They're so well done. Sadly, he doesn't do them anymore because Youtube's algorithm doesn't make it worth his while. Evidently, he gets the same traffic & revenue from a 10 minute video reviewing "stupid bike gadgets" into the camera as he does for spending a month building a cool bike jump and editing together one of those amazing videos on the playlist.
If youtube rewarded evergreen stuff like that instead of cheap "reaction" videos, it'd be a much cooler place.
Is it the YouTube algorithm's fault? Or viewer preferences? I think YouTube would be happy to recommend the videos to more people if more people watched them.
I watch photography videos on YouTube, and camera review channels consistently have far more subscribers than channels who make content about taking photos. (Or at least they did in the past - in recent years camera tech has really matured and interesting releases are much less frequent, and reviewers seem to have taken a hit).
I think people just like gear. Should YouTube not show people what they like to see?
I've watched some Berm Peak videos in the past and I mostly know the channel for its videos about builds/repairs, or his video about the history of valves. The mountain biking videos are good too, but only hold my interest for so long. If I want to see mountain biking I'm more likely to look at some of the stuff Red Bull is putting out.
The thing is, "what people enjoy while watching", "what they derive lasting benefit, memory or happiness from", and "what they click on in a thumbnail" are three different things, and youtube optimizes for the latter. Which is why youtube face is a thing.
Yes, modulo only that "what people like enough to keep going through the adverts" isn't exactly the same as "what they click on in a thumbnail", and the latter combines with "did these ads convince someone to get the paid ad free experience" is what YT optimises for.
I’m gonna say it’s YouTube. They are obsessed with pushing short form shit videos to me despite me never wanting to watch them. I hate YouTube shorts so much
I'm with you on not liking shorts. I read there is a new option to limit time spent in shorts, if you set that to 0 they do go away. Have not tested it.
In the Home Screen it is always completely full of shorts. In my recommendations, full of shorts. There’s no way to just never be shown shorts. It’s very clear from the layout that they REALLY want you to watch shorts. I assume it’s because they are more addictive = more views = more ads. But I pay for YY premium! So why do they still insist on putting shorts everywhere? If I want shitty short videos I’ll use TikTok
I don't get them on desktop either, but on the mobile app they're very hard to avoid. Seems like YouTube doesn't want to be YouTube anymore, it wants to morph into TikTok. We don't need more TikToks, having one TikTok is already bad enough thankyouverymuch!
>* Is it the YouTube algorithm's fault? Or viewer preferences? I think YouTube would be happy to recommend the videos to more people if more people watched them.*
I always got garbage even if it suggested things I wanted to watch too.
The best way is to disable suggestions completely and then just make a note of your favourite channels. That way you get a completely blank landing page and are forced to search out exactly what you want every time.
You can disable suggestions and still subscribe to channels, I'd argue that's the easiest path while still keeping what you're actually interested in. If you have 200+ subscribed channels over the years it's less good, I'd just unscribe if you're not interested in it.
As a young film student my Prof asked me whether I wanted to go to a talk to which he was invited. It was on the genres shown in German public television.
There the summary of the discussion was: Our core demographic are 60 to 70 year olds which is why we only make shows that appeal to 60-70 year olds and our core audience watches TV while doing household chores, so it needs to be simple to follow, so they can do household chores while watching.
I told them that to me this sounds a lot like circular logic, where they justify the things they are doing with the outcomes that produced. It is obvious there are other markets targeting different audiences (e.g. the likes of Netflix have been explicitly mentioned) and these markets are growing based on the way demographics shift.
A bit like a drug dealer that says he can't do honest work since all his customers are drug addicts, they are using the status quo as an excuse to persist the status quo.
The real way to think about these things is to consider them feedback loops. If all your content targets a specific demographic of course you're gonna have more audience members of that demographic, which again leads you to make more content for said demographic, which leads to more audience members of that demographic which... Until you hit some systemic limit, e.g. you have saturated the market or it turns out your content isn't that appealing to begin with in comparison to other stuff.
That means if you want to be strategic about this you need to give incentives to creators to produce stuff for audiences you don't already have. Even better: you need to become a partner these creators can and want to trust in.
These are the levers YouTube needs to pull if they want to stay a relevant platform that people enjoy spending their time on.
I think it's the algorithm. Occasionally I get recommended videos that are 5-8+ years old (so old in terms of Youtube years) with no new comments so presumably not getting a lot of recent views. But soon comes a wave of fresh comments wondering why they never discovered this video before. So the algorithm starts the cycle, not the organic user preferences.
For this particular channel, I watched a bunch of his videos on this Reevo bike In January 2025, and a lot of bike/cycling related videos in general. Despite this clear preference to guide the algorithm, Youtube stopped recommending this channel to me. It disappeared from my feed.
I always suspected Youtube "motivates" creators to pay for promotion by giving them a taste for free, how it looks like to be on everyone's feed, and then takes them off.
> Is it the YouTube algorithm's fault? Or viewer preferences?
I didn’t read the rest of your comment but it’s the fault of the algorithm because that tail wags the dog. It’s physically impossible to watch all videos so we are all at the mercy of the (a) algorithm.
I only saw his previous video on the Reevo that he now fixed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPe3cY3oeu4 - just in case YouTube doesn't list it under suggested videos when you watch this one) and it was hilarious.
Youtube seems to regularly suggest old videos to me so I think it's less a problem with evergreen content and more that youtube pays for minutes watched so someone who does cheap reaction content can produce more minutes to watch than someone who spends a long time on one video.
Absolutely insane how people could have bought a bicycle that will become (partially) useless if they don't connect it with a mobile app. Even if this bike have the build quality of a spaceship I wouldn't even touch it with a stick.
Kudos to Seth for cracking the control on the bike, just so we can reclaim control of an appliance that we paid for with our own money, one that won't work because the maker can't be arsed enough to make it work without a mobile app.
I don't have that model but I can very confidently say :
- do NOT buy an e-bike with custom parts, no matter how "cool" it is!
I bought a CowBoy years ago and honestly, it was great. Until it wasn't. Inexorably, it does not matter how good the parts are, how well designed it is, wear and tear WILL create problems. You WILL need to replace parts. If nobody but the company making the bike sell them you will get in trouble. It's the same with the App, if it's not open source relying on standard AND with existing, not upcoming, GadgetBrige support they will stop supporting your bike and brick it.
Please, pretty please, as consumers who expect to keep on maintaining your bike over years, ASK your repair shop what THEY think is a good bike to fix. Not what is a good bike to ride.
PS: I now ride a Fixie because screw CowBoy and all those e-bike startups who believe they are the new Apple. They aren't and I was the one paying for their delusion.
I hate how he’s doing the kind of project a ton of people would like to help with, for free and on their own time, yet he’s making an LLM do all the interesting work. He can’t code so he vibecodes the whole frontend. He can’t reverse engineer so he leaves Claude with the uart connection. He doesn’t understand something so he makes an LLM explain it.
With his platform he could easily find a person (or a couple) who could do this work themselves, not only saving him money, but nerdsniping someone into hacking a bike. A win-win for everybody.
Imagine after mowing your own lawn with a petrol-powered lawnmower, you got some shades from the neighbors for "Robbing the kids in the community a chance for some honest labor. If you don't know how to use the gardening shear, ask the kids to do it instead of using the automatic lawnmower. Would be a win-win for everybody".
A bit of a tangent, but I hate the way this channel uses AI. There's moments where the creator doesn't really know what they're talking about so they ask AI which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, I don't mind it! However, the way it's repeated verbatim mimicing the speech style of the creator is so offputting I don't really know how to describe it, sounds like someone trying to speak a language they don't know is the best way I can describe it. Might just be me though.
edit:
Actually the comment the creator left on the video is almost purely AI and is just as yuicky to read: "There are lots of questions about runaway Reevo mode, and it's a fun topic. Let's go deeper. First of all, I did add a "PAS Timeout" that turns off PAS after a few minutes, and is selectable in the menu. If you set this up from my Github repo, that feature is active. A lot of you also suggested a weight sensor on the seat, but that would disable pedal assist if you stood up out of the saddle, which is when you would need it most. Another suggestion was the dead man switch. That one would work! This is all fun to think about, so keep the ideas coming. I just MIGHT get another Reevo for myself."
I've been watching Seth for years, that comment is pretty in line with his writing style. I expect he's using AI, but I don't think he would be lazy with it. I would expect him to prefer not replying at all over using AI to reply.
As a very very very long time viewer I've only noticed this in last 10 videos where there's verbatim reads like this from time to time. Ironically where you can notice this the most is the same kind of video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPe3cY3oeu4
I've seen a pretty big percentage of his videos, dropped off past few years or so, but the writing style is heavily influenced by AI in some parts of the script. It might sound like Seth, but AI cannot replicate it perfectly and it just sounds very off.
It seems to be Claude that was doing the majority of the work on the software, so I find it appropriate that Claude responses (as in Claude-in-a-harness-with-the-task-context-available responses) were passed through. Attribution should be clear though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAsuk8OndHs&list=PL5S7V5NhM8...
They're so well done. Sadly, he doesn't do them anymore because Youtube's algorithm doesn't make it worth his while. Evidently, he gets the same traffic & revenue from a 10 minute video reviewing "stupid bike gadgets" into the camera as he does for spending a month building a cool bike jump and editing together one of those amazing videos on the playlist.
If youtube rewarded evergreen stuff like that instead of cheap "reaction" videos, it'd be a much cooler place.
I watch photography videos on YouTube, and camera review channels consistently have far more subscribers than channels who make content about taking photos. (Or at least they did in the past - in recent years camera tech has really matured and interesting releases are much less frequent, and reviewers seem to have taken a hit).
I think people just like gear. Should YouTube not show people what they like to see?
I've watched some Berm Peak videos in the past and I mostly know the channel for its videos about builds/repairs, or his video about the history of valves. The mountain biking videos are good too, but only hold my interest for so long. If I want to see mountain biking I'm more likely to look at some of the stuff Red Bull is putting out.
The thing is, "what people enjoy while watching", "what they derive lasting benefit, memory or happiness from", and "what they click on in a thumbnail" are three different things, and youtube optimizes for the latter. Which is why youtube face is a thing.
Luckily I use uBlock Origin and ReVanced, and I blocked all Shorts from even appearing.
I always got garbage even if it suggested things I wanted to watch too.
The best way is to disable suggestions completely and then just make a note of your favourite channels. That way you get a completely blank landing page and are forced to search out exactly what you want every time.
There the summary of the discussion was: Our core demographic are 60 to 70 year olds which is why we only make shows that appeal to 60-70 year olds and our core audience watches TV while doing household chores, so it needs to be simple to follow, so they can do household chores while watching.
I told them that to me this sounds a lot like circular logic, where they justify the things they are doing with the outcomes that produced. It is obvious there are other markets targeting different audiences (e.g. the likes of Netflix have been explicitly mentioned) and these markets are growing based on the way demographics shift.
A bit like a drug dealer that says he can't do honest work since all his customers are drug addicts, they are using the status quo as an excuse to persist the status quo.
The real way to think about these things is to consider them feedback loops. If all your content targets a specific demographic of course you're gonna have more audience members of that demographic, which again leads you to make more content for said demographic, which leads to more audience members of that demographic which... Until you hit some systemic limit, e.g. you have saturated the market or it turns out your content isn't that appealing to begin with in comparison to other stuff.
That means if you want to be strategic about this you need to give incentives to creators to produce stuff for audiences you don't already have. Even better: you need to become a partner these creators can and want to trust in.
These are the levers YouTube needs to pull if they want to stay a relevant platform that people enjoy spending their time on.
There are a bunch of other channels out there too that I watch from time to time, but I think the above are the best in their respective categories.
For this particular channel, I watched a bunch of his videos on this Reevo bike In January 2025, and a lot of bike/cycling related videos in general. Despite this clear preference to guide the algorithm, Youtube stopped recommending this channel to me. It disappeared from my feed.
I always suspected Youtube "motivates" creators to pay for promotion by giving them a taste for free, how it looks like to be on everyone's feed, and then takes them off.
I didn’t read the rest of your comment but it’s the fault of the algorithm because that tail wags the dog. It’s physically impossible to watch all videos so we are all at the mercy of the (a) algorithm.
Kudos to Seth for cracking the control on the bike, just so we can reclaim control of an appliance that we paid for with our own money, one that won't work because the maker can't be arsed enough to make it work without a mobile app.
Related: Cory Doctorow's [Unauthorized Bread](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...)
- do NOT buy an e-bike with custom parts, no matter how "cool" it is!
I bought a CowBoy years ago and honestly, it was great. Until it wasn't. Inexorably, it does not matter how good the parts are, how well designed it is, wear and tear WILL create problems. You WILL need to replace parts. If nobody but the company making the bike sell them you will get in trouble. It's the same with the App, if it's not open source relying on standard AND with existing, not upcoming, GadgetBrige support they will stop supporting your bike and brick it.
Please, pretty please, as consumers who expect to keep on maintaining your bike over years, ASK your repair shop what THEY think is a good bike to fix. Not what is a good bike to ride.
PS: I now ride a Fixie because screw CowBoy and all those e-bike startups who believe they are the new Apple. They aren't and I was the one paying for their delusion.
With a conversion kit? ^_^
I guess I won't be riding them anytime soon. But I am glad to know there is a way to resurrect/improve them!
With his platform he could easily find a person (or a couple) who could do this work themselves, not only saving him money, but nerdsniping someone into hacking a bike. A win-win for everybody.
It's impossible to do anything on the internet without someone in the peanut gallery telling you you are doing something wrong.
edit:
Actually the comment the creator left on the video is almost purely AI and is just as yuicky to read: "There are lots of questions about runaway Reevo mode, and it's a fun topic. Let's go deeper. First of all, I did add a "PAS Timeout" that turns off PAS after a few minutes, and is selectable in the menu. If you set this up from my Github repo, that feature is active. A lot of you also suggested a weight sensor on the seat, but that would disable pedal assist if you stood up out of the saddle, which is when you would need it most. Another suggestion was the dead man switch. That one would work! This is all fun to think about, so keep the ideas coming. I just MIGHT get another Reevo for myself."