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Tom Scott’s work stands out as some of the best examples of how interesting and valuable web content can be. In a sea of short derivative junk-food content, he made things that i honestly learned from, without demanding more than 10 minutes of my time a week! There’s of course a lot of people also doing the same sort of great content, but it does feel like a slowly dying breed. Tom definitely deserves an indefinite break though. If/when he goes back to short form web video, I’ll be happy to watch again! :)
I agree! But the thing is— I’ve got about fifty Tom Scotts in my subscription list. I’m perplexed by doomsaysers’ laments about the state of online educational media. I’ve got far more high quality content for a huge variety of topics than I’ve ever had before.
My theory is this: your favourite hobby store expands and adds one more aisle of fantastic products and five aisles of garbage. You’ll likely perceive quality as having gone way down. In a limited sense, sure: it might be in the way. But it didn’t replace the good stuff.
Tom's commitment to accessibility is fantastic.
Turn on the subtitles on any of his videos (particularly when there are multiple speakers) and you'll see the effort that goes in to it.
Far too many people who publish to YouTube just let users deal with the the auto-generated subtitles, even when they have the ability and budget to do it properly.
"'Oh look at me I bought a Lamborghini!' Buy some damned subtitles" -- Tom Scott.[0]
> Turn on the subtitles on any of his videos (particularly when there are multiple speakers) and you'll see the effort that goes in to it.
He actually did a video on subtitles recently, "Why don't subtitles match dubbing?":
I've lost a lot of my hearing so I play games, watch videos and people who put effort into subtitles are very much appreciated.
Simple things like tagging who is talking is so helpful to understanding what is going on when there are multiple people in the video
Damn, this is a video I didn't want to see today. I love Tom Scott's videos, and just about everything he's ever made has been a great watch. I still remember the VPN videos debunking common myths about them, and the one about how electronic/online voting was a bad idea.
But sadly, I get what he means here. YouTube has basically split down the middle, with the assumption being that you'll either pump out content quickly without much time to prepare, or you'll work on more infrequent essay length videos on a monthly basis or longer. And in both cases... the expectation seems to be that most videos are a professional endeavour now, created by a team of people with pro level editing skills and different people working on things like the script, research, getting the footage needed, etc.
It honestly feels like the platform isn't 'fun' anymore, and the kind of content we used to visit for is becoming less and less common by the day.
Regardless, enjoy your break/retirement Tom! You've made some incredible videos over the years, and I'll be excited to see what you create in future too.
What struck me was “it’s either keep growing and become a manager or stop and do smaller projects”
As someone who many years back looked at a team of 40 developers I was leading and went “nah, I want to be an IC again” that resonates
I'm not sure I buy his reasoning there. He said that he uploads a video every week which is a brisk pace. Why not a video every month? Every quarter?
Perhaps he really just wants a break and this explanation sounded the most reasonable. But I hope he didn't get burned out because he was afraid of switching things up.
Same same. I get the desire to manage more folks (status, money, org impact, joy of mentoring) but the ability to see what you directly build help solve problems... Well, that's hard to beat.
I was lucky to have a boss who let me dip my toe into the water of management. I dealt with a team of 10, I was formerly a IC on, and they required very little effort. After a year I decided to go back to being an IC as well. I was glad I was able to see I didn’t want to do it when the stakes were low and the team was actually easy to manage. It also gave me some more empathy for those in those management roles.
Interestingly, back in YouTube land, Matt D'Avella also just announced he got rid of his team and is back to doing things himself. He fell into that trap of thinking he needed to hire a team and scale a few years back, then found himself as a manager and wasn’t happy. It’s good Tom was able to see the paths ahead to avoid the headaches and layoffs when he ultimately decided he didn’t like it.
I joined a company in 2021 as a tech lead after working as a IC for almost a decade. I thought it was going to be a technical role but it slowly turned into a more engineering management one. The were aspects about it that I liked and actually good at. But I really missed programming and building things on my own. Plus the stress was bad. Few months ago, I went back to an engineering job.
Tom is why I understand UTF-8 [1].
And it is not so much WHAT he explained but HOW he explained it, what really made it stick. It was his sheer unbridled genuine enthusiasm that put him on the map for me.
One of the best to do it.
And he's why I know I shouldn't roll my own time zone library.
I first came to learn about the complexity of character sets by finding out that SQL Server's default characterset is 2 bytes per character. I eventually came across Scott's video. UTF-8 encoding is only as new as SQL Server 2019.
https://sqlquantumleap.com/2018/09/28/native-utf-8-support-i...
I remember asking at some point what seemed to make Tom Scott so successful compared to the thousands of others who have probably tried to make it big on Youtube/social media. Was it the format/length/style, the topics, the camera work, the commentary/research, etc?
I think the consensus was that he came out with generally interesting content, but most of all, predictably and sustained, which generated viewership. Interesting how that can be the main factor -- maybe both in keeping people's interest, but also developing the skills to create content that was improving each time and becoming more engaging. And I guess he points to that explicitly in this last video, where he says he challenged himself to make it his real job. For 10 years.
I always appreciate when authors of successful projects decide to stop after they've figured out the formula for success. Whether these are films without sequels, TV shows without dozens of seasons, or video content creators who are not compelled to keep uploading in perpetuity. It shows true care and dedication to their craft, and a desire to keep innovating in perhaps other areas of their career. It also avoids the pressure of keeping the high bar for quality, as there are not many authors who can consistently pull this off. I'd rather enjoy high quality content for a short time than see it gradually worsen over a long period.
Still, 10 years is a long run for any type of content, and uploading every week without fail is very impressive. I'm sure Tom Scott used the "Seinfeld strategy" for this, which goes to show that great minds think alike, considering Seinfeld is one of the shows that ended at the peak of its success.
Thanks for the interesting content over the years, Tom, and best of luck in whatever you decide to pursue next.
On the latest cortex, CGP Grey made the point that what's happening in youtube education-adjacent videos is much the same as what's happening for entertainment in those spaces: the law of the excluded middle. You either do long infrequent videos e.g., like MrBeast, or frequent short videos. Both CGP Grey and Tom Scott did frequent mid-length content, which gets squeezed out.
Tom Scott is one of the great YouTubers. I don't know him personally but he does come across as a genuine down to earth guy who just wants to share knowledge with the world.
I also only recently learned that he has a newsletter. He mentions it briefly in some of his videos but I have never seen him ask people to sign up. The only reason I found out about it is because he included one of my articles in it[1]. Definitely highly recommend checking it out[2].
1 - https://mousetrack.co.uk/blog/mosquitoes-at-disney-why-do-yo...
You'll be missed. Each video was interesting, fun and well made.
I recommend to anyone to have a look at the backlog, especially the series about linguistics inspired by the "lingthusiasm" podcast.
What a brilliant bit of foreshadowing with the helicopter statement.
Given the other comments about the deep sea or space, maybe those are areas which he hopes he could've explored which he might end up tackling at some point!
I'm really glad I was around for his journey. Sometimes creatives will keep pushing a form of media long past the point where it's interesting or exciting. It takes a great deal of courage and creative integrity to let great things come to an end.
Tom Scott has been one of the best YouTube creators ever. He deserves a break.
I started watching his channel at the beginning of Things You Might Not Know. He’s one of the all-time greats. His RI lecture “There Is No Algorithm For Truth” is as prescient as ever. He truly helped make YouTube a special platform, even if it doesn’t always recognize its own strengths, and chases trends it’s fundamentally incapable of adopting properly.
I'm glad he's still doing the Lateral podcast (as that's the only thing I know him from). I do wish he would get somebody besides Youtubers as guests, though. It's frustrating to hear 20-somethings with very little cultural and historical knowledge try to work through the problems.
I first saw Tom Scott on Computerphile. He’s so good at explaining topics with excitement and enthusiasm. It’s amazing he’s been so consistent with a video every week for the last 10 years. Not only “a video”, but videos that go above and beyond the norm in quality. He’s an inspiration.
I agree with his self assesment. I liked many of his videos but many I also found disagreable and opinionated without much of a sound argument. Sounds like he doesn't like those videos either. All in all, his videos are heads and shoulders above most of YouTube and I wish him well.
Tom Scott was so sharp, he knew to end on a high note, and damn near his peak.
It’s one thing to produce a lot of great content, but it’s very rare for someone to wrap it up when they clearly were still at or near their best.
Godspeed, Tom Scott (and thanks for your help on POPFile all those years ago).
I first saw Tom Scott onscreen around 2010, when he appeared as a contestant on the esoteric - and very good - BBC quiz show Only Connect. Link to 2022 Reddit discussion, which includes video [0].
It is a fun look back at a ponytailed Tom exercising his intellect and his natural aplomb on-camera, at around - or perhaps just before? - the era when his Youtube work began in earnest.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/pypew1/tom_scott_wa...
What happened to the "Six months from now, this channel stops" video he posted?
Well deserved. The amount of travel he's done was crazy. I'll still listen to the Lateral podcast and whatever he'll come up with in the future.
End of an era. I knew this was coming and it still was a shock to see it hit my feed today.
Best of luck on everything Tom Scott!
To this day when I have buffering problems with online videos I immediately think about his explainer-demo with confetti [1]. Love his work!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Rp-uo6HmI&themeRefresh=1
It's nice to see Youtube channel end on their own terms. So many creators burn out without warning, maybe a written explanation somewhere. Very few would post a video saying this channel is dead for obvious reasons.
It's probably against the rules, but I hope he reuploads every week from episode 1. I haven't gone through 10 years of backlogs and it's nice when new videos, as in videos that's never been watched comes to you.
It would also be nice if he (and creators in general) reformatted the videos into season format. Way easier to mentally keep track whether you watched something or not. 20 seasons of 6 months / 24 videos each.
Imagine making a video every week for ten years, 520 videos. I don't even think I've made git commits that consistently.
I'm not sure exactly how to define it but this is the end of something — certainly something for that clique of British YouTubers (e.g. Tom Scott did the graphics for many jay foreman videos and so on)
And really YouTube in general — Tom Scott understood the medium of youtube very early on. https://youtu.be/MrppkAIVhH4?si=6y2yRkk2QY6hknwF from 17 years ago is basically the exact same rhythm as a modern video, Tom Scott doesn't like memes so its also not massively dated either (other than the obvious).
Tom's incredible ten year run inspired me to write a thing about escalating streaks, and the power of doing something on a repeating schedule and trying to make it a tiny bit better every time: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jan/2/escalating-streaks/
When major YouTubers like this stop uploading, I assume they're still getting fairly generous Adsense checks each month, which may decline over time, but, are probably not nothing and would continue ostensibly forever? I wonder what the numbers are if you grind for 5 years to build a multi-million subscriber count, then just stop (but leave everything online)?
You know you've made it as a cultural symbol when you are being parodied : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-IEVMwBEfo
I dislike montages and yet this was a wonderful one.
You made countless lives better, in small ways times a million.
If this is the best thing you’ll ever do, it’s already good enough. The rest is gravy.
By pure coincidence I just discovered Tom Scott today. I happen to have resolved yesterday to do a video each week for the rest of this year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBFkj9SjsLU
After seeing this I am wondering if I might just try to stretch that to 10 years...
2 million views in about 5 hours. Wow.
It was great seeing him on University Challenge last year more than holding his own as team captain on a team of academics and professionals
With the excuse of there being a MOUNTAIN of high-quality content on YT, for someone like me who's never heard of nor watched Tom Scott: would anyone care to curate me a couple of his best videos to sample from?
Totally had not heard of the fellow. But HN is a gateway to so much goodness.
Ouch. Burnout and painting oneself into a permanent corner. Seems a bit drastic. Apart from burnout, one of the worst things is wasted talent.
Tom is definitely in this thread somewhere and I hope he's smiling. Thanks a bunch and have a nice vacation. You are appreciated.
What a great ending to a video to end a great channel!
(If you didn't watch to the end, go back and watch it, one of the best ever outtros).
Good luck Tom.
I've learned a great deal from him over this time. Thanks Tom!
That literally brought tears to my eyes. We love you, Tom!