It's worse than creators not making content, they move their content to be lower rung click bait garbage to maximize ad-views.

If "smart" people use ad-block, then all the content gravitates towards those who don't.

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ndriscoll 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

The videos for smart people are things like:

* University lectures

* Conference talks

* Random clips of homeowners doing some DIY repair

i.e. things that were being done anyway, and someone decided to post it online because it's free and they wanted to be helpful. "Content creators" are already almost never making videos with high value information. The entire idea of "creating content" rather than "sharing information" is a bad framing to start from. When we recognize that "sharing information" is the high-value action, we're better able to see that it not only can be done by someone who isn't a full-time "creator", but may actually be done better by people who aren't devoted to it since their occupation is to be a practitioner of the field they're sharing information about. i.e. they are better informed.

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pseudalopex 5 days ago | parent [-]

Smart people enjoy many different things.

	▲	ndriscoll 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		What I listed encompasses many things. You can find lectures on philosophy, biology, anatomy, psychology, physics, Russian literature, religion, history, or whatever topic you're interested in. It's more about depth of information and level of expertise of the presenter vs. "lower rung click bait garbage". Information that demands your full attention for an extended period of time and expects you'll put in effort to engage with it instead of just throwing gimmicks at you to hold a piece of your attention before you click away. Or if you want to enjoy some slop, then apparently we'll all get plenty of that if the smart people block malware, so no problem. Generally speaking, something with wide appeal is going to be trash anyway because most people aren't going to want to (or will be unable to) engage with any given topic at more than a superficial level. e.g. compare Andrew Ng's Coursera MOOC to problem sets you can find from his real class at Stanford. It is obvious that he watered down the information hard for Coursera. Almost every class on those MOOC sites is of the "X for non-X majors" variety at best (and that's for people who are motivated enough to self-learn!), which IMO is why it could never truly be disruptive. The "creators" people are talking about are generally this except even more targeted at mass audiences. Even for people who are interested in "smart" stuff, 100x more people will watch some 10 minute video of surface level discussion with doodles about algebraic geometry[0] and then move onto another 10 minute video vs. putting in the work to engage with 15+ hours of lectures on the subject from a Fields Medalist[1]. World-class researchers provide graduate level educational materials for free (which is awesome), but they could never succeed as "content creators" because any given video will only get ~1k views after years of being up. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MflpyJwhMhQ [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8yHsr3EFj53j51FG6wCb...

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kentm 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> It's worse than creators not making content, they move their content to be lower rung click bait garbage to maximize ad-views.

They will do this whether or not people use ad-blockers. We've seen this happen before; someone will claim that they are an ethical ad company and don't do shady things, people allow-list in ad blockers, then they start ramping up.

I remember back in the day where Google was a "good advertiser" because they had simple textual ads and didn't do shady things. IIRC plenty of ad blockers just allow-listed Google at that time. And then they acquired Doubleclick.