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by FredPret 342 days ago
Conversely, a tidal flood of free content, much of which is low quality, can motivate a consumer to shell out $$$ for something that's more curated, limited, and has a guaranteed lower limit on quality.

I know because I've done this many times in many contexts, with everything from fitness apps to programming courses to buying the latest fiction books. With all of these, there are multiple lifetimes' of free, good content out there, but good luck mining the nuggets out from the thick layer of slop.
1 comments
maqp 342 days ago
Yup, I have no idea what's the point of gazillion YouTube shorts on exercises that have perfectly good tutorials by experienced people, available already.

E.g., https://www.youtube.com/@RenaissancePeriodization/playlists has ridiculously good per-body-part demonstration playlists if you scroll down a bit.

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FredPret 342 days ago
You joke but this is exactly what I'm talking about.

This channel must have hundreds of hours of content, and I'm sure much of it is good, but I don't have hundreds of hours.

Instead, I will send hundreds of dollars to some trusted person to distill hundreds of hours into an app or something that I can use immediately.

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maqp 342 days ago
No I did not joke. If you bother to open one of the playlists I referred to, you can find e.g. 10 rear delt exercises demonstrated in under 15 second videos with extremely good tldr advice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34gVHrkaiz0&list=PLyqKj7LwU2...

Mike Israetel who runs the channel is in the top-5 in scientific body building circles.

And you can get those same videos in their app https://rpstrength.com/pages/hypertrophy-app

Personally I'd use Jefit or Hevy over RP, but the point stands.

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FredPret 342 days ago
Every point you make is fair but the point still stands: you had to find this stuff first.

And if I did not know about him and typed "rear delt exercise" into Youtube, there will be an endless amount of slop before I personally would run into this guy.

I'd gladly pay for this guy's app if I were in the market for a new workout plan. My point is that free content does not eliminate the market for paid content.

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