Urgh this guy's videos are soo long and overdramatic.
This is the Wikipedia article he read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor?wprov=sfla1
this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2026
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He used to be brilliant but the creep on the length has been insane. That said his video was good for the interviews, would have been a good podcast like that guy dark web diaries.
Much obliged for the link. Personally, I can't stand the guy. Not only does he lean into sensationalism too much for my liking, but at least one of his videos - the one with Waymo - is just flat out advertising.
Same with his video about Google DeepMind. Vastly oversold.
I think you're being pretty reductive here.
I agree his videos are usually mediocre, but as a cyber security professional I actually think this one did a good job of simplifying and explaining computer security fundamentals at a level that most can understand.
You and I have a ton of extra context that the average person does not, so that Wikipedia article might suffice, but the video covers far more than that Wikipedia article.
They clearly did more research than just reading that article, and they went to the trouble of reproducing some of the steps in the attack to demonstrate the danger it posed. This isn't just a brainless regurgitation of the Wikipedia article as you're implying.
Veritasium partnered up with a private equity firm around the time his videos became far more sensationalist and I don't think that's a coincidence. His videos have become far more misleading and willing to stretch the truth for views in the past few years, so I simply stopped watching his stuff and don't trust his content.
https://www.electrify.video/news/electrify-completes-majority-investment-in-veritasium
That's fair enough. If you lead with this I wouldn't have commented. I agree his recent videos have been more sensationalist, I just thought this one was pretty good, especially for the non-technical crowd.
I've found his videos pretty on point in the topics that I'm familiar with.
I'd need more evidence of misleading information than 'A popular content creator receives an investment'. That's not proof.
It's not even implied by the evidence presented outside of an implied conspiracy not built on anything other than a press release.
There may be evidence of foul play somewhere, but it was not presented here.
There was no conspiracy theorizing here. Enshittafication driven by money is simply how our world works now.
Tbf, the recent "rod from god" video was a dumpsterfire. They didn't make smaller scale models or talk to experts ahead of time. They just yolo'd it and burned a bunch of cash while doing so
I feel the same way. I feel like I would love his subject matters he picks, but he's being so disrespectful of the viewers time that I can't stand it. Just the clickbait title alone is enough to put me off.
I'm surprised to find so much Veritasium hate on Lemmy. I always thought Derek and the team did a good job as far as edutainment goes. I also don't like clickbait titles, but it's worth noting that all of the videos are a real production with a crew of people who work full time and deserve to get paid.
I don't think anybody is critiquing the production quality or the right to get paid. I've seen nothing but complaints about the content quality (sensationalism) in the comments.
For me, I don't hate the guy or the channel. But I found I stopped watching his videos. I just felt like they were too long and could get to the point faster. I didn't really see it as sensationalism myself, but understand that view. He's essentially building it up to say why this is a big deal and you should continue watching the video.
I just see it as an hour long video can still be made very well if it were half that. There's a time commitment involved so when I see fluff that could have been cut it makes me not want to watch. The fluff doesn't add value, not even entertainment wise.
I guess his flavour of tainment just doesn't jam well with me. Like I said, it's not the subject matter, but the content just feels needlessly padded. Compare this to videos by Tom Scott, CGP Grey, Matt Parker, Steve Mould, etc. Those videos are far more dense with content It reminds me of how mythbusters gets so much better once you take out the narrator and the endless recaps..
Regarding clickbait - to me a title this one is just another symptom of that disregard for the viewers time. Being coy and mysterious about the subject matter to lure people in. And yeah, hat's probably why it works.
I agree that the production values are incredibly high. But I just can't stand being treated like a simpleton who needs drama to be tricked into watching videos, it feels very patronising.
Just compare it to his videos from 10 years ago.
3 minutes and interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OSrvzNW9FE
Don’t have any concrete reasons why I try to avoid that channel nowadays but something about his character and argumentation style they use for to the scripts just gives me a feeling of ”bullshit sensationalism”. Just a few years back I really used to like the channel.
That video is more of a (justified) takedown on sponsored content on Veritasium from 4 years ago and yeah, sponsored content sucks. I'm not saying that Veritasium is perfect, I'll just have to keep an open mind while watching their videos going forward.
at 26:10 it says redhat ships rhel and fedora. I'm 99% sure this is just wrong. Redhat doesn't maintain fedora, fedora is just a fork of rhel maintained by the community.
It's right. While Fedora is a community project, Red Hat does hold a special place in it as its corporate sponsor. For example, the Fedora Project Leader position must be held by a Red Hat employee.
You could argue it's the other way around - Fedora is the upstream for RHEL.
It’s the other way around: RHEL is a corporate fork of Fedora.
I was wondering about that too, but I guess it's a bit of both. From What's the difference between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux?
Think about it like this. The Fedora project is the upstream, community distro of Red Hat® Enterprise Linux. Red Hat is the project’s primary sponsor, but thousands of independent developers also contribute to the Fedora project. Each of these contributors, including Red Hat, bring their own new ideas to be tested and debated for inclusion by the larger community into Fedora Linux. This also makes Fedora an ideal place for Red Hat to put features through its own distinct set of tests and quality assurance processes, and those features eventually get incorporated into a version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.