I sat next to a girl on the airplane the other day who works with autistic children. She told me that the strange thing is that many of these children are good with computers and frighteningly addicted to YouTube. Apparently there is an entire community of autistic people making videos for other autistic people. The autistic viewers will watch the same minutes of autistic-produced video again and again thousands of times. They do things like read the contents of movie jackets on film, zooming in on each photo one by one. And out there in YouTube-land is an audience for it, obsessed.
I thought of this while I struggled to figure out why the Zefrank video was at the top on Hacker News this evening.
I've been on Hackernews now for over a year. Very early on I got cited for submissions that were 'not good content.' Please note... the video opens with Toboggan 'ass sliding'. Reallllly?
I watched this video for 30 seconds and it is not good content.
I would rather read an article about the sequential subset of Erlang oppose to this garbage.
Apparently, I am not alone.
God knows how it got to the top of HackerNews - slow Sunday night maybe?
I think it is a good idea to invest some part of your attention budget into avoiding to become too narrow minded.
Incidentally I looked up the word for German "Fachidiot", and the dictionary said "nerd" :-/ ("Fachidiot" in German is someone who is very good in his chosen profession, but completely clueless about everything else - to the point of making idiotic decisions for lack of broader vision).
Alright... I just sat thru the entire vid... I'll admit. Not bad - maybe he needs to do a little better job of relevance in the beginning... first 10 seconds scared me - not excite me.
I'm absolutely certain you are missing the context of the videos. The Show ran every weekday for a year. The series is a conversation with the viewer and can't easily be jumped into in the middle. There was no "ass sledding" -- the term was "ass-slappin' awesome" which was coined in a previous video.
In short: There's no need to "do a little better job of relevance in the beginning" because a.) the video is almost thee years old and b.) people liked it that way.
I thought of this while I struggled to figure out why the Zefrank video was at the top on Hacker News this evening.