Clickbait title: Why YouTube does not feel fun anymore.

Warning: Autobiographical

My dirty secret

One of the articles for this blog which has been in the draft-graveyard for years is one which attempts to enumerate what easily accessible online resources have influenced me.

Although said article will probably never see the light of day (for boring reasons), it has helped me organise my media consumption in an interesting way. Especially because it’s all goddamn Youtubers.

Accessibility

Yes, Youtubers. The person whose opinions you are reading trusts Youtubers. Or at least did trust them 10 years ago. It is of course the modern TV for my generation, we are influenced by it, but in specific, I ascribe that video platform basically all my extracurricular interests for a very long time.

Two culprits still come to mind: VSauce’s chaotic primer on ordinals and Tom Scott’s video on an Apple software bug. For anyone who knows me, these are of course both comically close to my current interests.

Why did I watch these videos? Most likely it was due to Youtube’s old recommendation algorithm being intelligent (or not intelligent, lucky). And I seemingly sent the feedback system some good indicators I want more of the sort. And I did, oh so much more. These videos were way more interesting than the alternative (probably Minecraft Let’s Plays).

Science YouTube is awesome

The technological and social innovation of such a seamless video platform should never be understated. It was a gamechanger for media as a whole, and science communication especially.

The creators may be experts or amateurs in their field (but of course more knowledgeable than teenager me) and they speak with an infectious enthusiasm, teaching me stuff way ahead of my education curve in high school.

I’m not preparing to pull the rug out (like I always do), this really is an awesome thing, I think it has made a massively positive impact on my life.

People change

As the years pass by, I have successfully passed the trials and tribulations of general education and am working myself through higher education (!). YouTube is staying a wonderful source in areas I have a passing interest in. But I have learned a lot since then early days. Especially in mathematics and computer science. And I’m older now. Some people I watch are younger than me!

More importantly, the audience for much of Youtube is younger than me and/or less-educated on certain subjects. And they deserve content too! Science education YouTube seems to be in a sweetspot around the middle of high-school when many students have solid basics in modern science and the subjects have not split out into the fractals of research science. Videos on Linear Algebra, Recursion or Newtonian mechanics are plentiful (and wonderful!)

Well I know these things, so are there videos for me?

Why am I annoyed

I think it is important to state the most obvious and simple reason. YouTube content scales well to larger audiences and there are just fewer people who are interested in research-level computer science. So there is less content like that. Or if it exists, it is less polished. My professional life has outgrown YouTube.

The solution is simple, consume content on the same topic through other means: blog posts and papers. Both of which are excellent and wonderful, coming from a world of mass-market appeal, they have immense effort for tiny audiences put into them. I am glad to live in a society where niche research is appreciated (and financially supported).

What I complain about

Now, despite just simply outgrowing YouTube, I have not put down the addiction app completely. Firstly, because there is still scarce good content and secondly, because it is addicting. So I still get served a lot of content on different subject areas.

YouTube’s algorithm is in my opinion genius. But it is not magic. Spending a decade now with it, the clustering of me into very specific interest groups has become more apparent. My academic friends and I watch the same videos, independently from each other. And I seem to exist in some more general clusters of mathematics and computer science.

Let’s look at the murder case of my patience.

The subject? " How a Clever 1960s Memory Trick Changed Computing".

The weapon? Clickbait.

The motive? Algorithmic Efficacy.

I obviously do not blame the original creator for making me annoyed. She simply chose to not put the difficult word of “Virtual Memory” in her title in hopes of reeling in a general audience. But I got annoyed, because I knew what virtual memory is. I clicked on the video in anticipation, only to be told what I learned at university in less detail. Curiosity killed the cat (me) and there was no satisfaction to bring it back.

So if I stupidly stay on this app to watch computer science videos, I get tricked by well-meaning creators. How annoying.

Addendum: Muddying the waters

The blog article is basically over now, it told a nice story with enough cynicism I feel comfortable sharing it. But it is not the whole truth. YouTube is not just pure sun and rainbows if you’re a high school student (or just anyone). But more importantly for me, it is not just a waste of time for a computer science student.

Here is a handful of Computer Science creators/videos I still love:

• BigNum Bakeoff. The best video series if you watched “How to count past infinity” 8 years ago and ended up studying computer science.
• Suckerpinch. Patron saint of fucking around with computers.
• StrangeLoop. I think I could list a dozen talks, but truth be told half of them would come directly from StrangeLoop. Every conference which uploads their talks online, thank you so much.
• Computerphile and Numberphile. Probably a redundant mention, along with Matt Parker and 3B1B. They all have been in this since the start and have been building the maths/computer science education on YouTube for a decade. I do want to point out Computerphile in specific because the format of just talking casually to a professor has done the most work for me wanting to be in academia since I was little. If someone with a camera ever hands me that brown paper, I’ll be very happy.