videos
Breadtube if it didn't suck.
Post videos you genuinely enjoy and want to share, duh. Celebrate the diversity of interests shared by chapochatters by posting a deep dive into Venetian kelp farming, I dunno. Also media criticism, bite-sized versions of left-wing theory, all the stuff you expected. But I am curious about that kelp farming thing now that you mentioned it.
Low effort / spam videos might be removed, especially weeb content.
There is a cytube that you can paste videos into and watch with whoever happens to be around. It's open submission unless there's something important to commandeer it with at the time.
A weekly watch party happens every Saturday (Sunday down under), with video nominations Saturday-Monday, voting Monday-Thursday. See the pin for whatever stage it's currently in.
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I absolutely despise this flavor of science content. Real science does not lend itself to quick cut/tiktok cadence videos and presenting it this way only degrades its legitimacy.
Edit: And after looking into it this all stems from an incredibly hyperbolic university press release. The paper is in a sub-sub-Nature family journal and in no way supports the claims that it makes, let alone the wildly overblown claims that the press release and subsequent slop tsunami make.
I don’t think this is that bad. The video content basically follows the content of the abstract of the paper, and he promotes a longer deep-dive video he apparently has elsewhere in his channel, I haven’t gone looking. Part of science communication is being able to summarize the core narrative of the research, sometimes to an audience who are not experts in that field. This is crucial if you want interdisciplinary collaboration, if you want cross-pollination of findings between fields, and if you want the public to care about what you are doing and support funding you.
That said, this guy needs to link the research in the description.
Here’s the summary the University of Rochester put out https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/why-dont-bats-get-cancer
And here’s the non-paywalled paper in Nature Communications https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59403-z
A) I read the press release and the paper within about 10 minutes of making the post, which is in my edit. I'm not sure if you responded before or after I added that so maybe we're just ships passing in the night on this point.
B) The absolute number one goal of science communication is to maintain the credibility of the field. Making some goofy ass Cocomelon/tiktok short about a research paper doesn't lend any credibility to legitimate science. Pretending like a paper has "found" something that is in no way supported by the data in that paper is a disservice to the field. This reeked to me of some overzealous university comms department trying to pump up a publication for cheap PR and it turned out to be exactly that. This shit makes legitimate scientists look like assholes and liars in the minds of laypeople when they find out that the hyped up story that went viral was actually a nothingburger.
C) If someone is going to call themselves a "science communicator" they had God damned well better be able to interpret research rather than just gobbling up abstracts and press releases like a little baby bird.
yeah, I never saw the edit. I thought you objected to the brevity and non-technical language of the video. As for the content, I've only read the abstract and I don't know that much about this field, so I can't really object on scientific grounds.