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

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

#31

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 b…

I agree! But the thing is— I’ve got about fifty Tom Scotts in my subscription list. I’m perplexed by doomsaysers’ laments about the state of online educational media. I’ve got far more high quality content for a huge variety of topics than I’ve ever had before.

My theory is this: your favourite hobby store expands and adds one more aisle of fantastic products and five aisles of garbage. You’ll likely perceive quality as having gone way down. In a limited sense, sure: it might be in the way. But it didn’t replace the good stuff.

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

#32
On the latest cortex, CGP Grey made the point that what's happening in youtube education-adjacent videos is much the same as what's happening for entertainment in those spaces: the law of the excluded middle. You either do long infrequent videos e.g., like MrBeast, or frequent short videos. Both CGP Grey and Tom Scott did frequent mid-length content, which gets squeezed out.

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

#33
I started watching his channel at the beginning of Things You Might Not Know. He’s one of the all-time greats. His RI lecture “There Is No Algorithm For Truth” is as prescient as ever. He truly helped make YouTube a special platform, even if it doesn’t always recognize its own strengths, and chases trends it’s fundamentally incapable of adopting properly.

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

#36
Tom's commitment to accessibility is fantastic.

Turn on the subtitles on any of his videos (particularly when there are multiple speakers) and you'll see the effort that goes in to it.

Far too many people who publish to YouTube just let users deal with the the auto-generated subtitles, even when they have the ability and budget to do it properly.

"'Oh look at me I bought a Lamborghini!' Buy some damned subtitles" -- Tom Scott.[0]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m__OZ3ZsO4Y&t=334s

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

#37

Tom is why I understand UTF-8 [1]. And it is not so much WHAT he explained but HOW he explained it, what really made it stick. It was his sheer unbridled genuine enthusiasm that put him on the map for me. One of the best to do it. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MijmeoH9LT4

I first came to learn about the complexity of character sets by finding out that SQL Server's default characterset is 2 bytes per character. I eventually came across Scott's video. UTF-8 encoding is only as new as SQL Server 2019.

https://sqlquantumleap.com/2018/09/28/native-utf-8-support-i...

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

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the story there?

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

Huh, that really feels like one of those “small world” occurrences. Interesting to think about.

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

#39

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 b…

I agree! But the thing is— I’ve got about fifty Tom Scotts in my subscription list. I’m perplexed by doomsaysers’ laments about the state of online educational media. I’ve got far more high quality content for a huge variety of topics than I’ve ever had before. My theory is this: your favourite hobby store expands and adds one more aisle of fantastic products and five aisles of garbage. You’ll likely perceive quality…

Yeah but the burden is now on you to sift through the garbage to find the good stuff, especially since it's mostly mixed together in recommendations or search results etc. It feels more limited to me the other way around, like yes we have added some more good stuff, but good luck finding it.

If my favorite hobby store kept on expanding and expanding and the ratio of great stuff to garbage kept going down, I would definitely perceive the overall quality as being well into some death spiral.

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

#40
I'm glad he's still doing the Lateral podcast (as that's the only thing I know him from). I do wish he would get somebody besides Youtubers as guests, though. It's frustrating to hear 20-somethings with very little cultural and historical knowledge try to work through the problems.
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