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by blihp
2817 days ago
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I'm the same way but I think people like us tend to be heavily over-represented on HN and probably represent a small fraction of the total audience. Similarly, I like to watch YouTube videos for specific technical content where the vast majority seems to prefer pop culture and cat videos. A couple of other personality types / situations to consider: 1) Some people treat learning the way they treat a workout... procrastination is the path of least resistance. So metrics like course completion % 'gamify' it for them to give them the push they need to keep motivated. 2) In the business world, think of the times someone has said 'I'm not trained in that' (or something along those lines, often to try to get out of doing something) and the boss says 'well, go get trained in that.' Course completion is a thing that can be shown to said boss to 'prove' they learned something. While self-learners would tend to keep their mouths shut about not knowing it and say 'sure, no problem' and then go find whatever training materials were needed to learn said thing. |
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Sure, there are countless massively popular channels with garbage pop content, but that may be due to the "general" nature of the content. The broad audience keeps it at the top of the most watched lists.
I think if you aggregate all the technical content, the "long tail" might be more numerous than the hump of the curve.
There are channels about programming, woodworking, plumbing, HVAC, construction, 3d printing, PC building, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, knitting, photography, cinematography,graphic design ... it just goes on and on. Sure, most of those channels may only have a hundred thousand or fewer subscribers (with some exceptions in the millions) but I wouldn't doubt that in aggregate they surpass junk like moviemojo and cat videos in time watched.
Youtube is an amazing phenomenon that I think doesn't get enough credit because of all the junk on there, but the fact that I can search for how to remove the abs module on a 2007 BMW 750li and get multiple videos showing how to do it just blows me away and definitely makes it a lot easier to get things done.