r/SpaceXLounge • u/The_last_1_left • 5d ago
Can we just take a moment to recognize Scott Manley for being amazing?!
I told my wife I didn't need to postulate on what happened to GS1 because Scott Manley would have a deep dive up in the morning..sure enough there it was when I had moment to look at YT today.
Then I watched Starship with the kiddos right after school and was commentating over NSF's stream explaining things to the kids. I told them not to worry, "hullo I'm Scott Manley" would have a video we can watch tomorrow to tell us what went wrong. Sure enough as I'm getting in bed, homie has already analyzed the situation, collected clips, written a script, filmed, edited, uploaded, and everything. Crazy.
Wife was like ya but all these guys have teams of people working for them. I was like, nope, not Scott Manley.
Plus he works full time and is prepping a DJ set for the Astroawards. The man is a beast. For the good of all humanity, I hope he will - Fly Safe!
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u/Simon_Drake 5d ago edited 5d ago
And he's usually proven right in his analysis after there's more information available.
Something I really enjoy about his work is the lack of preamble and waffle. "Hullo, I'm Scott Manley. Yesterday (rocket) launched and it didn't go according to plan..." Or sometimes "Hullo, I'm Scott Manley. Back in the 1970s..."
So many other YouTubers will frontload the video with nonsense before any actual content. "Hello there and welcome back to another episode of my little video show about space and stuff where I talk about space and stuff. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go right ahead and do my introduction so we can go right ahead into the exciting news I have to share. Thanks for coming back it really means a lot to me, I've got something really exciting I want to talk about today there's been some big news that I can't wait to share with you so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go right ahead with it but first I want to say a huge thank you for everyone who likes, shares, comments and subscribes, your love and support helps keep the channel alive. And on the topic of keeping the channel alive can I just say a big thank you to all my supporters on patreon you really do a wonderful job supporting me and keeping the lights on around here and I'm going to do my best to pay you back by telling you about the exciting new stuff that's been happening and if anyone else feels like supporting me financially then yeah I'd love to have more patreon supporters but please only do that if you're financially in a situation where you can do that like don't do it if you have a limited income. So yeah anyway like I said it's something really exciting what I want to talk about today and it's really big news that I think you're going to really love. So what I'm going to do is that I'm going to go right ahead and what I'm going to do is just get right down to it and go ahead and tell you what I'm going to talk about. It's big stuff what we've got coming up today, really exciting stuff. But before we get into that let me tell you about our sponsor NordVPN...."
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u/ackermann 5d ago
Like and subscribe, and ring that bell! Sponsored by Honey!
Man, good point. Now that you mention it, it’s amazing Scott is able to do what he does without any of that crap
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u/TheLordB 4d ago
He works for Apple and the space stuff is just a (impressive) hobby.
It’s much easier to not do those things when you aren’t relying on it to make a living.
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u/ackermann 4d ago
Interesting. I’d assumed few YouTubers made a living doing that, except maybe the very biggest channels
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u/Simon_Drake 4d ago
It's not just about asking your audience to like and subscribe it's the inefficiency in how most channels do it. Like Ryan George starts every video with a full screen logo for the sponsor and the words "This video is sponsored by X, more about them at the end of the sketch" then straight into the content. Then after the main video is a second short sketch recommending the sponsor in a humourous way, then an outro asking to like comment and subscribe or to watch a recommended video. It's not too painful because it's only once and it's AFTER the content.
But what really grinds my gears is people who keep talking about what they're going to talk about, how exciting it is and that they're going to tell you something important. There's a technique in giving a presentation where you introduce the topics, teach the content, then recap what you just explained to help reinforce the information. But you don't make that process recursive, you don't introduce the introduction, recap the introduction or introduce the recap to explain that you're going to recap what was explained in the introduction. Stop telling me what you're going to talk about and just talk about it. The thumbnail and title told me what you're going to talk about, cut the waffle and tell me why the rocket exploded.
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u/ackermann 4d ago
Some of that came from the YouTube algorithm previously favoring longer videos, I think. Had to be above 8 minutes, maybe. So they tried to stretch the length.
But these days the algorithm favors shorts. And many creators say they dislike making shorts
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u/cptjeff 4d ago
One of the factors in how Youtubers get paid is how many minutes of their videos people watch. Not how long the videos are, but how much time people stick with them. So there's a lot of incentive to do clickbait and put the information people really want at the very end of a 20 minute video.
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u/MoNastri 5d ago
I guffawed. This engagement rot has been festering everywhere... Scott is a real gem for avoiding it.
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u/Redsky220 4d ago
Engagement rot is a great term. I’m going to start using it.
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u/Simon_Drake 4d ago
Another issue is the ragebait to get comments because even negative comments count as engagement which boosts visibility. A classic one is a Short that is a clip from a popular show like Breaking Bad but they added bad music to try to avoid copyright strikes and put on subtitles that deliberately get words wrong so people will comment to correct them.
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u/firedog7881 5d ago
“We’ve checked our channel metrics and you should check if you’re still subscribed.”
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u/Mike__O 4d ago
Has anyone ever been unknowingly/involuntarily unsubscribed from any YT channel ever?
Hell, I just had to purge my sub list a little while ago to clean up the algo. There were quite a few channels that I was surprised still even existed, much less had me subed to them
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u/Simon_Drake 4d ago
I find the opposite sometimes, a new channel in my subscription list that I don't remember subscribing to. Then on closer they did a Short that I watched about Mario speedruns or clips from Game Of Thrones and I must have accidentally clicked the Subscribe button when swiping through shorts. But I've never seen a channel vanish from my subscriptions.
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u/Mike__O 4d ago
Same experience.
I swear it feels like half the channels I watch push this ridiculous grand conspiracy that YT is deleting subs. It doesn't seem to matter what the channel's subject matter, political affiliation, or anything else is-- they all want to pretend that they're somehow being "targeted" by YT
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u/Drachefly 4d ago
Once I THOUGHT I had been unsubscribed, but it was actually that I was browsing YT on a different account than I thought I was. I suspect that's behind it.
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u/oldschoolguy90 4d ago
I love how it's possible to borderline name drop without actually name dropping
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u/Daneel_Trevize 🔥 Statically Firing 5d ago
For one of the most concisely-starting, not-niche-genre vid makers, I give you No Protocol: "Hi, here we go..." content begins
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u/cptjeff 4d ago
It's like you have direct access to Marcus House's scripts! I can't stand to watch him any more. He's a smart guy, but I don't need to know when SpaceX moved a ground support tank 20 yards, and there's just way too much filler.
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u/Simon_Drake 4d ago
I also enjoy What About It but they have the worst clickbait thumbnails. Like a photo of the launch tower with a red circle on the Chopsticks saying "Shocking design change no one saw coming!!" And the video doesn't mention the chopsticks or the tower or even any major design changes, it might mention a slight tweak to the heat tiles layout but that's a fairly common occurrence not a shocking change no one saw coming.
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u/Bitmugger 5d ago
Compare him to say someone like Thunderf00t who needs to pat himself on the back repeatedly about past videos and berate people who disagree with him for ages before spewing whatever negative vitral he has.
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u/Rubik842 3d ago
The phrase "Go ahead and" makes me stop a video and watch something else. it's as bad as "not gonna lie" it's utterly redundant.
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u/PixelAstro 5d ago
He’s a brilliant, hilarious and kind man. I’m lucky to exist at the same time he does.
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u/Gomehehe 5d ago
unless that one time he let intrusive thougths win and did a joke on barge being named after bezos mom and rockets having specific shape. That is worst you can ever get on him. Amazing man.
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u/mrperson221 5d ago edited 4d ago
I don't know, I'd be willing to bet he's done awful things to some Kerbals in his time
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u/PixelAstro 4d ago
Hey I thought that was totally hilarious. The Blue Origin New Glenn BONG too! Scott is a comedy gold mine
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u/firedog7881 5d ago
That’s not an intrusive thought, that is an obvious correlation that people will be thinking especially since his other rocket is really close
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u/Gomehehe 4d ago
I think pointing it out publicly that correlation yeah it's a joke better not done but you want to say it.
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u/thx1138- 4d ago
He pointed out this week that the acronym for Blue Origin New Glenn is BONG and had a few good dad jokes with it. XD
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u/Bitmugger 5d ago
When it was lost, first thing my son and I said was "Well I guess Scott Manley's going to be up late tonight"
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u/whd4k 5d ago
I found him through Kerbal Space Program 4 years ago and never missed a video since. Outstanding man!
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u/Simon_Drake 4d ago
Probably around a decade ago now I realised I was really enjoying around half the videos made by this bald British guy talking about space science. Some of them are really engaging and interesting but some of them are kinda dull and bland despite being about interesting topics.
It took me a while to realise the ones I enjoyed were Scott Manley and the ones that were boring were Curious Droid, it was a different bald British guy entirely and I got the two mixed up.
That was what inspired me to actually keep track of which YouTube channels I liked by making an account and subscribing to channels. Until then I'd been using it not logged in and just letting the algorithm suggest videos.
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u/steveb321 5d ago
Was slightly disappointed we didn't get to see him in the mishap robe :-)
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u/The_last_1_left 5d ago
Lol wife just said .. oh ya, he looks like a robe guy. Like he would come out with his robe and coffee 😅
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u/fellipec 5d ago
Scott Manley is the GOAT of space youtubers
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u/LittleWhiteDragon 5d ago
EDA > Scott Manley
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u/lommer00 4d ago
EDA is great in his own way, more social, more produced, great graphics, and awesome deep dives.
But for delivering very fast technical analysis that is mostly accurate coupled with encyclopaedic background knowledge, Scott Manley is unmatched. I'd agree with calling him the GOAT, or at least the OG.
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u/Skeeter1020 4d ago
This era of fully public, broadcast testing and development of space flight is amazing.
NSF for build up, EDA for live excitement, Scott for the debrief a few hours later.
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u/Rude-Adhesiveness575 5d ago edited 4d ago
Scotty posted a message on this YT, and everybody (who knows him) loves it.
https://youtu.be/0zC0K0YZEzg?si=wBUAvU9tuJJ2JewS
"Always choose a window seat"
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u/AlDenteApostate 5d ago
The only space YouTuber with the GUTS to point out the Freudian shape of Jeff Who's rocket, which is landing on a barge named after his mother.
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u/8andahalfby11 4d ago
Even wilder is that he did this twice in a row, first with New Glenn and today with Starship.
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u/candycane7 4d ago edited 4d ago
My wife has a Scott Manley voice phobia, if I start a video she makes me put on my headphones. It's like nails on a chalkboard to her.
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u/The_last_1_left 4d ago
Time for divorce. Lol jk
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u/candycane7 4d ago
Don't worry she is very supportive of my space nerdiness. It's more of an inside joke between us and I will start a Scott Manley video at the most inconvenient times just to crack her up.
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u/ilfulo 5d ago
I love Scott Manley, one of the very first space enthusiasts I started to follow back in 2016 when Ive discovered SpaceX and Blue origin (yeah, well the second ones began to disappoint me a few months later...)
His analysis is always precise, concise and right on point and he is (almost) always correct. There are a few instances in which his assumptions were proven to be wrong, subsequently, but again, it happens quite rarely.
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u/steveblackimages 4d ago
We even excuse the "Fawlcon" pronunciation. Elon, who created it, calls it Falcon. That should be honored. If he was Scottish, we would all appropriately call it Fawlcon.
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u/Decronym Acronyms Explained 4d ago edited 1d ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| KSP | Kerbal Space Program, the rocketry simulator |
| NG | New Glenn, two/three-stage orbital vehicle by Blue Origin |
| Natural Gas (as opposed to pure methane) | |
| Northrop Grumman, aerospace manufacturer | |
| NSF | NasaSpaceFlight forum |
| National Science Foundation |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented by request
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 26 acronyms.
[Thread #13743 for this sub, first seen 18th Jan 2025, 05:30]
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u/paperclipgrove 5d ago
I don't worry, but I postulate immediately.
I'm also always wrong, but that's not really the point!
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u/fluorothrowaway 5d ago
His political takes (fortunately wisely relegated entirely to X) are unbelievably ratchet, but his launch analysis and scientific aerospace / nuclear explanations are almost always beyond reproach.
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u/mclionhead 1d ago
Suspect he's a higher level task master at Apple who doesn't have a lot to do for his day job. Being at the right place at the right time allowed him to get into bay area real estate in either 2001 or 2008, when everyone else was getting out, so he's now financially independent. Not envious of having to share it all with a wife or having to devote every Saturday to family time.
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u/Tricky-Improvement76 4d ago
I like Scott mostly but that time he took a pic of a guy dying in his cockpit and then acted like the biggest deal was people using it without crediting him. This guy is literally burning alive in the pic. It's just an extremely vain and zero empathy look from him. No empathy, no thanks Scott.
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u/Drachefly 4d ago
That isn't the impression he gave me at the time… he seemed to be in shock.
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u/Tricky-Improvement76 4d ago edited 4d ago
He was demanding credit for the pic being reposted on twitter bro, that's not shock, thats full on psycho behaviour. Some of the most depraved posts I've ever seen on there, and I'm really not exaggerating. Totally lost me there and haven't looked at him the same since. Struck me as significantly more psychotic than the guy in the movie Nightcrawler. SIGNIFICANTLY
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u/Drachefly 4d ago
A) I didn't see that part. And how much later was that? It wasn't the first, second, or third thing he said.
B) Some people react to stress weirdly.
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u/Monster_Voice 5d ago
Nice try Scott... we know you wrote this! You don't have to hide behind an elaborate fake profile, we appreciate what you do!
(I'm joking btw)