The Veritasium channel is suffering from "Numberphile syndrome"

I have written previously about the YouTube channel "Veritasium", which is one of those huge education channels with millions of subscribers and tens of millions of views per video, which publishes videos mostly related to educational content such as history, technology, science and other similar content. In that previous blog post I comment on how I lost brain cells because of the absolutely and utterly stupid comment the author made towards the beginning of one of his recent videos.

I would like to write about something else I have noticed about the channel over the years, as I have noticed somewhat of a change in more and more of the videos in recent years.

I call that phenomenon the "Numberphile syndrome". A term I came up with, but it refers to what happened to another enormously popular YouTube channel, "Numberphile".

You see, the Numberphile channel, which is an education channel about mathematics, became enormously popular very quickly when it was created something like 15-or-so years ago, relatively quickly gaining millions of subscribers and regularly getting hundreds of thousands of views per video, sometimes even over a million.

For the first 10-or-so years of its existence, the vast majority of the videos were really approachable, easy to understand, fun to watch, and quite educational. The subject matters were explained in relatively simple ways that were easy to understand and follow, and the videos tended to be relatively short and just concentrate on the key facts, even if sometimes with a bit of humor or a more lighthearted tone. A lot of people learned much more about arithmetic and some other fields of mathematics from Numberphile than they ever did in school.

Then, at some point, the quality of the videos changed quite noticeably. It started slowly with just a few videos being like that, but relatively quickly the videos of that kind started being more and more frequent, soon surpassing in number the simpler, easy-to-understand and fun videos.

And that's videos which were overly long, and which explained the concepts in completely unnecessary lengthy detail, spending too much time explaining technical minutia in a manner that makes the average viewer lose interest and track of what's going on. Too much unnecessary detail densely packed, for way too long, making the videos boring and almost unwatchable.

And no, in most of those videos the subject matter is not something that would require that amount of detail or that kind of explanations. Often it could be explained in a much simpler and more understandable manner, and in a manner that's much more interesting and holds the viewer's attention better.

As a good example, their recent video "The Weather Equation" is 44 minutes long, and a complete snoozefest. Most people lose track of what's going on, and thus interest, in the first 5 minutes, 10 at most. It just goes to way too much unnecessary detail and is too meandering, too boring, too uninteresting.

Thus, this kind of "popular channel started with interesting well-made easy-to-follow videos, but later succumbed into long, tedious, plodding, boring snoozefests full of unnecessary detail that nobody is interested in" change in such YouTube channels is what I call "the Numberphile syndrome".

And the Veritasium channel is suffering from this same thing. It's perhaps yet not as bad as with Numberphile, as maybe 50% of their recent videos are like this, but it's clearly noticeable. While for years and years the videos were extremely well made, interesting, didactic and easy to follow, more and more of the latest videos have been too long and stock-full packed with unnecessary boring detail that's hard to follow, and which the subject matters in question wouldn't really need.