I totally understand this take and the animator said the same thing (so upvoted for giving me another data point here).
Now let me vent my frustration:
The sad thing is that your comment has a decent chance of being correct. I think that, yes, at first glance minecraft videos may seem unprofessional. But man if you are correct that would be deeply deeply sad. Reality is: “redstone neuron in minecraft!” is utterly brilliant, even if I say so myself. It is a perceptron made with redstone. How cool is that? And probably one of the firsts, or the first, in the world. And I did that when I was 17. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever done, and one of the highest forms of self-expression. But NO it’s cringe because it’s in minecraft, right? And minecraft is for kids. Nevermind that it’s turing complete.
Also, I’m kind of horrified at the possibility that people look at a starting YouTube channel and say “hmmm this looks unprofessional I’m going to downvote”. YouTube channels shouldn’t necessarily look professional, they just need to be good. I could go the route of making everything as boring as possible and commit YT suicide.
End of venting.
All that said I AM updating towards “hmmm maybe I should use a less quirky aesthetic or completely remove the rationality/EA brand (even if talking about EA/rationality topics) if I want to take quirkier routes or maybe just do both”.
Hmm. I feel like I partly see where you’re coming from, but there are two other things worth noting:
Maybe “confusing” is more important than “unprofessional” here.
The channel is called “Rational Animations”, and the first few videos look like they match that, and then suddenly there’s a few videos that just literally aren’t animated (in the same sense) and also at least look like they’re on totally different topics. E.g., a 24 hour clock.
I like Plenny Bars and I like Apple. But if I went to the Plenny Bar website and they were trying to sell me mostly Plenny Bars but also a phone, or the Apple website and they were trying to sell me mostly phones etc. but also snacks, I’d be confused.
This’d be very survivable for those companies because I already knew them
But if it was a company I was unfamiliar with, I might then reasonably click away, thinking “These people seem unfocused, I’m going to go to one of the hundreds of other potential suppliers”.
It may genuinely not worth me spending 15 seconds looking into it closer and seeing if they have good reasons for their combo of focuses, when there’s already so much competition and I didn’t have much reason to think this new company was better than the competition.
Relatedly, I’d guess that this is like one of the cases where a stereotype actually does do better than random chance for prediction.
I haven’t gathered any systematic data, but would bet that if we looked at a lot of channels aiming to do something like engaging communication of useful ideas, and compared ones that seemed to have a relatively clear and consistent focus, aesthetic, etc. to ones that have a minority if videos that at first look quite disconnected and in particular look like they’re about hobbies like gaming, the former set of channels would just actually tend to have better content than the latter.
Obviously that doesn’t mean it’ll be true in every case. But a viewer has an insane amount of content to choose from, and when they’re not yet sold on you, it’s fair for them to make snap judgements and move on.
I think this isn’t really about quirkiness, nor about Minecraft being intrinsically cringey or something, more about something like consistency. If you had animated videos that were using Minecraft as the central “device”, but whose titles made it clear how they were relevant to rationality, that would seem fine to me.
This is all correct, but also notice that the most recent video among those that break the pattern of animated videos is 7 years old. When we’ll have accumulated a lot of animated videos those old videos will be relegated at the bottom and have approximately zero impact on how people view the channel, other than being old curiosities. Also, an interesting datapoint that contradicts your thesis (although I agree with you, I wanted to point that out): VSauce. Look at his older videos. And they are a lot more!
One thing that I could do is to simply hide the minecraft videos for a while, till the channel has more animated videos, so it can have a more consistent aesthetic early on, and then unhide them later. I don’t like this option but I will consider it (in part I dislike it because public from the old videos is saying “wow you hath returneth!”)
I totally understand this take and the animator said the same thing (so upvoted for giving me another data point here).
Now let me vent my frustration:
The sad thing is that your comment has a decent chance of being correct. I think that, yes, at first glance minecraft videos may seem unprofessional. But man if you are correct that would be deeply deeply sad. Reality is: “redstone neuron in minecraft!” is utterly brilliant, even if I say so myself. It is a perceptron made with redstone. How cool is that? And probably one of the firsts, or the first, in the world. And I did that when I was 17. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever done, and one of the highest forms of self-expression. But NO it’s cringe because it’s in minecraft, right? And minecraft is for kids. Nevermind that it’s turing complete.
Also, I’m kind of horrified at the possibility that people look at a starting YouTube channel and say “hmmm this looks unprofessional I’m going to downvote”. YouTube channels shouldn’t necessarily look professional, they just need to be good. I could go the route of making everything as boring as possible and commit YT suicide.
End of venting.
All that said I AM updating towards “hmmm maybe I should use a less quirky aesthetic or completely remove the rationality/EA brand (even if talking about EA/rationality topics) if I want to take quirkier routes or maybe just do both”.
Hmm. I feel like I partly see where you’re coming from, but there are two other things worth noting:
Maybe “confusing” is more important than “unprofessional” here.
The channel is called “Rational Animations”, and the first few videos look like they match that, and then suddenly there’s a few videos that just literally aren’t animated (in the same sense) and also at least look like they’re on totally different topics. E.g., a 24 hour clock.
I like Plenny Bars and I like Apple. But if I went to the Plenny Bar website and they were trying to sell me mostly Plenny Bars but also a phone, or the Apple website and they were trying to sell me mostly phones etc. but also snacks, I’d be confused.
This’d be very survivable for those companies because I already knew them
But if it was a company I was unfamiliar with, I might then reasonably click away, thinking “These people seem unfocused, I’m going to go to one of the hundreds of other potential suppliers”.
It may genuinely not worth me spending 15 seconds looking into it closer and seeing if they have good reasons for their combo of focuses, when there’s already so much competition and I didn’t have much reason to think this new company was better than the competition.
Relatedly, I’d guess that this is like one of the cases where a stereotype actually does do better than random chance for prediction.
I haven’t gathered any systematic data, but would bet that if we looked at a lot of channels aiming to do something like engaging communication of useful ideas, and compared ones that seemed to have a relatively clear and consistent focus, aesthetic, etc. to ones that have a minority if videos that at first look quite disconnected and in particular look like they’re about hobbies like gaming, the former set of channels would just actually tend to have better content than the latter.
Obviously that doesn’t mean it’ll be true in every case. But a viewer has an insane amount of content to choose from, and when they’re not yet sold on you, it’s fair for them to make snap judgements and move on.
I think this isn’t really about quirkiness, nor about Minecraft being intrinsically cringey or something, more about something like consistency. If you had animated videos that were using Minecraft as the central “device”, but whose titles made it clear how they were relevant to rationality, that would seem fine to me.
This is all correct, but also notice that the most recent video among those that break the pattern of animated videos is 7 years old. When we’ll have accumulated a lot of animated videos those old videos will be relegated at the bottom and have approximately zero impact on how people view the channel, other than being old curiosities. Also, an interesting datapoint that contradicts your thesis (although I agree with you, I wanted to point that out): VSauce. Look at his older videos. And they are a lot more!
One thing that I could do is to simply hide the minecraft videos for a while, till the channel has more animated videos, so it can have a more consistent aesthetic early on, and then unhide them later. I don’t like this option but I will consider it (in part I dislike it because public from the old videos is saying “wow you hath returneth!”)