I noticed this with one of my favorite channels, Vsauce… they were one of the pilot channels to be “upgraded” to YouTube Red, back when that was a thing; the series was called “Mind Field”. I never subscribed to it when it was premium, but when YouTube Red shut down it all became free.

I tried watching a few episodes of the ostensibly “higher quality” format of Mind Field, and it was demonstrably worse in most aspects. Bloated, way more filler, way more pointless behind the scenes stuff of the host interacting with the guests, and an overall much slower pace of interesting material. It felt a lot more like a cookie cutter Nat Geo show instead of the denser, faster paced material of Vsauce.

Overall I think that the smaller, self-produced (or minimally produced with small teams) format is the future and I’m glad to see that YouTube is failing to change that despite their efforts.

To be fair Vsauce ruined itself a long time ago. Obviously the next step for a popular channel is to turn it into a company that churns out content for money, but it kills the charm and quality.

Should just stick to (relative to big orgs) low budget and take in those views.

Phillip DeFranco's stuff was good until he started a million offshoots and it wasn't personal anymore. Then it was just mediocre unorganic (as in how pop bands are formed by talent scouts) stuff.

I thunk vsauce has still put out some great content after mindfield but it has been pretty sparse. I think Michael could totally reclaim it but it would take time.

YouTube has been pushing garbage "woke" videos into my feed. I have been having to click not interested on them. I just want to watch the home made construction videos like Essential Craftsman in peace without an ideology being shoved down my throat.

This is also probably just survivor bias at work too. I will say that vsauce still made some good content even after mindfield. I just had to avoid the mindfield stuff.

All channels will eventually burn out and fade, but the youtube model guarantees that there will always be new shiny content.

Which is another way of staying that YouTube will leave a wake of burned out and faded creators behind it.

Just like all social media

Just like all human art and celebrity culture.

We loved the Bee Gees, then we hated them, then we loved them again...

My favorite band from that time is ABBA, if only because they totally rocked these cat dresses, which would have made a killing on etsy if the internet existed back then.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/apr/27/abba-announce-...

I mean even if love art and artists from thousands of years ago, their celebrity did fade away. But we can still enjoy their best works, same with contemporary artists who produce good shit for a while and then decline (or revert back) into mediocrity.

I mean Pewdiepie still mostly just makes dumb videos of him and gets an absurd number of views, and has over 100m subscribers.

and it's great. Imagine if he had created an incubator for the next generation of let's players or tried to make a media company. It would have been terrible (see: Casey Neistat's 368)

He stuck to his usual content and his margins just keep increasing since there's no added costs for a higher viewerbase.

I don't really understand why some YouTube people go off doing this. What is the value proposition exactly, their success is due to themselves, how do they commodatize that and scale it to a company

> What is the value proposition exactly

Having a career.

It's very rare for someone to last decades as a performer in the entertainment industry, and online content moves faster than most. You don't want to suddenly have no audience age 35 with zero skills or experience outside making potentially niche YouTube videos.

This typically comes from chasing after higher sources of recognition/prestige/clout, and it's especially prone to happen when you have a background in the "traditional" industry and saw the whole endeavor of producing Internet content as a stepping stone. "Finally, I can run a proper show with real production values", they say. Emulating an idol is the goal, but there's often no particular benchmark guiding it and their creative role suddenly shifts towards managerial elements, so the final product is invariably worse than whatever they did before. Plus the impulse to do it is pretty much always an indulgence running counter to market trends.

I thought Mind Field was really cool. Obviously a very different feel to the normal vsauce videos but … I dunno, I don't see what's wrong about going that route.

Derek of Veritasium is trying to go that route by himself. He released some documentaries of his own (which actually were of lower quality than his regular material, I thought).

Wendover is also releasing some long-form documentaries. He's much better at it, actually.

What's interesting is maybe the different incentive structures. I don't know how Derek is doing it, but Wendover seems like to get the funding mainly from Nebula/other sources. In the case of Vsauce, YouTube Red probably has agreements to let outside people manage it to be more "commercially-safe".

I watched some Mind Field and thought it was ok, but thought it was not as engaging as vsauce regular content.

I figured that vsauce is good at making videos he makes. They gave him a cable format & crew and it didn't really translate his appeal.

Someone like Veritasium or Wendover might be able to get very proficient in a documentary format, it sounds like they might have good ideas.

I think I have watched more Alex (French guy cooking) and Guga (Sous vide everything), than I have watched real commercial studio-produced cooking shows.

Check out my name is andong, his Presentation style is incredible.

Babish is a go-to when I need to learn to make something new.

Make sure you check out Epicurious and Ethan Chlebowski

>Chlebowski

what a fitting name for a cook!

Means bread, isn't it?

Yeah, MacBread for a bad English equivalent.

I know what you mean. I loved Vsauce when it originally came out. I remember getting an “oh! Wow!” reactions with amazing first season when Michael would explain things. Later when it moved, it was all too much fluff and little core material I originally loved. I completely lost touch eventually.

Yeah, many of the YouTube premium series felt overproduced. I wouldn't exactly describe modern YouTube channels as "home video" but it's certainly a different feel from the network TV shows many of the premium series tried to emulate.

There were a couple premium series that did work out pretty well though, in my opinion. The Slo Mo Guys had a bunch of episodes which were basically just their usual content, but with a higher budget and a team of people available to set up the scenes they were filming. Those videos were excellent.

I wonder if someone here tried all of the premium stuff like CuriosityStream, Nebula and whats that other one?

I think that's just a result of trying to be more inclusive towards a general audience.

> 16 years later, home video is still the core value of YouTube

Is it? I guess it depends on what you mean by home video. Is it "Me at the zoo"[0], or independent content creators like PewDiePie or Veratassium? Compared to Hollywood most if not all Youtube channels are completely different, but when I think of home video and early Youtube I think of personal family trips, not NileRed.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw

"Home video/community space" obviously encompasses independent content creators, wherever and whatever they're creating. I mean, 90% of PewDiePie's videos are him at home. Why does the venue of a zoo define the category? In any case, independent creators going out in the world, zoos or elsewhere, creating content is representative of the divide between big studio content and independents.

I think you misunderstand the difference between “Me at the zoo” guy and Veratassium. It’s not that one is at the zoo while the other isn’t. :)

The dude in the zoo video is dab smack in the middle of what i would call “home video”. Some person with a video recoding device points it at their life withouth much thinking about what is that they want to say or how. It’s clearly not a nature documentary, though there are elephants on the picture.

Veratassium videos are much more intentional. The content creator clearly has thought about what they want to talk about, and how they want to talk about it. They hired a camera person and very often special cameras or drones to shoot the best footage to illustrate the content. Each video is a mini documentary about a fascinating topic, with expert interviews, experiments and models.

I think it is a disservice to call this second type of video “home video”. Doesn’t make sense to mix these two together in any sense of the word.

It's a matter of target audience. Maybe I've misunderstood something, but I thought home videos where made for friends and family, not millions of people.

"Home videos" implies amateurism, maybe candidness? PewDiePie is obviously a professional making video entertainment as a career. That's meaningfully different than a recording of me taking my kids to the zoo.

Venue isn't the defining difference, no. Some combination of intent and skill are. At least thats what I think.

Even in the "people at home" category, all the good channels I can think of have very high quality. They just happen to be about a person talking on or off-camera. AvE and This Old Tony come to mind.

>home video

I think of Steve Sutton (now Protopod).

https://www.youtube.com/user/protopod

I don't know why I watch it, it's just fascinating watching this guy talk about his life. No "smash that subscribe button" nonsense. Just an honest real guy living his life and making videos on youtube.

*Veritasium, as in Veritas latin for truth, hence an element of truth

Is it really home video if a DIY youtuber spends 10's of thousands of dollars on a setup to have high quality production value?

If it's at home, yes. They still have their core values : independence, relatability and risk-taking.

I wouldn't call it "home video", at that point it's more of an independent media production.

The overproduction of "home content" is killing it for me. As soon as Youtubers get a whiff of success suddenly all of the authenticity drops out of the channel and absolutely everything becomes sponsored content.

If you can fake authenticity, you’ve got it made

s/literally/directly/

The word “literally” has no synonyms and if it dies it will leave a massive lexical gap.

Are you afraid for the expressiveness of future English speakers? Fear not, if the word 'literally' no longer had its meaning we'd make a new one to take its place.

The problem is, if I want to use the term "literally" in a literal sense now, nobody will recognize its literal meaning, and everybody will assume it's being used metaphorically. You literally can't use "literally" in the literal sense of the term anymore.

Unfortunately, this very particular pair of meanings is always going to be sabotaged by hyperbole. Not the words, but the actual meanings.

Whatever word we have for "this is [truthfully] [adjective]", they're always going to use the word for "truthful" to give something added punch. Specifically in the sense of suggesting a quality has become so extreme that the metaphor is no longer an exaggeration.

Part of it is we humans just love metaphors come to life. Godzilla "literally" was taller than a skyscraper. Superman "literally" was stronger than a freight train. Tolkien was disappointed enough as a kid in Dunsinane forest "coming to life and walking" (by a bunch of men chopping off branches for camouflage, in MacBeth), that he wanted to do a story where the trees literally walked, without any metaphorical fine print.

Frankly, too bad. There is no meaningful resistance to this change in language. You can't use the word "awesome" to mean "deeply terrifying" in almost any context anymore and that is okay.

That is okay because you can use the phrase “deeply terrifying”. Languages change in general. I’m fine with that.

This specific change literally has had me pacing back and forth in distress before.

Then use the word nonfiguratively instead of literally.

But you can't use the phrase "quite literally"? or "in a very literal sense of the word", or some variation of those?

If this is what has you pacing in distress, I'm envious.

> I’m envious

Well I’m also getting divorced, for reasons that aren’t entirely unrelated to literal communication.

That's more paceworthy I'd say, at least compared to the natural evolution of language continuing as it has for all of recorded history.

I’m not objecting to the natural evolution of language in general. I’m objecting to the specific loss of the word “literally”.

So you're objecting to the natural evolution of language.

Couldn't you say "in the literal sense"? Until the word treadmill claims that too of course.

Meanwhile, natural language isn't formal language, and people understand meanings of statements just as much as they did yesterday.

If people raise objections, that suggests that they are having issues with understanding. I know I've been confused by it before, and I usually feel compelled to use modifiers to distinguish between 'literally millions' and 'actually, no-exaggeration, literally millions' when I want to be understood.

That doesn't necessarily mean we're moving in the wrong direction. Language evolves to satisfy speakers' criteria, so it will gradually improve median utility. But any change is going to have cost, and confusion could be the price we pay for progress.

Alternately, you can imagine a situation where 1% of the population derives a huge amount of utility from a word, while 99% only get a small benefit from another definition. Improvements to the median in that scenario can have negative consequences in aggregate. Or you can see that this particular usage has been confusing people for a hundred years, and the cost of change may outweigh any potential benefit.

I think the position that natural language will just take care of itself is just a touch hand-wavey. Human interests and linguistic-evolutionary movement are often coaligned, but sometimes diverge- the same as with human interests and economic growth.

> I think the position that natural language will just take care of itself is just a touch hand-wavey.

Why not? It's done just that for countless millenia. Cavemen without Ph.D.'s in linguistics managed to develop languages for communication just fine.

Now, they could be further optimized, sure. But the default of taking no conscious action at all has historically worked out just fine for linguistic evolution.

In the last half of the last millenium, we achieved widespread literacy, invented the printing press, made publishing available to the public, and invented the internet. I don't think we can assume the process that worked before this tech will definitely work now.

On reflection, I'd like to retract this. I was reading quickly and didn't understand what I was replying to.

It is not my belief that, left to its own devices, natural language will become unusable. It is probably true that we can get away with letting nature run its course. I do object to using this as an argument for avoiding optimization, but I don't think I'm in disagreement with the parent there. Apologies for my error.

> and people understand meanings of statements just as much as they did yesterday.

This is the underlying source of my distress: the fear that my ability to understand and be understood by people will remain as it is.

The new word is "deadass", and the problem is solved.

That ship has sailed. This usage dates back to the time of Dickens, Brontë, Joyce, etc [1]:

As Dan Smith has pointed out in his reply to my comment on Mike Ruiz's answer, this usage crossed over into general acceptability quite a while ago, having been employed in works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, James Joyce and Thomas Hardy, and so on. What might be happening is sort of a "resistance" against this meaning of literally, which people are starting to believe should mean something closer to what it originally did.

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-term-literally-come-to-mea...

Sean Hou's answer in that Quora thread is the correct one. The word "literally" never means "figuratively" or "hyperbolically", but it can (like any other word) be used figuratively or hyperbolically. By analogy, someone can dishonestly say "Honestly, I didn't do it," when they did. This doesn't change the meaning of the word "honestly". There are no words in English that cannot be used in a lie, and neither are there any words that cannot be used in hyperbole or metaphor. You can, if you like, dislike hyperbole (I dislike dishonesty!) but there is no use worrying about the meaning of the word.

> The word "literally" never means "figuratively" or "hyperbolically"

Yes it does. The dictionaries have added the second figurative meaning:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally

The word ‘literally’ is often used figuratively. That is not the same thing as the word meaning ‘figuratively’ in those cases.

They are wrong. Native speakers just don't use definition 2 in a literal way. Maybe this usage will evolve (now that the dictionaries are wrong) but it doesn't explain any of the common usage.

> Native speakers just don't use definition 2 in a literal way.

Unclear if you meant some kind of irony by using "literal" here, but as a native English speaker I can assure you the second meaning ("used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible") is frequently used.

Try a twitter search for something like "literally turn the world upside down": https://twitter.com/search?q=literally%20turn%20the%20world%...

Plenty of the people using it are native English speakers and (literally!) using the exact phrase in the dictionary in the way they describe.

This usage is indeed very common, but it is always meant and understood hyperbolically, and the meaning of the word relied on by the hyperbole is just M-W's sense 1.

To see this, remove the word "literally" from such a sentence. You are generally left with a statement that is still hyperbole or metaphor and not literally true. Which word are you going to redefine in a sentence like "It turned the world upside down." to enable you to interpret it literally? If you understand it as hyperbole, why does adding the word "literally" require any special meaning for that word?

Conversely, if you believe that the word "literally" literally can mean "not literally", in the same way that, say, "cleave" is an auto-antonym, it would authorize statements like

  (*) When you use metaphor, you are speaking literally.
  (*) What I said was the plain truth, but John took it literally.

which I think you will agree are not standard usage.

Moreover, if you replace the word "literally" in a sentence like

  "It literally turned the world upside down."

with something that means "not literally", like

  "It figuratively turned the world upside down."

it changes the meaning. The first sentence is hyperbole and the second is awkwardly literal.

I understand the desire of lexicographers to document this usage, which is as you say common (and legitimate) and seems to confuse people, but it's just not a different meaning of the word.

Interestingly, there is actually a long history of literally switching back and forth between its original meaning and "figuratively" over the ages. My fiance did his thesis on it!

„He literally did his thesis on it!“ There, FTFY

That’s amazing. I would like to read the abstract

'Nonfiguratively' would work.

and in our era, "disfiguratively", "unfiguratively" and "infiguratively" would likely make an appearance ...

The word verbatim is admittedly a bit latin-tasting, but doesn't it literally mean the same thing? :)

I do not believe that it does.

Literally is used to distinguish figurative speech from literal speech, while verbatim is used to distinguish exact wording from paraphrasing.

For example, if I had temporarily lost my voice and couldn't talk, and someone texted "want to call", if I replied "I can't talk right now", they would assume I meant I was busy, but if I replied "I literally can't talk right now", that would accurately convey that I was in situation where talking wasn't possible, not merely busy. "I verbatim can't talk right now" is nonsense.

metaphorically. I assume no geese were killed in that comment

it's literally killing the metaphorical golden goose

They are back into home video with 'Shorts' after TikTok showed them how valuable it is.

The worse thing is that they’re trying to do both. They should just go 100% into something like netflix that’s not related to youtube.

Advertisers of note strongly prefer to put their ads next to the second type of content, not the first.

"one day ... we'll become like iTunes and TV"