Oh whoops! My mistake! I’ll edit the above comment to fix that. It was Kurzgesagt who was in the wrong.
The drama was (to copy/paste an earlier comment, because it’s rather lengthy):
It started when a YouTuber whose channel is called Coffee Break reached out to Philip of Kurzgesagt as part of a video he was doing into the flaws of popular science communication. Specifically, about some significant errors in K’s video on Addiction. Instead of agreeing to collaborate, or even giving a simple “not interested, sorry”, K took an instant accusatory tone, claiming CB must have been making a “gotcha” piece. CB and K agreed that they would talk more about the matter to try and assuage K’s concerns, but K kept stalling while working on a retraction video, at which time K took down the video that was the impetus for this discussion (shortly after, as one of those aforementioned stalling efforts, having said “I never could bring myself to take it down”, claiming it would be “cruel and unnecessary” to do so—funny, considering in his AMA attempting to spin the story, he said “I was really stressed out about the addiction and the refugee video for years. Being finally open about my mistakes and deleting them felt like weight leaving my body.”). The Refugee video was also taken down along with the Addiction one that CB was interested in.
K claims to be interested in science communication. But here, he decided to make the selfish decision to do what he thought would protect his own personal brand through duplicitous means. He got ahead of the story that falsely assumed was coming, and put up a pre-emptive response to that. Now, CB isn’t entirely blameless. In response to the above, CB put out a rather hot-headed reaction to the whole incident. He didn’t follow up with K to try to understand what had happened; he lashed out in anger at K’s self-righteous arse-covering video.
And then CB started getting harassed. K called out CB, and many of K’s friends (other very large, powerful YouTubers such as CGP Grey and Philip de Franco) made very public statements to their audiences attacking CB. It ended up forcing CB into taking down his video, deleting a whole heap of tweets explaining what happened, and putting out an apology. Perhaps it was an apology that CB should have indeed made, but the need for an apology from K was much, much greater. And one never came. K used his larger platform to spin the narrative so that his large audience, and now also the general public who becomes aware of this, almost all take his side.
Thanks for the great breakdown, it sounds vaguely familiar. I remember K’s retraction bit and I follow Philip DeFranco. Disappointed he landed on the wrong side.
For what it’s worth, Philly D is someone I could have answered the original question with too. Not for any spectacular reason like the above—I had already stopped watching him before that occurred. For me it was just finding his focus was too much on sensationalist pop culture news rather than news reporting that interested me. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, it just wasn’t right for me.
Yeah he definitely can veer too much into that stuff for a time. I strongly dislike his thumbnails and titles but I feel he has to do that to compete but I do like his content, some days just less than others.
Oh whoops! My mistake! I’ll edit the above comment to fix that. It was Kurzgesagt who was in the wrong.
The drama was (to copy/paste an earlier comment, because it’s rather lengthy):
It started when a YouTuber whose channel is called Coffee Break reached out to Philip of Kurzgesagt as part of a video he was doing into the flaws of popular science communication. Specifically, about some significant errors in K’s video on Addiction. Instead of agreeing to collaborate, or even giving a simple “not interested, sorry”, K took an instant accusatory tone, claiming CB must have been making a “gotcha” piece. CB and K agreed that they would talk more about the matter to try and assuage K’s concerns, but K kept stalling while working on a retraction video, at which time K took down the video that was the impetus for this discussion (shortly after, as one of those aforementioned stalling efforts, having said “I never could bring myself to take it down”, claiming it would be “cruel and unnecessary” to do so—funny, considering in his AMA attempting to spin the story, he said “I was really stressed out about the addiction and the refugee video for years. Being finally open about my mistakes and deleting them felt like weight leaving my body.”). The Refugee video was also taken down along with the Addiction one that CB was interested in.
K claims to be interested in science communication. But here, he decided to make the selfish decision to do what he thought would protect his own personal brand through duplicitous means. He got ahead of the story that falsely assumed was coming, and put up a pre-emptive response to that. Now, CB isn’t entirely blameless. In response to the above, CB put out a rather hot-headed reaction to the whole incident. He didn’t follow up with K to try to understand what had happened; he lashed out in anger at K’s self-righteous arse-covering video.
And then CB started getting harassed. K called out CB, and many of K’s friends (other very large, powerful YouTubers such as CGP Grey and Philip de Franco) made very public statements to their audiences attacking CB. It ended up forcing CB into taking down his video, deleting a whole heap of tweets explaining what happened, and putting out an apology. Perhaps it was an apology that CB should have indeed made, but the need for an apology from K was much, much greater. And one never came. K used his larger platform to spin the narrative so that his large audience, and now also the general public who becomes aware of this, almost all take his side.
Incidentally, here’s the video that CB was working on at the time. Hari, the scientist discussed in the video whom K worked with on his video discussed earlier, communicated very well with CB on it.
Thanks for the great breakdown, it sounds vaguely familiar. I remember K’s retraction bit and I follow Philip DeFranco. Disappointed he landed on the wrong side.
For what it’s worth, Philly D is someone I could have answered the original question with too. Not for any spectacular reason like the above—I had already stopped watching him before that occurred. For me it was just finding his focus was too much on sensationalist pop culture news rather than news reporting that interested me. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, it just wasn’t right for me.
Yeah he definitely can veer too much into that stuff for a time. I strongly dislike his thumbnails and titles but I feel he has to do that to compete but I do like his content, some days just less than others.