A Reaction to that Veritaseum ClickBait Video

I saw the math problem video, watched it, decided I hated this guy and his smugness, and then more or less blocked future recommendations of his channel. He's a bad imitation at what Mark Rober does. Who called you an idealogue?

Will Surrette

Thanks, I really enjoyed this. BTW, personally I don't feel hard done by if you take this public instead of 'exclusive content'.

Mim Franklin

i think my two biggest gripes are: like even with his 3x+1 example, finding that video down the line is a nightmare with a generic title like that. why not call it “Boring Title: Clickbait Subtitle”. clickbait just further makes the art of video making feel more fleeting and like the flavor of the week rather than a piece of work that can be returned to. also i think people overestimate it’s power, like with dunkey still pulling views. i think i saw a linus tech tips vid where he said they saw a 10% increase in views by clickbaiting which is like, ight i’d rather keep my integrity. especially cause 10% of rich is still rich. plus back to 1 now when i wanna see the LTT benchmark reviews for a GTX 2070 to influence my buying decision i have to remember that the video was called “we have NEVER seen this BEFORE ?!”

Safe

As the person with the top comment on his video I was hoping you’d have the top tier context ty

Derek came from academia (he started Veritasium when we was a grad student IIRC), so I'm pretty sure somewhere deep down he finds the entire prospect of actually making things... grabbing and marketable... anathema to his sensibilities. Thus he needs to make videos justifying that project to himself. Because at the end of the day, Veritasium is no more 'clickbait' than Vox or the New York Times is. It's a really solid channel. I do think that on some level he might have that 'TV envy' that you see among some creators (i.e. he really wishes he was producing a TV show and not a YouTube channel) - and his comparing himself to Mr. Beast is a little weird (hell of a Jones to keep up with, as you say) - but I do think that his titles/thumbnails respect the intelligence of the audience, which is the personal metric that I judge 'clickbait' by. All of that said, your comments on 'when is enough?' were spot on, I feel. Internalized capitalism can be a hell of a drug.

Stephanie Li and Chris Thomas

I think the Veritasium guy might be receptive to your criticisms and that's reason enough to make this public IMO