[WhrRTheBaboons]

easier said than done

3b1b's main selling point is the extreme level of polish on his visualizations - something that takes a lot of time (money) to develop

the sad part is that it takes extreme luck to make it on yt. i wish educating skills counted for more but unfortunately they don't, really.

[bigyikes]

YouTube is a lot less luck and a lot more skill than people realize. If you make good content regularly, your audience will find you.

The algorithm is very good at rewarding good content. (It’s also good at rewarding other things, but that is besides the point)

[jorvi]

Yup. There is probably a few dozen (if not hundreds) of 3b1b out there with just as much polish, the algorithm just didn’t bless them.

[bigyikes]

Do you have any examples? I find this hard to believe.

[mikhailfranco]

3blue1brown runs Summer of Math competitions to highlight other creative math videos. Many, but not all, use the same 3b1b 'manim' animation software, so they often have the same look'n'feel. Here are the results from 2022, and the huge YT playlist:

https://www.3blue1brown.com/blog/some2

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnQX-jgAF5pTZXPiD8ciE...

[jorvi]

That’s kind of the point, you won’t be able to due to the algorithm.

I can give you something analogous though: I’m a big fan of old school east coast hip-hop. You have the established mainline artists from back then (“Nas”, “Jay-Z”, “Big L”, etc), then you have a the established underground artists (say, “Lord Finesse” or “Kool G Rap”), and then you have the really really underground guys like “Mr. Low Kash ‘n Da Shady Bunch”, “Superscientifiku”, “Punk Barbarians”, “Harlekinz”, etc.

A lot of those in that third “tier” are every bit as good as the second tier. And both tiers contain a lot of artists that could hit the quality point of the mainline artists, they just never had access to the producer and studio time that the mainline did.

I know these artists because I love going digging for the next hidden gem. Spotify recommended me perhaps one or two of all the super-underground guys.

Ironically more West-coast style, but here is a great example (explicit!): https://youtu.be/BUwJMVKSMtY?t=129

Dude could’ve measured up to the best of the west coast. Spotify monthly listener count? 891.

Algorithms are sadly win-more.

Now I’m just silently hoping a math nerd will feel inclined to share their hidden math channel gems :+)

[_tk_]

Somewhat off-topic, but what do you feel like are the best techniques to find the artists in Tier 2 and 3? I face a similar conundrum just in a different genre.

[jorvi]

(I realize know I dislike using the descriptor "tier", as it implies some sort of ranking. Perhaps "layer" would have been better, but I'll stick with it for now)

For both tier 2 and tier 3 its basically the same process. This is for Spotify btw, I have no idea how different the workflow would be for something like Apple Music.

Say the genre you want to dig around in is Hip-Hop. You are aware of Eminem and Mac Miller, and vaguely aware of a guy named Nas. By intuition you'd probably already be able to tell that Nas is more at the edge among the mainline artists.

You click on "Nas", and scroll down to Fans also like. Right now, for "Nas", it is showing "Mobb Deep", "Mos Def", "Rakim", "Big L", "Wu-Tang Clan", "Gang Starr", "Ghostface Killah", "Method Man" and "Common".

This is a mix T1 and T2. "Wu-Tang"s in there along with assorted members, but some of the other artists are much lesser known quantities.

Its a bit hard for me to decide what a Hip-Hop layman would consider the most unknown name here, but I'd venture it'd be "Big L". We click on him, do the same thing. Now we're really getting somewhere, with guys like "Inspectah Deck" and "Smif-n-Wessun". Click, dig, we get a bunch of names amongst which "Lord Finesse" stands out. The Show more at the end of Fans Like is also invaluable.

In total the dig order for me to get to the very bottom of the undeground is "Nas" > "Big L" > "Smif-n-Wessun" > "Lord Finesse" > "Channel Live" > "Ed OG & Da Bulldogs" > "Trends of Culture" > "Brokin English Klik" (358 monthly listeners).

I wouldn't consider each of those going a tier (layer) deeper. As a guy who knows waaay too much about Hip-Hop, I'd separate them into:

- T1: "Nas", "Big L"

- T2 "Smif-n-Wessun", "Lord Finesse"

- T3 "Channel Live", "Ed OG & Da Bulldogs", "Trends of Culture", "Brokin English Klik"

Perhaps "Brokin English Klik" should be in its own T4 and 3 tiers lacks the fidelity to be necessarily accurate. Not sure.

A little shortcut would be using "The Edge of $Genre" playlists. They're the pair playlists to "The Sound of $Genre" (broad slice) and "The Pulse of $Genre" (most popular) generated via everynoise.com, although as that guy got fired from Spotify its up in the air how long those will keep working.

Edit: oh, and if you run into a playlist that caters to that deep underground (in my case, that was "90's Tapes"*), that's worth its bytes in gold.

*https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2H0rNGEBShvHSGebM2m37c?si=...

[passion__desire]

I hate the fact there is no diversity in recommendation algos. We need to bring back Yahoo style top-down directories recommendations and not just a blackbox. But you can find good channels on youtube using tags like "#some3" and "#some2" and so on.

[jorvi]

(I deeply hate TikTok)

TikTok's recommendation algorithm is probably one of the best. It puts content first, giving what seems only a passing weight to follower count.

That doesn't mean that having a big follower count doesn't increase you chance to go viral and gain a lot of views, but it is much more likely for great content from a small creator to go viral, than mediocre content from someone with 500.000 followers.

You can also see this in that successful TikTok profiles often have a much higher view-to-follower ratio than something like YouTube.

[plutokras]

https://www.youtube.com/@Reducible/videos

[mlrtime]

So then isn't there a market for millions of people who [may] have something worth teaching but lack the marketing/polish?

Perhaps some automation/ai combination where you feed it learning videos and it helps create the "other" content.

[da39a3ee]

3b1b's animations are certainly important but his main selling point is his thoughtful explanations of mathematics -- the topics, approaches, and words.