The beginning of the end of Veritasium?

For a long time I've watched YouTube videos, from Veritasium and from many others. I suppose I belong to that group, now called "geeks", who like science and enjoy watching the roundest object in the world, an octopus dreaming, the wiring of the human mind, or how to push a circle through a square.

In the beginning, YouTube was a place where people posted videos in a completely amateur way, with the sole intention of pleasing a few fans or teaching things to other people (it's my case too). But things are changing, and I think I can make out the beginning of the end of something I used to like.

Because YouTube is no longer a place where people simply upload videos. These days YouTube is the new television. And successful YouTubers do it professionally (sometimes with the whole family), and so they have an interest in getting a bigger audience. At the same time, YouTube started to optimize (using AI) which videos it offers each user on their home page (and in the sidebars of the videos), to the point that now YouTubers meticulously tune every detail of their videos and compete with each other to be the ones chosen by "the algorithm".

Which brings us to a recent Veritasium video, where he explains this whole scheme. I thought it was a great video, eye-opening, like the good Veritasium videos. But at the end of the video, Veritasium admits that he has no other choice but to start optimizing things like the thumbnail that shows up for the video, the length, and many other details to maximize the click-through rate. This is what he does for a living, and so he has to keep his little operation going, I don't see anything to criticize about that.

But what's going to happen? With the next videos he's uploaded you can already see the trend a little. For example, after the video about the balls covering the Los Angeles water reservoirs, he makes another one where he wonders whether you can swim in those balls. I liked the first one, the second one strikes me as totally trivial. The same thing happened with the next one, which I didn't even watch, where he apparently waterproofs his body with aerogel. Frankly, I don't care anymore.

I, at least, am starting to see the "papier-mâché". What I mean is that all the videos are the same, they try to push the same buttons. To see a bit of science you have to sit through a scene where they burn something with a flamethrower or some similar nonsense. It's not just Veritasium, it's almost everyone. But I, honestly, feel like I'm being treated like a fool, as if I were also one of those people who need silly stuff to have fun. As a kid I steered clear of people who kill time with these things, and I haven't stopped doing so.

Which is why it's quite possible that I'll end up getting tired and stop watching Veritasium, when I really think he's a genius. And I don't know who I should blame; we're facing one of those cases where the final outcome emerges from the interaction between all the parties and all you can do is let out a lament. Which is, basically, the intention of this post.