clickbait is "Can a Wind-Powered Car Go Faster Than The Wind?". It was 20 minutes, and nearly completely devoid of any real information. Certainly not 20 minutes worth, and very different from the rest of his videos. It did spawn more videos about how the car actually worked that were worth watching.

> It did spawn more videos about how the car actually worked that were worth watching.

Yes, including one by him, in which he specifically addresses the shortcoming of the video you are referencing and notes it's an example of what he considers a failure of him providing enough information in the video.

I never understood this type of reasoning, where just because the creator(s) acknowledge their shortcomings, you're not allow to not like the video because of it, or complain about it. So I'll repeat, "I didn't like the video", don't take it personally.

If it's a criticism of the video in isolation, then that holds merit. It sounded to me like it was a criticism of his technique and how he does things. That he acknowledged that as a mistake to rectify makes it less valid as a critique of that as long as he actually changes.

The person I was replying to asked for a specific example, I provided one. I still like his content, still subscribe, and have watch most of his videos since. Seems like some people are just taking this as a "hate on Vertasium" post.

I understood that he's been doing more clickbaity titles for the past year or two, but maybe i misunderstood.

For the first video about the wind powered vehicle, yes i agree. It was more of a story and spectacle than any actual information. Still quite entertaining i think, but maybe disappointing if you wanted to learn something, which is usually the spirit of the channel.

> It was 20 minutes, and nearly completely devoid of any real information.

It's entertainment, not a scientific lecture. As entertainment, it contained far more information that the vast majority of competing entertainment.

> and very different from the rest of his videos.

I must disagree here, I think most of his videos contain very little information as well. Less than I would like, in any case.

> It did spawn more videos about how the car actually worked that were worth watching.

How is this not a good thing? It's great for people who actually want more information, and it's great for the creators who provide said information. It makes the creator community (I hate that term) healthy.

A shame he doesn't name them properly to make the "most valuable and informative" videoes more easily accessible to those in need of information on the topic

> Have you also found other videos by the author to be "10 minutes of tiddly little bits of information"?

Yes. His videos are personable and pleasant to watch, but information sparse. They are more likely to leave me with the feeling of learning something than they are to impart lasting knowledge (ironically, I believe this is a problem he has discussed before, I guess that much stuck with me at least.)

It's not just a problem that he's discussed before- it is the central motivation behind his approach of "person-on-the-street interviews".

His view (supported by his grad research) was that the default approach of presenting information allows viewers to gloss over how the video's information differs from their pre-existing mental models. After the video is done, they can go back to their pre-existing models without actually updating with info from the video, because as far as they're concerned, there wasn't conflict between the pre-existing model and the video's info.

His hope in showing interviews with people off the street is to get people to think about how they might answer the interview question. Get people to remember their pre-existing model. Then hit them with the contrast between their pre-existing model and the truth, so the viewer hopefully makes an attempt to incorporate the truth.

Now, this doesn't say anything about the information density of his videos. I don't think they're very information dense. This reply is just about his attempt to increase the viewer's retention of the information that is presented.

Some of your criticism seems to be directed at video length and not a clickbaity title. If a video takes 10 minutes to tell me a single piece of information, the title isn't the issue with that video.

Maybe I'm putting the cart before the horse here, but what if there's a human reason why 10m videos are popular. Maybe 10 minutes is just the minimum time needed to get across a non-trivial idea to a broad audience. Sure, the platform itself encourages that length implicitly but maybe that's not an arbitrary decision and is based on the human capacity to absorb information.

10 minutes is the original minimum video length youtube required before you could place midroll ads. It's now 8 minutes, but 10 is still a goal that many "creators" aim for. What it mostly results in is low-quality, low-information videos that are padded out to be just long enough to show you:

- pre-roll ads

- embedded sponsored content

- plug for your patreon/other videos

- reminder to like/subscribe/comment

- a tiny nugget of actual content SOMETIMES

- mid-roll ads

- post-roll ads

I agree that 10 minutes feels about right if you were actually trying to convey a good chunk of information in good faith, but that's just not what happens on youtube. Maybe 10 minutes was a good threshold for midroll ads for the same reason that it would have been a good threshold for quality videos.

Videos like the linked one, while technically longer, just result in more and more mid-roll ads. In fact while attempting to watch this one, I got just past his embedded sponsorship plug, when youtube ambushed me with the "Ads in 3... 2... 1..." type of ad that makes it impossible to tell just how much of the video is compromised by ads before watching it.

I think within the video in question is the beginnings of a good justification for this. He views his job as getting his educational content in front as many people that can learn from it as possible.

Part of that is making sure he can afford to do so, so we should consider holistically whether breaking from the ad roll time format is better in the end or not. if he can keep up the quantity and quality of videos, then maybe it's worth breaking with that format. If he can't, then maybe it's not.

The is a similar question as to whether scientists should break from universities and corporate labs and fund their research and experiments without ties to those institutions, which will necessarily have some impact on the science being carried out in small and sometimes large ways. Personally, I suspect that there would be a large drop in both quality and quantity if this were to become the norm.

10-25 minutes or so seems like the sweet spot for a lot of podcasts, informational videos, presentations, and the like when they're genuinely trying to inform/entertain. It's hard to really communicate a lot of information or have a meaningful discussion in a shorter period of time unless it's very focused (how to...) and a lot of those would better be text and a photo. And a lot of hour long interviews etc. tend to feel like they go on too long.

Feels right to me. You can sink that amount of time into something without really feeling like it's a large commitment of time or energy, while also feeling satisfied if you liked it. It's just a shame that on youtube, the advertising pressure erodes such content away.

While there are logistical issues with shorter presentations at multi-track physical events, I've come to think that 25-30 minutes is a better sweet spot for conference presentations than 45-50 minutes. (With the exception of workshops/tutorials in most cases.)

And it's where I've ended up with my podcasts. Less than 12 or so feels like you're barely getting started and get past about 30 and, as a listener, I'm generally losing interest. It's no coincidence that longer professionally produced podcasts almost always have segments or otherwise break up the content.

So you're saying that if it's 10m then it's only because ads, and if it's longer it's only because more ads. There's no valid reason for a video to be longer than 9 minutes according to you. That sounds absurd to me. You're not actually arguing a point, you're just complaining about ads.

I also despise YT ads. (Embedded ads are less annoying because they can be at least slightly relevant to the content.) How much time do you spend watching ads? How much is your time worth?

Some recommend valuing your personal time at $50/h. YouTube Premium family membership is $18 and gives 6 people ad-free viewing which comes to $3/person/month. At these rates you break even at 3.6 minutes of ads. That could be just 2 videos.

I think there are valid reasons, just that you will rarely encounter such videos, be able to identify them if you do, be able to seek them out consistently, and that those who produce them will probably not do so for very long.

> and gives 6 people ad-free viewing which comes to $3/person/month

Six people who live in the same household, to be clear.

A discussion between @ghaff and myself a few months ago on this aspect. I find 10--30 minutes a sweet spot as well, with an information-dense 10 minutes highly preferable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27337668

For a deeper discussion pulling in more references and nuances, 20--60 minutes can work, but the content's got to deserve it. Excessive filler content ("Mayday: Air Disaster", The History Channel, "The Gift Shop Sketch" is of course the exemplar: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=7MFtl2XXnUc) is absolutely maddening.

How are you using "cope" in this context?

Sounds like one of the modern colloquial definitions: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cope

Tough to put in words really. Maybe it could be rephrased to "I found that he is trying to legitimize clickbait", however the second part of the sentence says that too.

or maybe: "rationalizing his use of clickbait as a means of coping with the weight it places on his conscience"

That's a great explanation, I agree with that. I couldnt put it into words that well :)

I mean as a coping mechanism for not admitting that clickbait is manipulation of humans. "But look it's working" is not an excuse

Thanks.

That's rather unclear and nonstandard, in my view.

Unreasonably.

cope = sour grapes

> to accelerate the access to relevant information so that the world can move forward faster.

While I would love this to be true, we have to remember that so much of the internet is a business in our capitalist economy. To many YouTube channels (especially the big ones), the primary purpose of the title is to get someone to watch the video to make money. Sharing information is only a secondary purpose.

This is true across basically every business. The primary purpose of anything is profit, and every other thing is secondary. This is why health care is difficult to privatize, as the primary purpose of profit is very easily at odds with the secondary purpose of health outcomes.

I feel like I see this purpose thing come up all the time in different parts of businesses, and it really makes me wonder whether this system is sustainable. The YouTube channel is justified in writing a clickbait title, because other types of titles reduce profit. And because of the way our society and economy works, reducing profit is always a “bad” thing. You could say that with more profit, the creators could expand the business and provide even more value to their viewers. Maybe that’s true in this case, but that’s basically the whole reason clickbait exists. I’m not sure we should be that happy about it.

This one is almost 20 minutes. Here's a histogram of video lengths of Veritasium videos over the last year:

    3 videos 10m or less
    8 videos from 11m-14m
    11 videos from 15m-19m
    5 videos from 20m-22m
    1 video at 34m

>I have found this video to be cope,

I am not familiar with this phrase - is it a typo or is this just a bit of slang I have missed out on - is it a variant of this https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cope

OP responds here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28266767

Cope (noun, slang) is any thought used as a coping mechanism against an emotional stressor or perceived shortcoming.

For example:

Alice: I may be ugly, but at least I’m not superficial.

Bob: Cope

I'm aware of this usage of cope, and I guess I might use it myself if the opportunity arose - it's just 'to be cope' seems a different usage.