Regardless of what we as a society want, and even if YouTube never existed, it's the reality that salesmanship is always important to some extent.

Persuasive communication is important even outside of business: it's key for academia to get grants, it's important for non-profits to get funding and volunteers, and it's important for individuals who want to improve their lives (even in relationships). I know several people who are technically brilliant, but have abrasive personalities and/or fail to get their point across to key stakeholders, so they don't achieve what they want.

There is a difference between honest salesmanship and sales pitches that include lies or fraud. It's necessary to sell, but you can play the game with some ethics instead of not playing at all and losing out.

What I'm trying to say is, while the medium doesn't change core mechanics of human behavior, it distorts and accentuates – there is, for instance, a difference between tiktok and a novel. And we do have power of mediums, we can choose to engage in different types, and we can lobby for digital mediums to change. So pitting youtubers against the algorithm (just pimp your quantum physics lecture with an O-face thumbnail) isn't the only way forward. There's also "here's how YouTube could be better" or "we need a better alternative for this type of content". Unfortunately, we have almost 0 visibility and control over the algorithm so there's very little behavioral analysis that can be done.

Scientists spend something like 20-30% of their time begging for grant money.

Worse still, in order to get the grant money, scientists have to abandon the genuine pursuit of knowledge and do some random busywork bullshit that they deep down know will produce nothing of value.

Once they have produced the bullshit research, they then spend another disproportionately large chunk of time convincing their colleagues that their research is actually valuable.

The remainder of their work time is spent pretending that they don't realise that their peers' and colleagues' work is complete bullshit.

Don't get into academia.

You've made a good insight with an interesting solution. You might already be aware of this, but for an academic perspective, Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan framed this with the famous assertion "the medium is the message," [0] in other words the method of delivering a message strongly influences how that message is drafted. The reasons align with what you've written: the incentives caused by YouTube algorithms do pressure creators to create more clickbait content.

Perhaps human curation can be an initial way to get more viewership for quality channels that don't try as much to game the algorithms. Recommendations on HN and other forums have led to the discoveries of such interesting channels, though this would have limited impact versus change on YouTube's end.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

You said "outside of business," and then gave three examples of _asking for money_. You could have said "in dating," or "in electoral politics," but even in those examples, "persuasive" speech verges on "coercive" speech.

> you can play the game with some ethics instead of not playing at all and losing out.

In a darwinian competition, eg "the marketplace of ideas," ethics will always lose out to money. To play is to lose.

No, I didn't: the third item I listed was "it's important for individuals who want to improve their lives (even in relationships)." Relationships include both romantic and friendship. The second item with non-profits also mentioned recruiting volunteers, not just fundraising.

>"but even in those examples, "persuasive" speech verges on "coercive" speech.

Persuasive speech includes: if I ask a friend to hang out with me and go to a conference, it's great for the both of us because we'll both enjoy it together and learn. There's no threat or coercion here, it's a win-win that is communicated well. The non-persuasive alternative would be: "There's a professional event this Thursday, we should go" with no further explanation.

> "In a darwinian competition, eg "the marketplace of ideas," ethics will always lose out to money. To play is to lose."

Ethics has value in many contexts. Certain non-profits can struggle to raise money due to having a bad reputation. Significant ethical misconduct can lead to scandals and arrests of executives. Highly unethical companies end up paying premiums to applicants due to struggles with recruiting.

I might be confused about the context or definitions, but I didn't read on any darwinian model that included notion of "losing out to". Did oaks lose out to orcas? Or was it the other way around?

Sales were around before the industrial revolution and likely before the agrarian revolution. I'd conjecture that whether one employs ethics or not, a moderate amount of salesmanship can spice up ones daily hunting-gathering.

Darwinian selection is the species versus the environment and this environment can include other species, as well as other individuals in the same species with slightly different traits, that will compete for similar resources as well as the climate.

It's very difficult to even think of who is actually a competitor of who, was Facebook a competitor to myspace? Youtube to myspace? Tumblr? Livejournal? These were all platforms competing for creators and attentions so I think they are all in a certain degree of competition.

I think a sale in this space is the gathering of attention (i.e. time and/or money). But thinking of what's required to actually learn might offer some insight on why it is hard to compete in this space. To learn people need to spend effort and although it can be made fun it is extremely difficult to be made effortless. On the other hand, entertainment is effortless but it offers little learning. So these are two parameters that need to be tuned. But I think the problem here is that the algorithm benefits entertainment much more than it does learning, entertainment is more valuable for youtube's ultimate purpose (to grab the viewers attention) and so to thrive on youtube people that want to offer learning have an uphill battle to fight.

So I think this move is Youtube acknowledging that learning is also desirable in society and can be pulled apart from the loop and monetise in its own way. In other words, it's an evolutionary split, cells all have a common ancestor but some cells evolved to harvest the sun energy while others evolved to harvest the energy of other cells. Learning being desirable has given rise to platforms such as coursera which are also multi-million businesses and Youtube probably sees them uploading most of their content to youtube anyway (usually as private videos), so why not adapt the platform a little bit to give existing creators a chance to stay on youtube instead of moving to other services?

This move won't really solve the problem of entertainment predating on people's time over learning (if we consider that a problem) but it's not really intending to do that. So I believe if we want to look at things from a darwinian perspective we have different angles to look at. Creators that produce entertainment content will probably still benefit more than the ones that produce hard to approach but very good learning material, why? because attention is the most valuable resource out there. This move offers little solution to that, but, on the other hand creators will have more tools inside the platform to manage learning which will completely change the current online learning business and we'll see platforms like edx and coursera in need of offering more value to pull themselves apart from youtube. Because users from these platforms (including youtube education) are already searching for valuable learning experiences we might see evolutionary jumps in this particular area. Though this might also be a race to the bottom where youtube captures the segment and then changes to optimise attention-seeking. We'll see.

I’d be curious to learn if there’s any pain points or things you wish you could do faster in your process. Happy to chat offline :)

Students' attention is low (not an insult, just what my analytics show). They are mostly searching for a fix to their immediate problem when coding. So my videos are split into 3-10 minute chunks covering that single thing. Recordings for a single concept take roughly 1ish hour, mostly a combination of setup, being human and flubbing words, and something in my examples going awry and taking too much time on it rather than demonstrating the example. I mostly record on Sundays (again, free day) or at night if I know I'm going to be away. As faculty, you're not paid extra to do this, so its very much intrinsic altruistic volunteering your time to do it.

And like I said, the second part is being comfortable enough with the material to record it. I'm teaching Intro to AI for the 3rd time this semester and while I'm confident in my ability to teach it, I still have some kinks in my examples. Typos, what gets covered when, etc. type things. I feel ready to record it during my next iteration, but then we fall back to making time to do it.

I stand by this term for various reasons. I think it's accurate and summarizes the current day social media status quo.

> but the problem begins with the audience

Yes, but humans are non-linear. Porn, for instance, is extremely powerful for attracting clicks, and we've figured out that we need to keep it separate. Even if people want some amount of porn, they want other things too and the best way is to not mix. Now say hate, or cheap entertainment, is not porn but not super far off. Similarly, that type of content tends to win the attention-game against math lectures, if presented side-by-side to the average amygdala. If we mix it all together, it's hard to focus. So.. I'm pretty skeptical to leave education to Youtube. Not only do they have all the cheap content, they're incentived to bombard you with it.

Call it misplaced pride or whatever, but they usually feel doing/saying something purely because it helps selling comes across "not pure" or "not in good faith" or not "why I do this".

Eventually they end up justifying with something along the lines of "good product (or person) just sells itself" or end up bitter comparing themselves with someone who sold worse stuff, but sold more to stay long enough in business.

good advertising/sales/marketing (i know they are not the same) strategies have a large upfront cost, which most if not all good-but-failed products/services cannot sustainably pay for.

My hope for the internet was to lower the bar by being accessible to everyone and allowing more indie sellers to prosper. And it did deliver. what i did not see coming was this industry for gaming the system which in turn drowns the true indie voice.

That's what the world's biggest marketing company wants.

Otherwise, I think it's pretty obvious that the idea of rating artists, journalists, engineers and educators primarily on their salesmanship skills is a disaster in the making.

In the long run, online learning will probably become dominated by the equivalent of private schools: companies that hire great teachers and, separately, great marketers to build audiences.

Or look it at this way: Nonprofit authors don’t generally design their own book covers. They work with a publisher who does that. Why should teachers try to design their own YouTube thumbnails?

(On the flip side, if you highly value your independence as a sole proprietor, then yeah, expect that you’ll have to put on the marketing hat sometimes).

Click bait is ok sometimes?