As a scientist, I would definitely be a paying customer, and on top I could deduct that membership from my taxes or have my lab pay for it like we (like many others) are paying Overleaf just under $1000 a year only to have LaTeX run in a Web browser to collaborate on papers (now my most important online service/app).
We usually know where to find the talks and recordings for the conference venues of our own specialist areas, but if there was a general "ScienceTube"-type Web site, you could also check out talks from neighboring disciplines. God knows, this might be as useful/addictive as HN.
Should you want to launch this & need someone for the scientific advisory board, please get in touch.
Ideally, this runs like wikipedia or Lichess, if I'm being honest. I don't think its a great business model for a VC backed startup[0]. Perhaps a more traditional business inception might work, if you are selling it to the big conference organizations / hosts and make it attractive enough for it to be their go to for posting videos and such.
I think it ends up imploding against the pressures that come with it with being a VC startup though.
[0]: I'm taking the term startup to mean shorthand for venture backed startup, as it is usually used on HN and other places.
The hard part with going completely free is building enough of a community of strong contributors that they are able to effectively curate the contents for quality's sake, rather than the obvious commercial and career incentives to advertise their own work (or sneak in less educational content). That could be very hard to bootstrap without doing a ton of the curation yourself initially, and it requires an ongoing commitment to manage the community once it is established, which is also time consuming.
> I'm taking the term startup to mean shorthand for venture backed startup, as it is usually used on HN and other places.
I don't agree with that characterization because there are plenty of viable and useful "start up" opportunities that require zero outside funding, or only enough to get started. Also, VC funding is literally just debt that can convert to equity (it's a loan that can have an extremely high effective interest rate if you're successful), so you actually want to avoid it as much as possible if you think you have a good shot at accomplishing your goals without it. I think a surprisingly large number of founders and people working in SV/startups don't fully understand that.
As a scientist, I would definitely be a paying customer, and on top I could deduct that membership from my taxes or have my lab pay for it like we (like many others) are paying Overleaf just under $1000 a year only to have LaTeX run in a Web browser to collaborate on papers (now my most important online service/app).
We usually know where to find the talks and recordings for the conference venues of our own specialist areas, but if there was a general "ScienceTube"-type Web site, you could also check out talks from neighboring disciplines. God knows, this might be as useful/addictive as HN.
Should you want to launch this & need someone for the scientific advisory board, please get in touch.
EDIT: typo fixed