YouTube’s system for suppressing low-quality AI content mistakenly targeted Kurzgesagt, leaving the channel with its worst-performing upload since 2013.
YouTube’s system for suppressing low-quality AI content mistakenly targeted Kurzgesagt, leaving the channel with its worst-performing upload since 2013.
Youtube’s system sucks, but I don’t feel bad for many of these channels. They used to be great. You could learn a lot while eating, or just entertain yourself without brainrot.
For a few years now, however, increasing numbers of their videos have been sponsored by billionaires (or their chains of companies or foundations), either in part or in full. Some extreme cases are just plain propaganda.
That’s the youtube dream. Pretend to be genuine long enough to attract an audience that will attract a dark money suger daddy sponsorship gravy train and it’s all daisies from there on out.
Literally the same as a politician.
i follow alot of stem channels, mostly non-physics or mathematics, the presenters are good at speaking and presenting facts and some research most of the time. its the regular influencers and right wing that are brainrot.
Examples?
I’d love to have a small list for class.
A perfect example is Veritasium’s now deleted video about self driving cars. Entirely sponsored by Waymo, featuring exlusively data provided by Waymo (which coincidentally contradicted all other available data), and the guy acts like the video being fully sponsored means nothing.
Once people called him out, he started acting like a victim targeted by everyone for no reason. Just read his comments under videos on the topic. It’s just pathetic.
Many other channels, like Kurzgesagt, completely source their data from billionaire-sponsored websites like OurWorldInData. Sometimes the data matches other, more reliable and trustworthy sources, and other times it’s just plain made up.
In addition to portraying various subjects from only one perspective, which, suspiciously, always seems to be the one that makes billionaires look better.
YouTube videos about the two cases I mentioned:
Oh, Veritasium actually ended up taking that propaganda down? Neat.
Regarding Kurzgesagt, it’s been obvious he’s a grifter for a very long time.
It started when a YouTuber whose channel is called Coffee Break reached out to Philip of Kurzgesagt as part of a video he was doing into the flaws of popular science communication. Specifically, about some significant errors in K’s video on Addiction. Instead of agreeing to collaborate, or even giving a simple “not interested, sorry”, K took an instant accusatory tone, claiming CB must have been making a “gotcha” piece. CB and K agreed that they would talk more about the matter to try and assuage K’s concerns, but K kept stalling while working on a retraction video, at which time K took down the video that was the impetus for this discussion (shortly after, as one of those aforementioned stalling efforts, having said “I never could bring myself to take it down”, claiming it would be “cruel and unnecessary” to do so—funny, considering in his AMA attempting to spin the story, he said “I was really stressed out about the addiction and the refugee video for years. Being finally open about my mistakes and deleting them felt like weight leaving my body.”). The Refugee video was also taken down along with the Addiction one that CB was interested in.
And then CB started getting harassed. K called out CB, and many of K’s friends (other very large, powerful YouTubers such as CGP Grey and Philip de Franco) made very public statements to their audiences attacking CB. It ended up forcing CB into taking down his video, deleting a whole heap of tweets explaining what happened, and putting out an apology. Perhaps it was an apology that CB should have indeed made because his own response to K’s actions was rather hotheaded. But the need for an apology from K was much, much greater. And one never came. K used his larger platform to spin the narrative so that his large audience almost all take his side.
Incidentally, here’s the video that CB was working on at the time. Hari, the scientist discussed in the video whom K worked with on his video discussed earlier, communicated very well with CB on it.
Regarding the video about Kurzgesagt, if you look in the video description, you can find a Reddit post by Kurzgesagt where they respond to those accusations, which a lot of are refuted.
It’s important to be critical, but mindlessly blaming everone and everything to be billionare-controlled is just as dumb as being naive and believing everything u see on the Internet.
Personally I feel like that reddit post is terrible and nothing but PR. They did not ‘refute a lot of accusations’, as you claim. They cherry picked a grand total of two, one of which got twisted, and responded with largely irrelevant and misleading info.
Which is pretty much what The Hated One responded to them. Not to mention even the response to the two (out of what, 12?) points was full of holes and manipulative statements.
Naturally, no further comments were made by anyone from Kurzgesagt’s team. Just like corporate PR. Publish a meaningless statement that provides no new information whatsoever -> pretend it answers everything -> refuse to elaborate -> act like people are evil for asking questions.
Raycons? Established titles? Betterhelp? Not exactly what op said but theres plenty of examples of shitty YouTube selloutry. Here’s a whole dude who made his channel on calling out the shitty sponsors https://m.youtube.com/@Shane_McGillicuddy
That’s awesome. Thanks!