I feel kind of awkward only just now responding to this—I had planned to respond to it the day of, but forgot and then have been traveling the past couple of days. Still, I’ll just make a few comments, some of which I admit might have been made by others elsewhere (I haven’t thoroughly read the Red-Gertler exchange below) but I’ll still make them here.
“I wonder if it’s counter to productive to talk about “one minute in” [...]”
I probably should have been a bit less casual in saying that since, as you point out, that might lead OP to dismissing my comment. However, “one minute in” is a really important standard for this kind of content, since it’s the standard for a lot of real-world audiences: if you are just condemning people or otherwise leaving them with a bad taste in their mouths within 1 minute, you shouldn’t be surprised if people stop watching and develop negative feelings towards the origin/association of the content. That may not be an ideal world, but it’s the one we live in.
I think you may be undervaluing humor, scale and the value derived from targeting new people
I want to respond to this and a key chunk of the points I have seen from Red by emphasizing: not all publicity is good publicity. If you “target new people” at the cost of turning away others who might have been interested (or even just delaying their interest by a few years/months), that might be net harmful. Like Aaron noted, PETA is often ridiculed, plain and simple, although I will say that at least PETA has the status of being just one face/organization (albeit an outsized one) in the at-least-vaguely understood movement of animal rights activism. EA is far less-well known, and a lot of stereotypes from people who are only vaguely familiar but skeptical of EA is that it is elitist, condescending, demanding, etc.—stereotypes which would probably reinforced if one of those people were to watch this video (especially if they only watch the first few miutes).
I feel kind of awkward only just now responding to this—I had planned to respond to it the day of, but forgot and then have been traveling the past couple of days. Still, I’ll just make a few comments, some of which I admit might have been made by others elsewhere (I haven’t thoroughly read the Red-Gertler exchange below) but I’ll still make them here.
I probably should have been a bit less casual in saying that since, as you point out, that might lead OP to dismissing my comment. However, “one minute in” is a really important standard for this kind of content, since it’s the standard for a lot of real-world audiences: if you are just condemning people or otherwise leaving them with a bad taste in their mouths within 1 minute, you shouldn’t be surprised if people stop watching and develop negative feelings towards the origin/association of the content. That may not be an ideal world, but it’s the one we live in.
I want to respond to this and a key chunk of the points I have seen from Red by emphasizing: not all publicity is good publicity. If you “target new people” at the cost of turning away others who might have been interested (or even just delaying their interest by a few years/months), that might be net harmful. Like Aaron noted, PETA is often ridiculed, plain and simple, although I will say that at least PETA has the status of being just one face/organization (albeit an outsized one) in the at-least-vaguely understood movement of animal rights activism. EA is far less-well known, and a lot of stereotypes from people who are only vaguely familiar but skeptical of EA is that it is elitist, condescending, demanding, etc.—stereotypes which would probably reinforced if one of those people were to watch this video (especially if they only watch the first few miutes).