Tom Scott: After ten years, it's time to stop making videos [video]

Tom Scott’s work stands out as some of the best examples of how interesting and valuable web content can be. In a sea of short derivative junk-food content, he made things that i honestly learned from, without demanding more than 10 minutes of my time a week! There’s of course a lot of people also doing the same sort of great content, but it does feel like a slowly dying breed. Tom definitely deserves an indefinite break though. If/when he goes back to short form web video, I’ll be happy to watch again! :)

What’s the story there?

I remember asking at some point what seemed to make Tom Scott so successful compared to the thousands of others who have probably tried to make it big on Youtube/social media. Was it the format/length/style, the topics, the camera work, the commentary/research, etc?

I think the consensus was that he came out with generally interesting content, but most of all, predictably and sustained, which generated viewership. Interesting how that can be the main factor -- maybe both in keeping people's interest, but also developing the skills to create content that was improving each time and becoming more engaging. And I guess he points to that explicitly in this last video, where he says he challenged himself to make it his real job. For 10 years.

I dislike montages and yet this was a wonderful one.

You made countless lives better, in small ways times a million.

If this is the best thing you’ll ever do, it’s already good enough. The rest is gravy.

As a teenager Tom Scott helped write the documentation for POPFile. By chance he interviewed me years later on stage at some conference and just before we went on stage he told me that some of his very first contributions to anything on the Internet were to POPFile documentation. I had no idea.

https://getpopfile.org/docs/welcome