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Comment by blagie | Hacker News Reader

I don't envy the contestants. I think 1,200 entries is so many that the organizers can't even glance at most of them; there had to be a peer review process.

There were 5 winners. Your odds of winning were less than half a percent.

When submitting to a contest, you have no idea how many submissions there will be. With this many, and the processes around it, your submission WILL most likely be lost in the noise.

Indeed, many, many very good submissions will be lost in the noise.

At the same time, these kinds of videos take obscene amounts of time to prepare.

It's depressing to throw weeks of your heart and soul into something, only to have no one look at it.

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I don't think winning the contest should be the primary motivation for making such a high quality education video.

... not, the primary motivation is to help people and to share content. 3B1B might give a very tall soapbox.

If you spend this much time, for three dozen views (which is not uncommon for videos further down -- and a view doesn't necessarily mean a person watched it all the way through), you've probably wasted a lot of time.

I don't know what the solution here is, and I'm not faulting anyone (I don't think anyone expected 1200 submissions), but the amount of dissipated effort makes me sad.

I almost made an explainer for the contest, and I'm glad I didn't. I think I would have made a good one, but I think for the expected number of views, I'm better off tutoring people 1:1.

A few days ago I was trying to understand the State Monad in Haskell because the book I was reading didn't explain it well. So I Googled it and the the first couple of links also didn't satisfy, including the Haskell wiki book that many articles link to. However further down the search results list I found an blog post that seamed like somebody had written directly to what was confusing me. The author had obviously put a bunch of effort into making a clear and understandable exposition. I was so impressed by the article that I had to write to the author letting them know how much I appreciated the effort they had put into the article. But when I looked at the blog post date it was from 2012!! Which in internet time seems like ages ago!

My point with this long winded reply is that I think the primary motivation should be to help people. Obviously if you're spending a whole lot of effort to make an explainer for the contest and Grant changes the format next year then there is little utility to that effort. But for these contestants and their submissions I plan to bookmark this page and this will be my daily breakfast viewing for many days to come! (I was so excited to see such a long list of submissions for my consumption!) I think the effort people put into their submissions over time will be significantly greater (if not absolutely greater) than what 1:1 tutoring might achieve.

The key question is always discoverability.

"State monad" receives a half-million Google results.

1200 results means you could be watching one per day for the next 3 years. I doubt many will have the patience for that.

> But when I looked at the blog post date it was from 2012!!

Hopefully you wrote the Thank You anyway as they're probably still around.

P.S. Do you still have the link to the blog post?

The State Monad a Tutorial for the Confused:

http://brandon.si/code/the-state-monad-a-tutorial-for-the-co...

And I did!

Thanks!

3B1B said at the beginning (and emphasises is the results video) that the purpose of the "contest" was not to win, but just to give that little nudge to more people who were thinking about making math explainers to start.

According to his website, there was a peer review process. As Grant states, to be eligible for the final review, each entrant needed to contribute one hour to the review process.

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