I agree! But the thing is— I’ve got about fifty Tom Scotts in my subscription list. I’m perplexed by doomsaysers’ laments about the state of online educational media. I’ve got far more high quality content for a huge variety of topics than I’ve ever had before.
My theory is this: your favourite hobby store expands and adds one more aisle of fantastic products and five aisles of garbage. You’ll likely perceive quality as having gone way down. In a limited sense, sure: it might be in the way. But it didn’t replace the good stuff.
Yeah but the burden is now on you to sift through the garbage to find the good stuff, especially since it's mostly mixed together in recommendations or search results etc. It feels more limited to me the other way around, like yes we have added some more good stuff, but good luck finding it.
If my favorite hobby store kept on expanding and expanding and the ratio of great stuff to garbage kept going down, I would definitely perceive the overall quality as being well into some death spiral.
Youtube makes it pretty easy for me. The algorithm recommends videos nd channels, and I say 'not interested' to the garbage, the result: a high quality subscription tab.
There seems to be a few topics which will cause your recommendations to spiral into conspiracy theory nonsense pretty quickly. Unfortunately you’ve got to be very careful with any gun content in YouTube as they almost always lead to bullshit in your feed.
Garand Thumb videos I've seen have been very good. Like the one about what supersonic rounds sound like going overhead. I'd guess there's somewhat less overlap with his content and conspiracy stuff.
This has always been the case since the printing press practically. There's always been way too much quality 'content' to manage and you have to sift your way through it. What has changed is that everything is now at our fingertips and we expose ourselves to the recommendation feed. I guess I'm saying that the problem hasn't changed, just our awareness of it.
The pulp mills must run, that capacity is already paid for. Let us convince the chattering classes of their value to the human enterprise in putting words down to keep the presses running.
"Romance" literature is honest in its own provincial way. No pretensions to much besides entertainment and consuming printing capacity.
Is it really on you to sort and sift, or is it on you to find a good guide? In the hobby store example, there are other people around to ask, and I think that is similar as well.
The future is more content, not less, so finding mechanisms to cope with that is well worth the effort.
Not exactly. Assuming the number of people in the hobby store didn’t grow exponentially, you would be completely empty in your favorite isle, most of the time.
But you aren't, because there's really only a few stores, not thousands, so people congregate at the same ones, and if there's nobody in those aisles continuously, they stop getting stocked (people create less content if nobody consumes it).
The problem is almost never that there's nobody in your aisle, it's about finding the right way to connect with them. There are numerous ways to do this. Even just leaving a comment on a video asking a question or responding to someone else's comment. That's about as low effort as you can get, but actually works.
Quality niche creators are partially motivated (and sometimes supported) by viewers. The bigger the sea of garbage they are swimming against, the less inclined they will be to start or continue.
People are motivated by viewers, but once it gets above a certain amount I think it becomes a different motivation. When I write things on reddit on a specific topic subreddit that have few posts in it, and those things get a few upvotes, I am more motivated to continue than posts in huge subs which get boatloads of upvotes. Because in order to get those one or two important ones, you need to know something specific and valuable, but to get thousands you have to find a way to appeal to a lot of people in a broad way.
Trying to chase the broad appeal will lead, in my experience, to a downslide where content gets less and less useful and more pop-culture oriented, or it becomes outright fraud or manipulation.
I’ve also been watching Tom Scott since he started, and love his content. I’ve put a few others that I enjoy below, that also produce what I consider to be high quality and entertaining content. Mind sharing any others?
Nile Red
Nick Zentner
Practical Engineering
Real Engineering
Ivan Miranda
Joe Makes
Tom Stanton
Veritasium
Numberphile
Deep Sky Videos
Objectivity (Honestly all of Brady’s channels are great)
3Blue1Brown
CGP Grey
Undecided with Matt Ferrell
The B1M
Kurzgesagt
Scott Manley
PBS Space Time
Deep Look
Looking Glass Universe
Institute of Human Anatomy
Smarter Every Day
Be Smart (formerly Its OK to be smart)
I’ve also recently started watching Scam Nation, which is a walkthrough of various magic tricks, in a relaxed setting. It’s not as dense as some of the others, but very good.
I would love a monthly “Where cool things are” post on here. Kind of like the Who’s Hiring post, but simply for listing channels, blogs, people etc. No specific works that would be better served by a regular post, but a comment with [name] and [what they do].
Hehehe. This channel is full of videos about "boring" topics and still you play them and bam, you are sucked into 15 min of nerdy details about a 90’s microwave that doesn’t even exists anymore and now you are wondering why you can’t have it. Amazing channel.
What sold it for me, was the Sunbeam toaster. I always wondered why in the cartoons people would get shocked sticking a fork in a toaster. And into the rabbit hole I went...
Steve Mould (himself a good science educator on YouTube) said that Technology Connections makes videos about things you didn't know you wanted to watch until you watched them.
I always think I will watch just 10-15 and end up watching the whole thing and then wonder why learning about a crappy refrigerator was so interesting.
There are so many great channels on there! Here are a few of my recent favorites:
Laura Kampf - german maker and problem solver, currently renovating a 120 year old house
Jimmy Diresta - maker and designer, also renovating an old house in upstate New York
Adam Savage - from MythBusters, interesting builds, and interesting discussion of shop and building techniques
Rambling Wild Rosie - former long-distance hiker and interior designer, renovating an old house in the forest Sweden, figuring things out as she goes - very beautiful and peaceful videos
Also loads of great wood working channels: Paul Sellers, Woodworking for Mere Mortals, Izzy Swan, Samurai Carpenter, and on and on!
One more vote for Steve Mould. I don't follow him directly but I still end up watching a bunch of his content through random suggestions, he's quite good.
Wendover Productions (random shit, but high quality)
Economics Explained (self explanatory)
Mini Air Craft Investigations (self explanatory)
Renegade Cut (leftist content)
LegalEagle (law)
Townsends (historical foods)
Casual Navigation (maritime/shipping)
How To Drink (mixed drinks)
Huygens Optics (optics/fabrication)
EmpLemon (weird video essays)
minutephysics (physics, and general science communications)
All of these I'd recommend for a general audience/nerdy person. Some of them are informative, some of them are funny. I've got much more that I'm personally interested in, but generally won't be interesting for the average person.
On the food topic, Tasting History with Max Miller is a favorite - it's interesting seeing him try to recreate recipes from historical primary sources and provide historical context.
Also, Adam Ragusea has some good content on food science, among his regular cooking videos.
Also on the food topic: How to Cook that with Ann Reardon is one that I like, aside from her more useful cake-related videos, she has a great series on historical recipes as well as amusing food hack debunkings.
Not quite in the same theme, but as far as gaming goes I'd put both videogamedunkey and MandaloreGaming there.
Dunkey doesn't post hour long video essays, but I find that apart from the occasional filler and joke content, his focus is on fun and it is completely infused with an empathetic passion for gaming.
Mandalore does the occasional deep dives into the weird and obscure but he's thorough and doesn't take it too seriously. Again, seems like a guy who is passionate about games but prefers to go off the beaten path in terms of game coverage.
Posy!! I can't believe I forgot him on my list! +1
Same with casual navigation! Have I ever worked on or piloted a boat? No. But will I watch little 10min explainer videos about bilge pumps and anchor chains? Definitely.
the problem i have with educational youtube is that it's competence porn. it's quite satisfying to watch lyle peterson, kiwami japan, grandpa amu, nigel braun, grant sanderson, andy george, or xyla foxlin working through the problems involved in creating something, to the point that hours spent getting satisfied that way displace the far more effortful hours required to work through those problems myself. but i don't gain skills by watching someone else work through problems (or, in the less praiseworthy cases, glossing over problems); at best, i might get an idea to try out, or a feeling of inspiration, or a declarative, factual understanding of a particular mechanism—a kind of understanding which still requires exercise to convert into knowhow. but it's much easier to just click on another video and vicariously enjoy someone else's stunning competence than to close the window and struggle with my own
worse, sometimes it isn't actually competence. yesterday i watched a video where a guy made opaque soda-lime glass and convinced himself it was a better refractory than his insulating firebricks because he was, among other things, confused about thermodynamics, confused about different material properties, confused about the composition of waterglass, confused about the composition of garden lime, and confused about the temperature of his oxyhydrogen torch (and, I suspect, in significant danger of blowing his foundry to kingdom come)
watching porn or sex tips videos won't make you a great lover. neither will reading alt.sex.wizards
fifty tom scotts is ten hours a week of, basically, watching porn. i spend more time than that on watching the youtubers listed above and others; what if i spent that time on deliberate practice instead? ten hours a week of etudes might not get you into juillard, but pretty soon you're better than the average garage band member
where do you get your etudes or katas, and how do you judge your success on them? textbooks are pretty okay for that, and it's possible to make youtube videos with exercises in them, but those aren't the videos that become youtube hits. and i think it runs counter to the nature of the medium: not just memetic fitness, but also the effort gradient for both creators and consumers
I definitely agree that these sorts of videos have the potential to be a poor substitute for the real thing. Sometimes I notice that I've spent all my time watching videos about stuff I'm interested in and not actually doing the stuff I'm interested in. On the flip side though, as another commenter mentioned, they have the potential to serve as motivation too. For example, when I'm learning a particular technique on guitar I'll intentionally watch or listen to performances that exemplify what I want to learn in order to remind myself of how great it'd be to play that and of why I'm training. I find it helps boost and sustain motivation. Of course it can't be the only thing I do, but when I can't practice (much) on guitar because, say, I'm eating lunch and need both hands, I can loop some Paul Gilbert or EVH performances and get fired up for the next practice session.
You might be unfair to yourself in the sense that not all hours are created equal; some hours were never going to be productive hours, and so if you can immerse yourself in a subject with some easy-to-watch videos, that might be better than trying to force productivity where none is available.
the problem i have with educational youtube is
that it's competence porn. it's quite satisfying
It's a balance we all need to find, for sure -- competence porn vs. actual practice.
I think it's only a problem when you fool yourself and/or hurt yourself.
Late in 2023 I started watching some streaming coders (a thing I did not know existed) and I've found it beneficial. Definitely exposed to some things I wouldn't have been otherwise.
It’s interesting to hear your perspective. I personally have had the opposite effect from watching these people on YouTube. I find it highly inspirational and I’ve gone out and made interesting projects on my own without them. Not all educational content needs to be structured like school, in fact most of it shouldn’t. With this stuff it just needs to humanize the process, so you can see the process for yourself, and follow it for yourself.
The particular problem I have with your reply is it is half wrong.
Textbooks tend to be filled with crap themselves. I have a feeling you're judging the contents of 'educational' textbooks rather than the corpus of all textbooks.
Next, you are not an island. You need both things, insight from other people that are learned in said thing your attempting and practice. If you practice without the insight you're going to waste most of your life accomplishing something you could have learned from someone else in a few minutes.
I completely agree with this observation. In fact, you can use this to your advantage to save time. During the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, Blizzard released "Classic" World of Warcraft and I had this huge itch to play the game. I satisfied it by watching YouTube videos on Classic WoW instead.
Did I waste time watching WoW YouTube videos? Yes. Did I save much more time by tricking my brain into thinking I was playing the game when I actually wasn't? Yes!
Similarly, Doug DeMuro quirks videos have saved me millions (which I do not have) on 80s and 90s dream cars.
That Porsche 928 or Lamborghini Countach or the ultimate teenage dream Vector W8? Fun to look at the videos but realistically it would not be fun to own and maintain one.
Perhaps. But I wonder how much of this completely passive entertainment was in our ancestral environment? Before 50 years ago, the percentage of all humans who had ever experienced the symphony was so low it was essentially zero. Perhaps the boredom is integral to good living?
I think of it more like learning a language.
Yes, you have to put the effort in and learn your grammar and basic vocab yourself - but in conjunction you want to immerse yourself into hearing experts speak it.
Watching a film you fancy with subtitles or another audio stream is still mainly entertainment, but it's making you better.
Every person who's picked up an instrument has done so, so they can play something they heard and enjoyed.
Also - I don't need to master something. I like the messing about. Occasionally you'll later stumble across a problem you'd accidentally learnt the answer to - and that's gratifying, but it was never the point.
That’s a good point, it’s the absolute numbers that give a bad impression. I think the main thing tainting my feeling about the whole situation is TikTok/Reels/Shorts content. Feels like the sort of video I like just can’t exist in that sort of format, and it’s a pretty over-emphasized format currently. (at least in the YouTube app)
still though, so many cool and interesting things to learn online from interesting folks! :)
Are those fifty Tom Scotts all competing with each other to become 'experts of the week' on the same topics in slightly different ways? (that's what my 5 or 6 Tom Scotts do)
I wish YouTube channels could be viable by following the Periodic Videos model - stick to a single domain but keep it fresh by improving on old content.
> My theory is this: your favourite hobby store expands and adds one more aisle of fantastic products and five aisles of garbage. You’ll likely perceive quality as having gone way down.
This is actually something which is borne out by research, though in a slightly different context. Niro Sivanathan at the LBS has studied how arguments are presented, and essentially, recipients of arguments engage in an averaging function instead of an additive function, when evaluating strength -- adding one weaker point to a pair of very strong points actually detracts from the perceived strength of an argument.
It would not be at all surprising if we did the same sort of thing in different contexts, such as the example you gave here.
Part of me misses watching Daily Planet after school. Mythbusters on weekends. How It’s Made too! There’s some gems from that channel in the 00s that got me excited about engineering. I definitely wouldn’t sell them short either.
I have the same feeling. I was sad to see Tom be done, but I'd also prefer that to watching his quality decline, and as you say - I have a lot of Tom Scotts that come up in my feed. Tom's excellent, but there's other people, and no doubt some new people inspired by Tom will enter the space.
I do worry that too many garbage aisles might mean people choose the garbage and never make it beyond, pushing non-garbage into a greater and greater minority.
My theory is this: your favourite hobby store expands and adds one more aisle of fantastic products and five aisles of garbage. You’ll likely perceive quality as having gone way down. In a limited sense, sure: it might be in the way. But it didn’t replace the good stuff.