First of all – the essay is phenomenal and his book is available online for free – https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/youtube-apparatus/36...
> “Communication within the YouTube Apparatus has no meaning.” The rapid feedback loop between creators and audiences (as constructed by platform metrics) means that the system more and more responds to itself. Rather than trying to go somewhere (as is the case with political ideology), the creator seeks simply intensification, to draw more and more of the world into his whirlpool of content.
This idea – that meaning is replaced by intensification – helps me understand a lot about the world today.
For people confused like me on what intensification means, it means maximizing the amount of attention and interaction that occurs. On Youtube this would be the metrics that drive engagement, including views, likes, comments, shares, and watch time. The issue is that the content focuses on driving engagement at the expense of communicating ideas with coherence and depth, for example by sensationalizing or oversimplifying a complex issue (especially for things like political discourse focused on sound bites and emotional appeals, or with virtue signaling and outrage culture). I think the above commentor is right, in my opinion, intensification shapes our world into being very reactionary, with only a superficial understanding of issues, and platforms like Youtube Shorts and Tiktok take this to its furthest possible level.
For an excellent, prescient, hilarious, and terrifying book on this topic, I highly recommend "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman.
OP here -- excellent suggestion, I've been heavily influenced by this book and would also recommend Postman's "Technopoly"
Thank you for writing this, and making it available online!
When researching+writing this, did you find it useful to look through McLuhan's "Medium is the Message" lens? If so, what are the "message" implications of this ouroboric/circular/whirlpool medium?
The creators publication frequency is also an important factor. If you don't put out content at least once per week you fall off the recommended and lose a lot of views. Once your content is shallow, simple and without reflection, you are trapped in a hamster wheel of click bait vapidness.
Is this accurate in all cases? Isn't Jenny Nicholson one of the bigger YouTubers, with videos coming out maybe once or twice a year?
Seems like it might be the exception proving the rule. People say “every” restaurant these days needs to use something like Toast to provide online ordering and needs to play nice with DoorDash for delivery and needs to host ghost kitchens to increase income, etc. Of course there’s that one old-school place with the established reputation that does simple dine-in only and is thriving. But the new upstart can’t just not play the game - that privilege is reserved for those who have already won.
I know it's been a while, but I think Jenny Nicholson grew her audience with shorter content. I recall "script meeting" videos about a lot of movies as they came out, and those were shorter and more frequent. Now that she has a dedicated audience, she doesn't rely as much on the algorithm to surface her.
Jenny Nicholson and similar accounts rely on other channels than YouTube notifications. basically their video releases become events big enough to get minor news attention, chatter on discord, xitter traffic, etc.
if your channel doesn't have dedicated enough fans to do that it's not gonna work on you. and you almost certainly aren't getting news coverage of your review of a star wars hotel, you know? Jenny is rare for that.
Well, no:
On the "not even wrong" front, in the Pauli sense of the phrase: she's a relatively minor success, you'll find 20 police bodycam video accounts created in the last year that get 10x views.
There is a pattern with well-known creators that are more video-essay than intensifying whirlpoolers or whatever, where they keep YouTube productions to a handful of high-quality videos a year, and monetize via Patreon with less well-polished videos published much more frequently.
There are a few 'long form' creators like Jenny Nicholson (I recommend the one about the failure of the Star Wars Hotel!).
Contrapoints (eg the Twilight one), Big Joel's (recently made a 6hr one!), FoldingIdeas and so on. It's a very different model, and a number of these creators also make videos for Nebula.
They also use patreon as a significant source of recurring revenue, so they can create a small number of high quality videos instead of putting out content constantly.
It's a very different business model, and it doesn't have the potential to become as profitable as Mr Beast.
Patreon subs also boost their video's performance on YouTube, since a subscriber committed to paying a monthly fee will definitely want to "get their money's worth" by watching videos as soon as they drop and participate in discussions and comment sections.
If you have 15k patreon subs those are guaranteed views around your video's publish time, which presumably is a good thing for their algorithmic weight.
People seem to have a good reasoning for your specific example, but they’re not addressing the question. I can think of a number of YouTubers that have longer schedules that have had success (Mark Rober, Cleo Abram, to name 2 but there’s clearly more).
My guess is that if all you want to do is work the algorithm to get views then you’re going to get worked by the algorithm.
You see this a lot in strange ways these days. Rage bait, feigned ignorance, and things like that. It’s anti-quality and it’s just as effective (if not more) than quality content.
What was the Twitter joke. 'If I want an answer to a programming question, I post the question, and then an incorrect response from a different account.' No ones posting to help, but a lot will post to smugly correct the wrong answer.
This trick has been around forever, it's actually got a name, "goodhart's law"
Oh your comment is so clever because now I’ve gone to correct you that it’s actually Cunningham's Law.
I'm not entirely sure if smugness is the entire reason for doing it -- I suspect that for many of us (particularly autistics like me) there's a certain amount "But someone's wrong on the internet!" syndrome going on.
Some of us just can't work up the energy to answer a question, but if we see something wrong, it doesn't sit well with us, and we have to correct it.
And yes, sometimes when I see a question I can answer, it gives me the energy to answer it ... but not always ...
old IRC joke
This is enabled by the Internet and, weirdly enough, by the robustness of our social norms and legal system.
It's possible to make 80% of people mad, 20% of people happy, and benefit from the 20% while the 80% can't do anything to you.
"at the expense of communicating ideas with coherence and depth"
To be fair, while shorts is clearly designed to generate high virality and compete w/ TikTok, YouTube does incentivize longer form content. For regular videos the platform appears to optimize for engagement at about the 10 minute mark.
Political/social discourse is complex and I believe goes beyond a simple soundbite problem. One could argue this began with 24 hour news cycles with all the time in the world, and news had to become entertainment to fill the space. The movie "Network" presaged this sensationalized this culture situation well before it became a thing, and certainly well before social media was conceptualized.
> YouTube does incentivize long
If they only gave you the option to remove shorts from results...
And the stupid ass playables that they're spamming me with now. It's not enough that I pay for Premium.
oh there is an X on the top right corner of the shorts block on the website. but don't you believe clicking it will remove the block for more than a couple days. and you're right, the mobile website/app doesn't even have that
Yes it says 'hidden for 30 days' and every damn month I click it again.
I think the above commentor is right, in my opinion, intensification shapes our world into being very reactionary, with only a superficial understanding of issues
In fairness, this is how the world has always been.
In the US for instance, back when there were only 3 networks and a channel for public tv, people were "reactionary, with only a superficial understanding of issues".
To some degree yes. Funny enough, llamaimperative's book suggestion goes into detail on how television is where this really started ramp up and how the Age of Reason was likely the peak of rational argument, where the focal point of transfer of information was through the written word.
"He repeatedly states that the eighteenth century, the "Age of Reason", was the pinnacle for rational argument. Only in the printed word, he states, could complicated truths be rationally conveyed. Postman gives a striking example: many of the first fifteen U.S. presidents could probably have walked down the street without being recognized by the average citizen, yet all these men would have been quickly known by their written words. However, the reverse is true today. The names of presidents or even famous preachers, lawyers, and scientists call up visual images, typically television images, but few, if any, of their words come to mind. The few that do almost exclusively consist of carefully chosen soundbites. Postman mentions Ronald Reagan, and comments upon Reagan's abilities as an entertainer."
Reagan apparently hated reading and would often skip written briefs given to him by, for instance, the CIA. Then somebody got the idea to put those briefs in the form of a television news style video made just for Reagan. Some of them are on youtube now. They have the tone of spoonfeeding a midwit.
Trump was/is the same. At one point they tried powerpoint like presentations with graphics. I don't know about Reagan, but from my personal experience with dyslexia (though I love to read--and dislike videos--even as it takes forever), I think Trump may be dyslexic. I would not be surprised if Reagan were too. I only wish it was more public (if true). It would help eliminate the stigma and eliminate most of the cheap shots about how he can't read or spell and how his speech is "simple" (as he has trouble pronouncing more complex words). Things that those of us with dyslexia can have problems with also. *I did not vote for him
It's much simpler than that. Trump needs reading glasses but does not want to be seen wearing them.[1]
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-seen-wearing-glasses_n_...
Having learned in the last year that I'm autistic, and having learned a lot just about what that means, I cannot help but wonder to what degree Reagan and Trump may be dyslexia and not even know it.
It's very easy to realize you're "different" from other people, but can't place your finger on it, yet manage to make up for the differences in odd and creative ways!
That's such a wrong take. Sunday TV was so boring because it was filled with panels of knowledgeable people calmly talking about subjects they were extremely knowledgeable about in calm, rational productive manners. Todays panels start with known battle lines already drawn populated with non-knowledgeable grifters.
TV was also required to air a minimal amount of educational television for children under 16 during the day. I learn way more on days home sick (latchkey kid) than I'd learn at days in school.
IDK the over reactionary, fishing for outrage, talking heads were parodied in the movie Airplane back in 1980 i think? "They bought their tickets, they KNEW what they were getting in to. i say let them crash".
I wouldn't necessarily say intensification is the issue, but more misrepresenting the truth or flat out lying.
Shouting "SO AND SO MAYBE MIGHT HAVE POSSIBLY DID THIS BAD THING BUT I DON'T HAVE ANY EVIDENCE!" from the rooftops won't provoke much action as shouting the same but reinforcing that it is definitely true, for sure, of course it is.
Then with human behaviour/intelligence there's the spectrum of people who care about fact-finding or not and will react according to new information depending on this. Some of it is general laziness, they can't be bothered fact finding, and some of it is tribal, they accept x must be true because it's about y tribe where they're a member of z tribe.
That's why it's so easy for politics, big tech, etc to manipulate people; because we're all still monkeys!
Baudrillard just gets more relevant every day. Honestly I find it hard to imagine how someone could have media literacy in the modern day without coming to an intuitive understanding of semiotics, whether they know it or not!
I called myself a Semiotics Engineer for 4 years, but the title didn't catch. I did domain analysis, logical model creation, concrete model creation in XML/OWL/KML, model review and improvement, semantic reasoning-based system design/implementation, and message system design/implementation. This was before the rise of ML.
What's your take on LLMs ? I ask you to comment on any aspect, whatever you think is the most interesting from a semiotician's perspective.
Everyone who is familiar with Baudrillard goes "simulacrum!" whenever they encounter LLM output. LLM output is after all a pure chain of symbols that is extremely far removed from a connection with ground truth reality.
I'm not sure it's that direct of a connection.
There's something to be said about the structuralist part of it: using large amounts of text as a rule set to return a semblance of truth seems to be a structuralist's wet dream.
It's like drawing the map for the king: the real is being represented by reducing a huge number of data points to a mixture of randomness and hard rules that pretend to be real.
At the very least it's a form of hyperreality as far as I understand it.
Indeed this is what I was aiming at, however the concern for (a semblance of) truth seems rooted in a view that locates meaning in what signs refer to. This view feels incomplete when faced with a dyadic model where the relationship between signifier and signified takes precedence over reference. The notion of simulacrum only emerges in a technical culture that has elevated 'reality' to a special status. After all, what is 'reality' in technical systems if not itself a simulacrum? Hilbert's program, symbolic AI, rule systems, ontologies, the semantic web - they all struggled to capture reality as a whole precisely because they tried to grasp it through formal objects claiming universal scope via the machinery of said formalisms.
What does that have to do with LLMs?
The structuralist unsuccessfully tried to find similarities between different symbol systems in different cultures. They were convinced they could come up with some sort of formula of how a culture can be categorized and in what development state it is.
Fundamentally it's about language. What does a word or a sentence represent? How do you go from a spoken or written text to something that is meaningful to you if it's presented to you?
This intermediating process of communication is highly complicated and fraught with misconceptions which lead to lots of fuzzy logic being applied by your brain when trying to understand something.
The stuff that's happening between hearing or reading something and you actually taking it in as something meaningful is a vast space which is as of yet unexplored and gives a lot of room for speculation. This is what Beaudrillard (and others) tried to describe and analyze.
And it has nothing to do with math. Math is a whole other story and won't solve the problem for you because it's a different kind of medium (or text if you will). Math sits between you and the other while language is something in yourself, so to speak.
LLM's try to gather meaning from text stochastically. This is not the way we gather meaning as humans and in a sense this is not how communication works in the real.
But Beaudrillard (and others) reasoned that we left the real and live in hyperreality. The most famous example of his is Disney World: As soon as it existed it started to infuse itself into our everyday lives. The simulation of a fantasy world (the real existing Disney World theme park) has started to become real outside of it but not rooted in reality (it became a simulacrum): it is an emulation of reality. In that sense it is virtual. It's like virtual reality in the real world, it's a fantasy you can touch (and that can be sold and be molded to be sold more successfully).
The idea of sociability in social media is another example: it does not exist in the real sense, it is mediated by technology. Its origins are hinted at by using terminology of social interactions but in the end it's a transactional empty sort of sociability which promotes attention seeking and fast, easily digested pieces of symbolism over actual interactions. And more and more this kind of "new" sociability becomes part of our actual social lives.
That collection of skills is still valuable.
Him and also Marshal McLuhan. McLuhan realized all the way back in the 60s that computer technology (like all technology) in some sense wants things and manipulates the user to get it. The 'electric' technologies have their own logic and are not neutral on questions of humanity, politics, nature, etc.
Yes, the 21st century is the age of simulacra and simulation. Post-truth society.
I'm pretty sure this was set in motion in the 20th century. This century is only about refining and monetizing it to the nth power.
OP here -- I like Baudrillard and McLuhan but the media theorist who best captures the present IMO is Flusser: https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/the-discourse-is-the-cybe...
Heh, I wonder if (hope that ?) Discord and WhatsApp are the equivalent of railroad's robber barons : they brought world-changing technology, but at the cost of tyrannical greed, before their abuses being reigned in by regulations.
Though now that I think of it, didn't that only happen when their power was on the way out, replaced by trucks and container ships ?
I find the ideas of Baudrillard really accurate in describing some parts of modern life, but to be honest I feel like he just saying random stuff when I tried to read one of his book. It's so metaphorical and abstract it's very difficult to understand what exactly he is saying.
My best experience reading Baudrillard was out loud with a group. Some passages spoke to some but not others, but most generated discussion. Some are also obvious to us now in the TikTok age - uncannily so.
Definitely when I read his works even though I didn't understand some of his writings it made me think about it.
He's not "just saying random stuff", he was a very serious thinker. Unlike Derrida he wasn't much of a joker.
Perhaps language is fundamentally metaphorical, and perhaps reality is actually abstract.
That's just what I feel I didn't claim that it actually is just random stuff. But I value clarity and Baudrillard doesn't seem to try to be. However, as I said I do find his general points very valuable just his style is not my cup of tea.
Part of it may be translation, too. English translations of French academic writing always seem to come out especially convoluted.
He wrote in many different styles, depending on the subject and likely audience. Simulacra and Simulation, Silent Majorities and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place are very different texts.
It also explains why there's been an alarming trend over the last 10 years of people just getting more vehement about everything.
We started attaching public comment boxes to everything and now everyone thinks their opinion on everything is important.
I think human nature dictates that this opens up a literal market for the opposite. People aren't served by exhausting hysteria, it's just a cheap date, a way to grab low hanging fruit. The more that's focussed on, the more an opportunity arises to cover abandoned needs and wants.
The question becomes, is YouTube's algorithm good enough to itself pick up on this new market and serve it? I see no reason it couldn't. It's possible human algorithm-minders might sabotage this instinct by going 'no, this is the big win' and coaxing it towards MrBeast stuff, but surely the algorithm will eventually win out?
> is YouTube's algorithm good enough to itself pick up on this new market
Something I find interesting is that there are good channels producing very high quality (non-extreme or non-intense) content for many interests on YouTube and they coexist with the hyperbolic large channels. I suppose that they make less money, but they do so without a large production crew. I think the algorithm is supporting both types of content (content for myriad mindless viewers, and content for the fewer discerning viewers) and accommodates both scales.
By "human nature", what exactly are you referring to? The statistically most common amount of extremities?
People tire of being poked with an algorithmic stick, even though it ensures a reaction.
Like the seasons and the phases of the moon and wandering of the stars?
10? We’ve been getting steadily more polarized since at least the 80s.
Possibly true, but I'm sure you'd agree that it can't really be called steadily since around 2010-2014
There is a straight line through 70s Falwell, 90s Limbaugh, tea party, to MAGA. All fueled by a self-reinforcing rage machine.
Reminds me of this quote: "The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way." -They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45[0] [0] https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm
Reminds me of the Ukraine war. The original intent was clearly a very short intense “operation” and then a quick annexation. Nobody planned to grind hundreds of thousands of bodies through a war machine, but “here we are” and now everyone is “forced” to go through the motions.
Left leaning folks are swept up in rage machines too.
Leaf through the BoingBoing BBS sometime to get a sense for it.
I find the right goes into rage machines and sees their way of life changing and double down on keeping things the way they have been.
I find the left goes into anger machines and ends up suggesting overzealous steps for necessary changes that take many people aback.
But that’s not new. What’s not new is that now we have social media and mainstream media that wants to fan the flames by giving voices to the most extreme.
They aren't obstructing Congress. That has been ongoing since 1994 when rational negotiation by civic minded leaders was replaced with hostage taking to suit an ideology without regard for public benefit.
One only needs to observe societies response to Covid to see how “left leaning folks get swept up into rage machines”. People were cheering on cars getting towed from popular hiking spots, skate parks getting filled with sand, crazy people “protesting” beachgoers, etc. if you dared to suggest schools should open you were a grandma killing MAGA hat wearing pariah. Don’t forget the level of censorship, vaccine passes, wishing death upon those who didn’t get vaccinated, etc.
No sir, people of all tribes are fully capable of getting swept into rage machines. At the end of the day we are animals operating on animal instinct. No tribe gets to claim otherwise.
And the internet hijacks our brains so effectively; since it became ubiquitous, it is almost impossible for regular users to see how they are being conditioned.
I mean, some people reacted how you describe, but the vast majority did not regardless of political leanings. Are you going to pretend that was the dominant reaction among left-leaning people just so you can be mad about it?
There were indeed surveys showing that a fascist stance (like throwing unvaccinated into camps or taking their children) was, indeed, dominant (60% and more support) among American "democrats". So much for your "vast majority".
Wait, in my media bubble the American left is the one consumed by rage.
The right is stupid or craven or greedy or just evil, but true righteous fury is reserved for those who saw a woman's rights not getting respected one time.
I don’t think you understand these groups and their motivations very well. Fear and concern for the future are much more significant than “rage”.
So basically since when cable TV came into mainstream existence.
- Huge shift in (near-total abandonment of) antitrust enforcement starting in the late 70s, driven by Chicago school assholes. Centralized economic power.
- Fairness Doctrine killed in the 80s, resulting rise of partisan AM radio and, somewhat later, Fox News.
- Media ownership concentration rules neutered in early ‘00s (iirc). More centralization, again in the hands of big capital.
- None of those rules ever applied to the Web, so when its power as a propaganda and agitation tool skyrocketed with increased use by normal folks (rise of Facebook; usable smartphones with the iPhone) that immediately headed bad directions.
Now we have LLMs, which are at their most-useful by far when you don’t care about accuracy or reputation—so, scams and propaganda getting a big boost in productivity.
i remember when Obama took office Rush Limbaugh was worried that he would try to restore the fairness doctrine but it turned out Obama did nothing. Democrats never acted like they were in a battle while Republicans were executing on a media domination plan over decades to dismantle the propaganda safeguards put in place by post war politicians.
That's because despite the right wing propaganda that will tell you Obama is a staunch far-left communist, Barack Obama is a committed centrist, and a representative of the Corporate Party.
He did nothing because he had no interest in doing anything to limit corporate influence or power. They put him in power, after all.
Turning attention away from each other and toward images of each other
I think you're confusing the issue. Cable TV wasn't coming into mainstream that was the problem. The issue was the 1996 Telecommunications Act that was the starting gun.
and I think "literally" abuse is a sympton of that
They changed the definition of 'literally' to fit the modern meaning. You can no longer call it abuse now as the misuse fits the new definition.
See definition 2 here:
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/literal...
That definition genuinely gives me cancer. I seriously, 100% am going to die now because dictionary editors don't seem to grasp that this is simply a "tone" of ironically over-emphasized speaking similar to sarcasm, and not a new definition of one word. I'm 250% honestly in chemotherapy now because they don't get that. Veritably, indubitably, unarguably cooked now. Thanks, dictionary editors.
The stronger player was handicapped when they gave their opponent a handicap, and yet they still won; they now held in their hands their prize that was the match's prize.
Literally false: https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally
Use of literally in, well, the non-literal sense dates back hundreds of years.
I literally had no idea.
Dickens did it. And people have been doing it since the 1700s.
Not to mention, if you're using the word "literally" to mean "something that actually happened", you are also using the word wrong. Because it means "relating to or expressed in letters".
I also notice people complain about "literally", but they never complain about "really" which also gets used in the same ways even though it means the opposite.
And I've noticed people do it as a substitute for intelligence. They complain about these things to seem intelligent. To seem knowledgeable. But when confronted with knowledge that contradicts the complaint, they try to dismiss the knowledge rather than adjust their point of view. Similar with fewer/less. These words mean the same thing. There are no rules as to when to use one or the other. There was the preference of one guy, who even said that he had no reason for it, he just liked it. And people took that as an ironclad rule. Or the gif debate. People try to invent all of these rules, but get pissy when you point out all the places where English does not follow those rules.
There have been thousands of years of written language, and the worst thing that ever happened was the invention of the dictionary, which enabled generations of prescriptivists to pretend that word meanings can't change once they're written down, despite thousands of years of evidence to the contrary. Maybe look up 'hidebound' sometime.
What would you suggest using instead. Actually?
People are generally good at context. Tone, expression, etc, all of these things are parts of communication that do matter. Assume your audience is at least as smart as you are.
When communicating through text only, tone and expression is all but lost which means we need to rely on the literal/actual/exact definition of words to convey our intended meaning. However it seems people dont agree on the exact meanings of words (using literally in this case), and so the intention often gets lost in translation and causes disagreements.
I feel personally this is a big reason why communication across the internet is becoming much more intense and full of conflict.
Truly?
But come on, that's been going on for literally centuries.
I think this is a bit of a warped view as this is true for the biggest channels, but the medium and long tail on YouTube has a lot of substance in computer science, engineering, geology, climate science, and much more.
When I was a kid there was Mr Wizard, and then Bill Nye, but it was far more limited than what I watch with my kid.
The land of videos with <1M views is full of gems - and many of the top notch science channels (eg Mark Rober), still give their creators a handsome income. And many of the channels, like Rober, do regularly crack 1M and the recommended list.
I disagree. I think those things you mentioned as being in the long tail are just things that you like and that you think have value. But there's no reason in theory that the same radicalization process can't be happening with those areas as well.
And if it was happening, what would it look like?
I have a theory, but I don't want to give the game away yet.
This is similar to what Vlad Vexler refers to as "being captured by the algorithm". That there are people on YouTube (and other platforms) that begin to mold themselves to fit into the algorithm's dictates so as to increase views and engagement. This means they may drift from their original political stance, for example, in order to please the algorithm. And this drift isn't always conscious - in fact it likely isn't conscious most of the time.
If you want to be a content creator on these platforms and you don't want to be captured by the algorithms you have to be very conscious that algorithmic capture is a constant danger. You have to be willing to lose algorithmic points and give up income that you're getting from the platform if push comes to shove. You have to constantly be on your guard.
I guess this just comes down to people losing themselves in the pursuit of money and power and status etc. That is the reason they please the algorithm. They lost touch with themselves, who they really are and their true passions and interests. Usually because of a trauma in the past they're trying to compensate for.
Exactly, intensification or acceleration, this is exactly the root of most issues. Since we've mastered energy (and in particular oil&gas), the world has been on an acceleration binge, which is now causing a lot of friction and overheating in the relationships and environment.
We need to slow down and to connect back to nature
Slowing down is not a solution since we're heading for a wall in some dimensions and a cliff edge on others. We need to find ways to drastically change course.
We need to build maps and steering wheels.
And we need to convince everyone to do it, or we just end up in the Red Queen scenario.
Yeah, I do think that collective action problems summarize almost all of humanities problems though. So if we just found a way to efficiently make decisions as a collective we'd be in a much better situation.
I might even suspect that solving collective action is the great filter that we have in front of us.
on the contrary, slowing down it's the only way forward
You might enjoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
Now I understand why numberphile has videos about infinity. I jest, but it seems like only certain content creators can get on the intensification train.
Seriously though, this is true. My YouTube feed has none of this "intensification" stuff. Perun, Blancolirio, everything Brady Haran has made (he's the guy behind Numberphile, Sixty Symbols, etc), Applied Science, etc.
I think the idea that media aimed at education or sharing a passionate hobby is different from media that exists in the first place to just make money. If you start out with a goal that involves communication, I think it's more likely to stick than if your goal was just to become the Death Star from the start!
It's hard to realize just how unrepresentative that is and how much of a minority that makes you.
Just like it's easy for people into video games to think the latest Steam-chart topping indie hit is really popular.
And then you look up the numbers and it turns out something like FIFA (EAFC) makes more money than every single indie game on Steam combined.
Intensification is the aim and result of Google, specifically their "online ad services" racket.
It is not created merely by the sharing of videos over the internet.
Such sharing was happening long before Google Video or YouTube existed.
Some HN commenters want readers to believe that YouTube, with its ridiculous "recommendations", is synonymous with sharing videos over a computer network... and that it's impossible for internet subscribers to share videos with other subscribers without a YouTube middleman. They warn that YouTube must exist, that surveillance, advertising and recommendations are essential, otherwise sharing video over the internet will become impossible and terrible things will happen.
News flash. Terrible things are happening as a result of YouTube. More specifically as a result of Google's surveillance and advertising tactics.
> This idea – that meaning is replaced by intensification – helps me understand a lot about the world today.
I don't see much difference to the "old world" either. Yellow journalism existed in the 1800s. We just do it in a more modern format.
Grabbing someone's attention through any means (often using tricks like ragebait that appeal to psychological weakness) is the only goal.
I ran a YouTube channel seriously for a couple of years. Chasing the whims of the algorithm contributed to burnout and now I only release one or two videos a year.
My reason for starting a channel was to have a discussion around some of the projects I was working on that I found interesting. This never materialized. I never had a ton of engagement, but if I did most questions asked by viewers that are answered in the video.
I monetized my videos and started making beer-money amounts of revenue. I put more and more time into them but never gained traction. I had a few "evergreen" videos that would make maybe a thousand bucks a year, the rest of the videos hardly got any views at all.
Eventually, I found myself making videos to feed the algorithm not because it was a project that I wanted to do. This is where I had to stop. I realized that I just don't like editing videos.
My channel makes no revenue now because YouTube requires an upload schedule and shorts. Mr Beast's job sounds awful to me. The videos I make now only get dozens to hundreds of views when they're published. I mostly share them with friends and in online communities where the info contained might be helpful.
Thank you for your story. I have been running a low traffic blog for decades now and there was a time when I craved engagement. I never put too much effort in but I did change the things I wrote about to try to get noticed, a strategy that was unmarred by success.
The creators that find success need to pump out content at a ridiculous rate. It is a faustian bargain that sucks in a lot of people.
These people are essentially competing against an algorithm, not against other humans. I consider this to be an extremely distasteful endeavor.
I had a hobby electronics channel that was getting quite popular (~30k subs after ~15 videos). I burned out for a different reason: it’s hard to do this as a side gig. If I could’ve done it full time I would’ve continued doing so, but YouTube just doesn’t pay you enough despite each video getting >100K views. I paid zero attention to the algorithm and just focused on creating unique, creative, high-quality content that showed a level of effort was put forth. This “side gig” burned me out.
So it’s possible you would’ve burned out anyways, despite any algorithmic considerations.
At the top of the heap (Mr Beast, Nastya, Ryan, etc), this is true:
> The ideal creator has no distance between themselves and their persona. They have been interpellated by audience metrics; their subjective experience already takes audience reactions into account.
> Or more simply, YouTubers are not “Creators” but Creations. Audiences, rationalized by the platform, and the vloggers who upload the videos those audiences consume are not separable either theoretically or empirically.
It's pretty obvious, too, because these YouTubers have a distinct theme where their popularity is dependent on 1) the whims and algos of the platform on one side, and 2) the ability for their audience to care and relate to something pretty dang detached and irrelevant from their everyday lives (unboxing, aggressive acts of charity, etc).
While you hear plenty (Most? All?) YouTubers complain about the ranking algorithms & capriciousness of their overlord, I don't believe most channels are quite as vapid as those at the top of the heap. Lots of deep subjective content, and lots of freaking annoying CapCut edits, but also a primary focus on meaningful content relevent to viewers. These people may not be getting rich from their vlogging, but it's also not fair to call what most of them are doing "vlogging", either. It's video-based short form content curation for a clearly identified audience. Not remotely the same as how the big guns like Mr Beast have to view their work [where they're much more similar to a cable TV network or a commercial production company than an independent producer].
Well put. As long as channels like Technology Connections can remain financially viable on the platform and not beaten down by the algorithm, I really don't care how many Mr Beasts are making "slop content".
I do. Slop content is melting the brains of the people watching that content to the detriment of society as a whole.
Soap operas, reality TV and evangelists have existed forever in various guises. "Bread and circuses" is thousands of years old.
I don't care so much about the dumb brain melting. However, what MrBeast and other youtubers do is exploitative to their audiences (which in the case of MrBeast skews young).
It's not great to see young kids addicted to content designed primarily to rob them of their money with false claims of success. "Oh, if you send me money, buy my shit, or subscribe to my channel, you could win millions of dollars!"
That sort of exploitative media should be illegal (and in the case of MrBeast appears to be illegal in some cases).
If you remove this they'll simply substitute it with something else. Some people don't mind "melting" their brains as they didn't have a primary use for it anyways.
Kentaro Toyama wrote that "Technology acts as an amplifier of human intentions".
We really are very susceptible to living in "default mode".
Probably. But this isn't really something you can control. So why bother?
Why even make this comment?
>but also a primary focus on meaningful content relevent to viewers. These people may not be getting rich from their vlogging, but it's also not fair to call what most of them are doing "vlogging", either. It's video-based short form content curation for a clearly identified audience.
There's a fine line between "content created for X people interested in Y topic in Z form" and "content that's relevant to my viewers."
The former is a channel that is avoiding the "creator" described by the author. The latter is on a path towards the author's "creator."
For a long time, the two can be very similar. The group you are tailoring your content for and your viewers won't necessarily diverge quickly, especially in niche areas or highly technical fields. But they will inevitably diverge.
Worth noting that the form this takes will depend on the topic.
It's rare to find a creator that can avoid this trap long-term. I see it even with small channels I follow.
Youtube is also killing a lot of history channels because if there's any violence (eg war) they get demonetized, the algorithm avoids them, or they can even have their channels disabled. Most now blur out pictures of the holocaust, which negates a lot of the otherwise serious impact on a serious subject.
I enjoy the occasional true crime documentary. It's been amazing to watch YouTube demonetization just drive censorship to an absurd degree.
No blood, no violence, no bad words. And the words YouTube deems bad are somehow much stricter than what I grew up with. Many words related to violence (abuse, assault, etc) words related to death (killed, executed, etc) words related to drugs (took me a while to figure out what a suspect was even saying when their speech was censored to "they drank and used s**d" I finally figured out it was speed aka meth)
It's amazing to see how sanitized things have become, almost to the point of absurdity. Does making it so that people can't say the word "abuse" somehow eliminate abuse from the world?
I watch a YouTuber called bigclive who does hardware teardowns. Occasionally he'll tear down a single-use vape to show how you can harvest re-usable li-ion batteries from them.
He can't use the word "vape", or the video gets de-monetized...
Obligatory plug for Nebula, where a lot of educational YouTube has gone for refuge from demonetization. Many creators will have different versions that they upload to Nebula containing the content that YouTube wouldn't let them add in.
> YouTubers are not “Creators” but Creations
This is such a broad and general statement for a platform that is unfathomably big.
I don't any of the mass market Mr Beast, Nastya, Ryan videos on my feed. At all. I get smaller (but still large) creators with videos that actually engage the mind. Example: https://www.youtube.com/@blancolirio
But I guess that's the distinction between a Youtuber and Creator.
> The ideal creator has no distance between themselves and their persona. They have been interpellated by audience metrics; their subjective experience already takes audience reactions into account.
Isn't this sort of one of the themes from The Prestige(2006)? That certain magicians were so dedicated to their craft that they became inseparable from it. The performance never actually stopped
They were dedicated to the craft though, there have been countless people who dedicated themselves to pushing the boundaries of their profession and lost their personal lives in the process. Losing yourself to achieve something new in math, art, science, etc. can be seen as a worthwhile sacrifice.
Content creators feels more perverse because they are sacrificing themselves to making metrics go up. The act of creation is in service to metrics that please an algorithm so views go up.
If the magicians didn't care about magic at all but were obsessed with optimizing the show around ticket sales it would be a shitty movie.
I am very skeptic of the creator economy, but to play devils advocate:
Could it be that "craft" until now has been a high dimensional and abstract conceptual navigation exercise, for which some people had both (1) the compass of intuition and (2) the drive. Replacing craft with metrics means that people without the high dimensional intuition/compass (but with the drive) can still play a part in the game.
So maybe this is just another example of unbundling and specialisation process, that is democratising access to renown (or whatever the wealth of "renown" is, in the sense of network topology)
Of course, if the compass that is replaced with metrics is miscalibrated in the system, the end point can still be a very sick society (even if access to the renown in that sick society is more equitably distributed by some measures)
I created an account after many many years on this site to tell you I have had the same thoughts about this navigation in a higher space, akin to spelunking in a cave system of concepts, this is just another way to explore viable concepts.
It's a horrid part of the cave system imo but it's obviously viable.
Great analogy! As a performing magician and a big fan of the movie, I get how obsession with a craft can blur the line between reality and performance. But that line still exists. The best actors, creators, and magicians make us feel they’re being real, even when they’re not.
This is why I struggle with enjoying Andy Kaufman's content -- I'm never entirely sure where that line is. I respect his dedication to the craft, but I have a difficult time enjoying it -- on a meta level, it's unsettling.
Kaufman was Daniel Day Lewis-level dedicated to the character, but there are others, Tom Green for instance, who ostensibly was just as dedicated for the first arc of his fame and career, then loosened his grip on the persona with age. I often think about his trajectory compared to the average social media influencer -- he pioneered so many things and has worked in a bunch of mediums while they're basically imprisoned in their chosen persona, doomed to repeat the formula / gimmick / character day in and day out until the novelty wears off for everybody and they burn out entirely 12-24 months later. The ones with the most longevity seem to have been able to retain autonomy as a creator rather than a creation, as mentioned in the article, allowing them to grow and evolve rather than forever being a one-note wonder whose entire raison d'etre is eating shoe polish on camera.
Also, exactly his aim
A couple times that theme appears (there are more)
---
https://youtu.be/uckLb_8LEGQ?t=36s
ANGIER
(scorn)
It's misdirection- he leaves those things lying around to make you think he's using a double.
OLIVIA
All the time? He doesn't know when I'm looking
ANGIER
All the time, Olivia- that's who he is, that's what it takes- he lives his act, don't you see?!
---
Also the dialogue after the fishbowl performance https://youtu.be/J8ZXT2HTxqE?t=34s
BORDEN
(points)
This is the trick. This is the performance, right here. This is why no one can detect his method. Total devotion to his art...
Vonnegut also uses this in Mother Night.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.This isn't purely new, either. I'm perhaps dating myself a bit but I recall that over the years I have seen a few actors have this weird vibe where they're never "human", they always "on" and seem like their actor-thing has totally subsumed their humanity.
David Cassidy and Shirley McClain come to mind for me on this.
I realize I'm probably in the minority for this, but for me when people create a "persona" for their media, it turns me away. I prefer watching people who are more genuine, whose content is less entertainment and more just themselves, even if that isn't what the internet seems to be looking for.
The people you consider "more genuine" are just cultivating a different persona.
Don't ever believe you "know" someone you don't. Parasocial relationships are harmless at the low level but quickly become toxic.
Always meet your heros so you can understand they are normal and flawed humans
I think it's even more complex than that. There's only one human I can understand pretty thoroughly, inside and out, and that's me -- and even then, there are a lot of limitations!
We cannot know all the thoughts and experiences of another human being. Even when that person is 100% genuine, there will be aspects to that person that will surprise you!
And that doesn't even get into the weeds of autistics, ADHDers, and intelligent people (I happen to be all three) -- who learn from an early age they have to pretend to be something they aren't, otherwise they'll face intense bullying and ostracision. And even then, there's going to be something "off" about them ....
I find it somewhere between "very uncomfortable" and "creepy". Even as a kid something felt very off in those interviews.
Peter Sellers also had this problem; in his case, it was a problem with his personality (or lack of one) rather than something acting did to him.
Comedians seem to exhibit this trait more often than others. Norm Macdonald had a somewhat similar vibe.
I grew up watching The Rock. As an adult, it's hard to look past the persona he shows when talking about anything on any medium.
Johnny Depp maybe?
One of the problems with modern social media (and digital media in general) is that this is now happening, to some extent, to everyone. This is particularly a problem for children, who are exposed to this so early that they may never internalize the difference between existence and performance.
Bo Burnham said it really well in an interview:
"I'm saying I feel very stressed because I feel like I'm on stage panicking in front of thousands of people... and I feel like I'm trapped within a performance and I'm freaking out because of it. And 13-year-olds were going 'yeah yeah, I feel like that every day'. And I go 'what are you talking about?' and I realize that the stresses of a C-list comedian were democratized and given to an entire generation.... Social media has made life a performance."
I'm not sure where the original interview is, but I found the quote at 9:43 of this analysis of Inside: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHat1OlMPeY
Bo Burnham really does have a lot to say on growing up on YouTube and the effects of social media/always performing/looking for an audience. I agree with pretty much all of it, but the most thought provoking one to me was in his Make Happy special right before his big ending. Him talking about the "Me Generation" from that special - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41hNI3YYnWk
> they became inseparable
If one spends most of their waking hours in front of camera producing video after video it's bound to happen subconsciously whether they like it or not.
Arguably also true for some (many?) tech entrepreneurs.
And that those who most successful are able to appear magical because they are willing to do things so unreasonable that the possibility doesn’t even cross your mind.
It reminded me of the old Vonnegut novel "Mother Night". The refrain from that work was "You are what you pretend to be."
Watching YouTube anonymously with different browsers and cycling VPNs frequently, I see it quickly ends up suggesting the same videos during the same week. Not similar videos but the same ones. Many of those videos are below 1M and not particularly notable. This is after only watching a couple of videos and those videos are different every session. Either it has some magic fingerprinting I am not aware of (and I go to lengths to avoid this) or it quickly puts me in a bin of generic results.
It feels like the YouTube algorithm is either way more manual than we think or it has rules that end up showing the same things. Or both. Or something more sinister.
I've never, ever clicked on short videos with girls in skimpy clothing doing something "based" and yet it keeps trying to hook me up on those. Even after clicking around very different videos (infosec, low level code, workshop). It's like it refuses to learn what I want to watch.
When watching with my account on YouTube mobile app it keeps trying to push dumber content. I wasted years giving it feedback with "not interested" and "Don't recommend channel". It only keeps pushing videos of channels I liked 1 video 1 time long ago. If I like a DefCon video the algo will pester me with garbage shock content for infosec.
Recently, I liked a cppcon wait free programming presentation and then YouTube started pestering me (again) with the Indian programming 101 videos with terrible sound and rushed video. I had to give it like 10 "not interested" / "Don't recommend channel" for it to stop.
Ironicaly, about a year ago, I started watching a really good ML channel by an Indian guy with great animations an in-depth explanations. Top level. And YouTube rarely suggested his content. I had to go to his channel to look for things or search the channel name and some keywords. It feels like YouTube punishes sophisticated content.
I think there is no true algorithm. Or that it has rules to never suggest me the content I actually want to watch.
And don't get me started with YouTube search.
Sadly most of the content I want to watch is hidden deeply in the garbage pile of YouTube.
> I've never, ever clicked on short videos with girls in skimpy clothing doing something "based" and yet it keeps trying to hook me up on those.
There was another post on HN recently about "multi-armed bandit" problems and an algorithm which occasionally retries previously nonperforming choices on purpose to "test" if their performance has changed.
I wonder if YouTube's algorithm works similarly, i.e. occasionally suggesting a video that has nothing to do with your preferences, to see if it can hook you.
This seems logical to me, there have been times when I wanted to hop off a deep dive after watching enough and wanted to move to something else. But I was probably immune to suggestion before getting to that point.
That satisfaction threshold is probably understood for someone like me who doesn't browse anonymously
Also, it might hook other people who watch similar videos to you. So the algorithm, thinks it might work on you based on the profile it has on you, based off the videos you watch.
I find that going into your history and removing offending videos that seem to be driving the algorithm is more effective than using the "not interested" option on newly recommended videos
Yes. Forgot about it. I keep the history clean, too. But it's only fractionally better.
> I've never, ever clicked on short videos with girls in skimpy clothing doing something "based" and yet it keeps trying to hook me up on those. Even after clicking around very different videos (infosec, low level code, workshop). It's like it refuses to learn what I want to watch.
This has made me realize that YouTube is like the leading platform for piracy and porn. If you have any interest in sports the frontpage will be littered with pirated livestreams from channels like ESPN, and while they may not be explicitly pornography, the skimpy girl content is basically that.
Not entirely related to MrBeast but related to YouTube. I genuinely miss the older algorithm where after watching a video you would go progressively further down a hole of videos somehow related to the one you just watched. It was quite entertaining and really uncovered fascinating videos.
I have no clue how to use YouTube. It seems like as soon as it latches on 3-4 interests of mine, the entire home page is exclusively filled with videos relating to that. I can mark videos as "not interesting" but it doesn't do much. I will see exactly the same videos on the home screen, ones that I'm not interested in and don't plan on watching, for weeks or months sometimes.
I'm sure there's plenty of interesting content about topics I haven't searched for, but YouTube seems intent on not letting me out of whatever bubble it thought out for me.
I think what you describe is what infecto was saying. You can't use YouTube to find interesting content anymore. You can only use it to find more of what you've already seen. In the past, it was better at unearthing new things.
Personally, I added uBlock filters so the home page is empty and recommended videos aren't shown. I only ever go to subscriptions now.
It doesn't even show me more of what I've already seen, half the sidebar is videos I've already watched (or watched halfway before dropping, with a helpful indicator of my lack of progress). Like, "we see you like video X, why don't you watch video X today?" Thanks, I already have bookmarks.
> I added uBlock filters so the home page is empty and recommended videos aren't shown. I only ever go to subscriptions now.
There's a setting to turn it off, no need for uBlock filters for that
It's the hammer I have and it works on those nails, hah.
Fair enough, just FYI. I couldn't be bothered to set that up on mobile personally; nice thing about the account setting is it will apply everywhere then (assuming logged in).
What setting is this? I'd love to disable the home page but I haven't seen any setting for it
Turn off your watch history.
Ah, I wanted a setting explicitly. I'd like to preserve my watch history, i only want to disable the home and recommendations.
Similarly, I use Unhook because it gives me fine control over what YT displays. I now find YT to be completely unusable without it.
While I do agree it has a very strong focus on suggesting more of what you've recently watched, I feel it's also managing to suggest new and interesting unrelated stuff from time to time.
Some habits I have is to subscribe to channels which I truly enjoy, instead of marking as "not interested" I select "do not suggest channel", and be cautious of click-bait titles. If I get lured in, I remove them from my history.
So for me it's mostly great, though I get your frustration as well. For example I recently watched a couple of informative videos on the LA fires as I have some relatives living in the area, and suddenly my feed is tons of that and little else.
I've found sometime in the last year or so YouTube has been suggesting random videos from very small channels much more, which I like a lot. Most of the videos are garbage, but every once in a while I'll find a gem that entertains me and my friends.
Recently I found a video of a young kid doing a taste test of a sour soda, and then demanding his dad come over from the other room to try it too. At one point the kid does a really loud burp that I found funny. Obviously not something that will do numbers, but it satisfies my people-watching itch.
You’ll get a kick out of this if you haven’t already seen it - a collection of random slice of life videos uploaded during the time when iPhones had a built in “send to YouTube” button. So many fascinating moments that would otherwise be lost to time. https://walzr.com/IMG_0001
While I cherish other kinds of videos, I too have noticed smaller creators getting recommended, and few large ones. Perhaps because most of the channels I subscribe to are smaller channels?
I too liked to prime my own algorithm but Yanis Varoufakis book Technofeudalism kind of ruined it for me. On a individual level it's nice to get good recommendations, but on a societal level I think it's starting to get a bit scary to the point of me wanting to opt out and instead curate my own feeds based on first hand sources.
Yeah I get your point, though I almost exclusively use YouTube as an alternative to TV entertainment. That is, rather than watching Mythbusters, I'm watching Numberphile, FarmCraft101 and such.
I specifically do not normally view "pure" news or similar. I might make the rare exception, like in case of the LA fire where I saw a clip from PBS. That is a very conscious choice, for reasons similar to what you express.
> It seems like as soon as it latches on 3-4 interests of mine,
Its worse than that. I thought that Youtube worked as you described, trying to find videos suited to your interests but it actually works the other way around.
Youtube has a series of rabbit holes that it knows maximise engagement, so its trying to filter you the human down one of those rabbit holes. Do you fit the mr beast ssniperwolf hole, or the jordan peterson joe rogan rabbit hole? Howabout 3 hour video essay rabbit hole, is that one your shape?
Its designing paths for engagment and filtering humans down not filtering videos for humans, its perverse and awful and it explains why the algorithm simply does not work for humans, because you are not the target audience, you are the data being sorted.
The homescreen recommendations seems to aggressively prioritize what you last searched for.
I missed the end of the recent Australia vs India cricket series so I searched for highlights from the final day of play. Since then for the past 2 weeks my homescreen has been an endless stream of cricket related videos. For some reason it has a particular focus on podcasts related to cricket.
Podcasts are popular enough high engagement content. Here engagement is mostly watch time. As such algo pushes those videos that have been recently watched a lot. Recently being popular is also other mechanic that seems very common.
I made the mistake of clicking on a Jordan Peterson video several years back. I'd never heard of him before and the title seemed interesting, so I clicked. 15 seconds in my charlatan detector went off, so I exited the video. For the next couple weeks I was playing wack-a-mole with a never-ending supply of manoshpere and right wing nonsense. Easy to see how so many people get sucked into sphere of influence.
One of the best things I've learned is that you can go into your watch history and remove something and that seems to work pretty well to fixing the algorithm after clicking on something and realizing it's garbage.
I've come accustomed to deleting cookies on browser close. The first ~10 or so YouTube page requests, the sidebar of recommended videos is pretty good. After that, as you said, it gets way too muddled. I think a good plugin for YouTube would be to always delete cookies before opening a video so that you're getting as close to a pure vanilla recommended feed as possible.
Don't use the homepage, use the subscriptions page
When you turn off search history, it makes the homepage useless and the subscriptions page becomes unavoidably the next step.
Discovery of content happens in the sidebar from videos I enjoy now, and only when I'm in the mood to discover something.
Usually the better content is down the page a bit on the YouTube home page. I use this CSS snippet to hide the first 12 videos from my home page.
[page-subtype="home"] #contents > ytd-rich-item-renderer:nth-child(-n + 12) {
display: none;
}You have to block entire channels. I've blocked all the major news networks, all the major content farms, and all the major "garbage" snack size content channels. There's hundreds of blocked channels on my account.
It's _almost_ like the old youtube.
I obviously don't know your personal experience, but your description is still how YouTube works for me. For example, over the holidays I would occasionally put on a video from a channel that plays holiday music with various videos of this guy's model train setup in the background. I immediately started receiving model train videos, which, of course, I had to click on and now I know a little bit about trains and building realistic environment models.
That being said, occasionally I do have to go into my Google data and clear/clean the watch history to reorient my recommendations.
I don't think thats the case. Don't confuse homepage recommendations with end of video queue recommendations. It used to be end of video recommendations were heavily weighted on the current video or chain of videos you just watched. Essentially you could keep going to the next video and go down a weird hole of obscure videos. Now the algorithm will quickly circle you back to your profile homepage of videos as opposed to the video you just watched.
Oh, I see. I suppose I do recognize more of the 'general recommendations' in the post-video grid rather than basing those solely on the video itself. That being said, I don't use that mechanism generally and tend to rely on the homepage-refresh and side bar to discover additional videos.
Thats exactly it. My best example of why I dislike it is you may be watching videos of live salsa music, the next two videos will be salsa and then all of a sudden the third video to play will be The Wiggles (an aussie kids singing group). I have a kid, we definitely will dance to The Wiggles but if we are watching Salsa I don't want to be recommended it.
Same, and now I've spent the last two weeks trying to convince YouTube that I don't need several different videos of Christmas music playing over a fireplace.
Feels a whole lot like the dumb emails I get from places like Home Depot, where because I bought a table saw they feel I should know about all these other table saws they have.
Agreed. This is still how YouTube still works for me. It's great.
> That being said, occasionally I do have to go into my Google data and clear/clean the watch history to reorient my recommendations.
Can you elaborate on this? What effect does this produce for your specifically?
If I find I am receiving recommendations in which I am uninterested and are clearly based on a handful of videos I watched previously, I can clear those from the history and the algorithm doesn't use them for future recommendations. The simplest example would be watching videos for a one-time use case such as repairing a specific home issue. I definitely don't need more recommendations to fix that/related issues, but YouTube is likely to spend a little time sending them my way. I can fix that quickly by removing the original videos from my history.
personally I just open up these videos in private mode
This is exactly how YouTube still works for me... I'm still finding new interesting content and creators everyday.
Do you subscribe to creators you enjoy, and like their videos? You still need to feed the algorithm.
I think you missed how the old end of video algorithm worked. The old way had a much higher weighting when picking the next video on the current video being watched. The current next video pick algorithm places a much higher weighting on your preferences instead of the current video.
I don't.
My experience with their algorithm between 2014 and ~2020 was that autoplay would quickly turn into a form of video diarrhea composed largely of Jordan Peterson and Lex Fridman. Was pretty bizarre because I only watched a few Peterson videos in the beginning, mostly his "Maps Of Meaning" videos which I think are mostly poppycock, and ever since then YouTube would quickly bring me back to his content even though I was never navigating to it organically. I had to resort to clicking "Not interested" and "Don't recommend channel" on several videos, which sort of worked, but it wasn't fool proof.
These days it happens way less often, though usually that loop contains a lot of "gurus" in general and less of Peterson.
I hope I never have to hear the voices of Jordan Peterson or Lex Fridman again. I'm not a fan of either one, but YouTube insisted I was for many years.
I think they can be paid to do that, but I'm not sure quite how it was arranged.
That, or the Peterson pipeline is a good representation of a local maximum: a fairly obvious way a set of videos can direct people to related videos and increase the appetite for them. That'd produce algorithmic reinforcement without anybody getting paid. Apart from Youtube, content-agnostically hungering for being paid in views on their platform.
It could have sent a very strong signal that 'this content maximally sends a statistically significant number of viewers down MASSIVE youtube rabbitholes never to emerge, therefore take the gamble and try to show everyone the content, ???, profit!'
This was at the center of controversy many years ago, described as a sort of alt-right pipeline. I believe there are studies about that exact algorithm behavior on youtube. My understanding is that it was changed to loop back around to trusted content sooner.
Dunno about parent but to me "old algorithm" is more like 2010, not 2014.
Edit: 2010 and earlier. To me old youtube is before the rise of Minecraft. There's probably a better threshold but that's the one that comes to mind.
Funny, I have the opposite experience. I used to get relevant videos to what I was watching. If I'm watching a Phish video, it would recommend other Phish videos. These days, if I'm watching a Phish video I will literally, as in literally literally, get a Candace Owens video recommendation. I have literally never clicked on one of her videos ever. I don't watch political content on youtube at all, and if I did I am very left leaning. I can't fathom what has made the algorithm so terrible that if you're watching 90s Phish videos it recommends right-wing talking heads.
I truly miss the way the next video used to be picked. I don't get political videos but I will be watching The Band live concerts and after the second video I will get something like a singing video with The Wiggles (I have a child). It makes absolutely no sense to me.
It's so weird and obvious that shenanigans are going on in the recommendation algorithm. I'll watch a Video Game Streamer, and in the sidebar, the top ten recommended related videos are:
- Same streamer, different video
- Different streamer
- Far right pundit blasts immigration
- Video game streamer
- Video game streamer
- Video game review
- Same streamer, similar content
- Ben Shapiro OWNS Liberals with FACTS
- Video game streamer
- Video game streamer
I've never watched one of these blowhards in my life, but man, YouTube thinks I'd love it. Because I watch video games? Is this the gamer-to-alt-right pipeline I keep reading about?
There are a lot of video game players who are tooting the "DEI is ruining games" horn, with streamers amplifying this message. You could agree with that thesis without being conservative but even researching it will pull your YouTube recommendations in that direction; it seems to align well with conservative values.
There is massive overlap between those who watch video game streamers and those who watch the right wing rage content. Youtube is recommending you the videos those other people who watch video game streams watched next.
Aren't a lot of video game streamers basically alt-right rage streamers now too?
I miss YouTube where you could just browse topics, like right around when Google bought it is when I liked it the most I think. I much preferred categories/topics based UI over this spoon fed algorithm. I think there's also a sweet spot in production value that I prefer. I like Technology Connection, Adrians Basement, Cathode Ray Tube Guy (name?), etc level of production much more than LTTs high production value.
I don't miss watching a video about a dog herding sheep, and then getting nothing but dog herding sheep videos the next week, heh. But I also don't like the new algorithm, it is as if youtube has assigned me to a demographics and really wants me to watch what other techy males around 30 y.o. watch, constantly trying to give me some rage political content to test the waters.
What I am describing is not the home page recommendations but the hole you would go down on post video recommendations, essentially the queue that Youtube would create for you had for a long time a heavier weighting on the current video you were watching. The simple example being you watch the dog herding sheep, then you the next video was about sheep, then you got to some video from a different country with sheep in it, then finally you ended up with some person who pretended to be a sheep. Purely making that example up but it often even in weird obscure videos quite quickly.
I tend to agree with you there, admittedly there was a skill in not being accidentally radicalised but you watch one 'lo-fi' video and accidentally fall asleep to four more and that's all YouTube shows me now!
I hope it doesn't happen anymore, but it used to be a game to clear your history and go to a fresh Youtube page and keep clicking on the top video in the suggestion list until you hit UFOs, Flat Earth, Climate Change denial, Lizard People, Chemtrails, or some other crackpot video. It was shocking just how fast the algorithm would gravitate towards that content, sometimes after just a couple of videos. I have a theory that the YouTube algorithm is partially to blame for the explosion in conspiratorial thinking on the modern Internet.
There's a lot of drama around the MrBeast YouTube channel lately—some of it justified, a lot of it manufactured...
I think the main thing is Jimmy Donaldson (MrBeast) has stated numerous times his goal in life (at least publicly) is to make the best YouTube videos possible. Realistically, a lot of the things that feed into drama are related to that goal: overwork, inadequate planning. They take 'move fast and break things' to the extreme to make the videos they make, and unfortunately the 'things' they break are often people.
The tough thing is, at least until recently, it seemed like MrBeast and the 'Beastification' of YouTube (where all content is loud, shouty, super-quick cuts) was inevitable. And in many corners (especially kids-centric content) it kind-of is. But luckily I think some people have pulled back. I feel like we're currently in kind of the anti-thesis of the '2001 Space Odyssey' era of entertainment. Instead of long, thoughtful content for consumption, it's fast-paced, zero-thought content with splashy colors.
I think MrBeast and other high end influencers like the Paul brothers are harmful to children. Kids see them flaunting their huge wealth and abandon all their other ambitions in favour of wanting to become a YouTuber. Which, now, is a very competitive platform few succeed on. Kids should be nudged towards working fruitful careers beneficial to society.
Although MrBeast has done some good things with it, I find the way he flaunts his wealth perverse.
In general I'm in agreement that they present a life where being an "influencer" is a goal in and of itself, but I think it's mostly harmless, like kids wanting to be a rock star or a professional athlete. These are unobtainable for most people but learning some music or sports or video production isn't a bad idea for anyone because you don't know where it will lead.
The specific criticism of "flaunting their huge wealth" does not apply at least to MrBeast -- he specifically is not very wealthy (I mean, he may be, but he says that he is not and he does not flaunt any such wealth; on the few occasions where his personal life is highlighted it seems he lives rather humbly). He claims to put all of the money he earns back into his videos; so when he makes enough to buy a "lambo" or whatever he will buy one and give it away to whoever can swallow the most toothpicks or whatever.
MrBeast does not push a life of luxury as his lifestyle, he presents a life of being a celebrity influencer whose life is making more spectacles.
In my opinion, giving away large sums of money, loudly and publicly, is very much flaunting wealth. It’s good too, it’s great, but it’s also flaunting wealth.
I guess what I mean is for a typical "influencer", you want to be that person to both be famous and also be rich and have cool stuff like they have.
But if you want to grow up to be MrBeast, you want to just be famous. Maybe you want to be MrBeast-famous and also buy cool yachts and lambos and private islands for yourself, but that's not the "lifestyle" that he's selling. The lifestyle he's selling is "be famous but still hang out with your loser friends but get to give away and/or destroy awesome things".
This is maybe not the thing we should aspire to, but for kids I think it's fine to imagine that for yourself the way that you imagine being an NFL quarterback or something. Not every kid imagines growing up and being a moderately successful CPA.
Franz Liszt is a Menace to Society and all those whose consider themselves Decent, Hardworking, Folk should warn their Children aginst[sic] him. Composition is of course a Good, but the competition is too steep, and if the Young seek to imitate the likes of him it will end in Tears. The Young should be guided, steered into more reliable, beneficial aspirations.
> Kids should be nudged towards working fruitful careers beneficial to society.
It’s all about incentives. I think we should nudge society towards rewarding kids who choose fruitful careers.
Yes, that too, but it might not help kids whose main perception/exposure of "society" is MrBeast et al. Kids can be quite oblivious to how "society" works in practice and what will be rewarded.
This is just a terrific read. The following excerpt from the final chapter of his e-book is just as good:
There are indeed “echo chambers” on YouTube, but they are filled with an active and demanding audience. When the YouTuber uploads their video, whatever originality, creativity or meaning they intended to communicate is reduced to the public audience measures that the platform appends to the video. This quantification puts the video into immediate comparison with the YouTuber’s previous videos, and indeed with every video on the platform.
It requires incredible willpower to ignore the reverberations of the ever-present audience on social media, to maintain an independent artistic vision or coherent ideological position. And for YouTubers attempting to make a living, the vast and intense competition makes it impossible to do so. The audience can simply click away if the YouTuber displeases them. The pressure of having millions of bosses issuing conflicting demands can produce “Creator burnout” or worse.
My poetic aspiration is that whenever you read the words “YouTube Creator” you think instead of “Audience Creation.” Social media does not create powerful Influencers but rather powerless marionettes, dancing jerkily to quantified audience tugs.
thank you!
So firstly I think for understanding YouTube it's much longer but it's better to just read Mr Beasts onboarding guide (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...). It gives a more complete picture straight from the horses mouth (and I always prefer primary documents if I can).
That being said I think the author here is taking some things for granted. An example of this to me is "As I wrote in the book, “If creators are speaking their authentic truths, how can they also be accountable to audience feedback? I am personally bemused to see 'authenticity' invoked as a criterion for what is ultimately and obviously a performance". So firstly I don't view authenticity as some binary thing that is mutually exclusive with taking feedback and context. Just because I act differently with my boss, my parents, and my friends based on feedback from them I'm not being inherently inauthentic. To me authenticity and external pressures are at odds but from the few videos and interviews I've seen of Jimmy he seems to genuinely enjoy creating the spectacles he does so beneath all the artifice in the videos I think you're still seeing the core of Jimmy making content that he wants to make. Anyway, I think if you stop looking at stuff like authenticity as less rigid rules for how to act and more as a spectrum or very broad category what the creators say makes more sense (because it's not just Mr Beast saying similar things).
Your conclusion is the exact same one the above essay comes to in the next paragraphs. It concludes that the "alignment" between MrBeast and his work is a result of the larger thesis: creators are ultimately created by the audience conditions of the platform. Or, authenticity doesn't mean much when the root of the creator isn't a ground truth, but a synthesis of demand.
We do not come to the same conclusions. The last paragraph is this:
“Luckily, I’d say I’m a pretty predictable guy.” Luck has nothing to do with it, Mr. MrBeast. Your predictability is the result of years of an information diet consisting of audience feedback metrics. You are the proudest creation of the YouTube Apparatus."
Audience feedback metrics are only part of what a creator does. They are people with complex motivations and being sensitive to audience feedback metrics doesn't eliminate that. I could see saying the ecosystem being a synthesis of demand (I mean that's just trivially true, we don't need an essay on Mr Beast to say that) but from interviews Mr Beast is very much a product of the pressure of YouTube mixed with the very specific nature of who Jimmy is as a person (from interviews he seems like a pretty weird guy and his videos definitely reflect his particular quirks).
Edit: I'm trying to see how the author and I agree but unless the author is saying that people who succeed on a platform are the people that do things that are successful on the platform (i.e. align with audience metrics) then I don't think we agree. And I don't think that's all they are saying because that's just trivially true everywhere and it would make all the talk about philosophy and authenticity useless cruft. I think that Mr Beast is the sorta platonic ideal of a "content creator" driven by metrics and even he cannot escape his own Jimmy Donaldson-ness in his videos.
The way I read it, the author says not that the creator as persona is synthesized by metrics, but rather that Jimmy himself is subsumed by MrBeast. He is being authentic, but that's true only because the platform inculcated those desires over a years long "information diet".
It's a view I sympathize with, even though I'm reticent to apply it to specific cases like this. Rather, when we look at these systems, we should treat their demands as prescriptive, rather than descriptive. Spotify is an excellent example. Say the recommendation algorithm starts recommending a genre, but not for any aesthetic reason. Over time other musicians that internalize the aesthetics associated with that genre and will succeed because they also get picked up by the algorithm. These artists are succeeding by making algorithm bait, but they're also being authentic because the algorithm they're courting shaped their sensibilities as artists and as people.
The article isn't making a novel observation that people are shaped by the systems around them but applying that idea to the creator economy.
It's interesting how this is happening in software engineering YouTube content as well. It seems like things like "go sucks rust is great! Now rust sucks and zig is great!!" get way more views since it is basically clickbait for nerds.
It's too bad that nuanced discussion doesn't do too well on social media.
The incentives with YouTube just seem bad. Whenever I research a product (recent examples: Garmin Watches, DJI drones) I'll find a few great videos with informative and useful content. I hope those channels are doing well! But then my YouTube recommendations related to those will have titles/thumbnails with things like "don't buy until you WATCH this" or "I was wrong!".
It also reminds me how the most upvoted comments on Reddit often reflect the consensus opinion but not necessarily the truth.
How could a voting system anywhere be expected to represent truth rather than consensus?
It probably depends if the audience is intelligent and open-minded, but I agree, it will always be biased towards their preconceptions.
Even then that's consensus on what the participants believe to be true (whether it's what they believed beforehand or not) - not a method of determining what is actually true.
Also, almost always highly emotional if you're on a popular subreddit's post.
I picked a random post on the home page, this one for example:
https://old.reddit.com/r/clevercomebacks/comments/1i1b4tn/i_...
The comments are all
"The oligarchs would never go for it."
or "It’s a cult." and on and on.
I think this is particularly true in rage bait posts on Reddit, which is most of the home page these days.
This is a great line, thanks.
I noticed this as well and it’s been the first real moment where I feel “old” as a dev.
I should acknowledge that our industry has always had some form of this - but it was contained predominantly to mailing lists/forums/blogs and eventually Twitter. It felt like all of these mediums (yes, even Twitter) required some form of proof that you’re an authority or experienced on what you’re writing about. I don’t feel like that’s what’s happening with YouTube/Twitch here; these creators may very well be skilled/experienced/authorities (and I am explicitly not saying they are or aren’t) but I don’t see anywhere near the level of healthy skepticism that I feel like we’ve always had in our industry.
Maybe it’s a generational divide as the window of developers shifts. Maybe it’s just the sheer size of the distribution channels now. I’m open to being wrong.
tl;dr: Something about these mediums turbo charges the information in a way that I’m not sure is healthy.
It seems like there was an era of journalism where the minimum quality was higher : in between the disappearance of the yellow press (WW2 ??) and the rise of social media.
Was that a result of economic consolidation ?
Or am I mistaken and the yellow press never went away ? (And why does it seem like it did for a while ?)
I've similar trends here in regards to new languages, technologies, ... People love to bandwagon.
Nuanced discussion can only happen in good faith. It’s impossible to enforce that so to prevent being turned in to 4chan, social media turns to the most obvious proxy- likes upvote etc.
The logic underpinning this is that if a person is a jerk they will be downvoted- therefore there is an incentive to not be a jerk.
However, because the person on the other side is anonymous and therefore people can’t instinctively presume good faith, upvoting system turn in to a voting system - the goal is not to develop ideas, but to submit ones people will most agree with. When the main danger is apathy, there is no reason from self-moderation. Nerds are not immune.
I don't think it's impossible to enforce, you can probably do it on social media limited to hundred(s) of participants, where moderators (and other users) can get familiar with specific posters.
On most social media people aren't anonymous, they are pseudonymous - this can still have an impact on your behavior when you know that even non-moderators can look up your post history.
But I guess that a lot of posters are still going to feel pseudo-anonymous, because looking up still requires a lot of effort... at least until for a few they become famous enough (dang, pg...) that their pseudo-anonymity is gone.
So formula for success on YouTube is to be constantly making crazy and then even more crazier videos and hope they become viral so more people discover you?
I knew that even 15 years ago when I was watching crazy pranks pulled by French YouTuber Rémi Gaillard[0]....he was so popular back in the day on YouTube.
The formula for success is more basic than that.
Make people watch more YouTube.
Crazy videos might become passe or burn people out, at which point the 'formula' will change, but the underlying reality is the same. It's a paperclip maximizer. To succeed at YouTube make people watch more YouTube.
>To succeed at YouTube make people watch more YouTube.
Yea but how do you do that? By making more compelling content than competitors. That's the basic formula.
What he's trying to say, is that compelling content is not necessarily what you think it is.
There's whole subcultures of people doing unboxing videos. People framing existing videos as "unintentional ASMR" (https://www.youtube.com/c/PureUnintentionalASMR)
The point is : it doesn't matter what you upload. As long as it allows Google to show ads to people.
You might (or might not) be interested to know that, among other things, he went on to make a movie, and even (semi-successfully !) run for mayor !
Also, I think his videos might be predating YouTube, or at least predating YouTube dominating the format ? IIRC he used to self-host as well as publish on other platforms ?
Dhar Mann’s channel is another interesting cultural signal of what kind of content tweens are being groomed with: https://youtube.com/@dharmann?si=vsNv2M2S7LfbVvVt
What is abhorrently revolting is the total amount of “Gold Digger” videos +100 and counting..
https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=76583c995a4c1c88&rlz=1...
Wow. I expected this to be just bad clickbaity content, but I didn't expect this level of algorithmic-driven slop. Disturbing. 25 million subscribers, too; millions of views on every single video, one new hour-long video of this insane crap every few days. All clearly directed at children.
yeah it's totally f'd up.
This is the NEW children "fables" that are teaching the next-gen modern "morality". My 11yr old made me aware of it, and I've seen like 20 of them now.. about 22% are OK in terms of messaging/values. But the danger lies in that the 9-13yr old kids watching this stuff will take most of it literally as 'this is how the real-world works'.
Sadly no one else if filling this niche better and he seems to have found the algo.
Dang. I wanted to see what "the youths" were watching so I scrubbed through a couple of those videos.
The people in them make me feel like the world's most accomplished actor.
> in cybernetic terms, a long lag time in production is deadly.
Does "long lag time" or "deadly" mean something else in cybernetic terms than in regular terms? I found the "in cybernetics terms" insert quite puzzling.
In control theory, this is called dead-time:
>Dead time is the delay from when a controller output (CO) signal is issued until when the measured process variable (PV) first begins to respond.
https://controlguru.com/dead-time-is-the-how-much-delay-vari...
Cybernetics has a lot (everything?) to do with feedback loops; the word itself comes from the Greek for "steersman". If you have a long feedback loop in a process that is supposed to self govern, it would be potentially deadly to the equilibrium.
Similarly, in a positive feedback loop (as in the article), a long lag time would decrease its growth rate.
Also the etymology of kubernetes
I googled for a cybernetics definition and this came back:
> Cybernetics is the scientific study and mathematical modeling of regulation and control in systems, focusing on the flow of information and how it is used by the system to control itself.
So maybe a long lag time is deadly because they lose control of the system? That doesn't really make sense to me either though because what control do they have in the first place? The author says as much when they call it an ever-shifting target.
An interpretation that made sense is "cybernetics" as the ancient Greek word for the one who steers the ship.
It is indeed a fascinating topic, and it’s completely changed content (for the worse, in my opinion) in the last ten years. I always wonder though, does the dead-eyed creepy smile factor into his metrics analysis? it must, or he wouldn’t do it. something has always felt a little “off” about that guy, but if your entire adult waking life is devoted to the whims of the massive YT content space, I guess you’d probably seem a little kooky.
If there’s no border between him and the Apparatus then his is literally the face of the Apparatus.
It does at the moment. At some point in the future, it might not rank, at which point he and anyone else devoted to the rat race will get their teams to replace their thumbnails with whatever new thing gets more clicks.
Please god let it be something other than faux surprise and arrows
I'm interested in how many people here on HN watch Mr Beast - I've never watched any of his videos ever, and I spend far too much time on YT.
What I feel gets missed in these kinds of discussions are that YouTube is a thousand things to a thousand people. I probably have it running more than any other streaming service, but I almost exclusively watch music videos and skateboarding videos, and there is nothing obviously algorithmically driven about their production. They're not made for YouTube at all. YouTube just happens to be one of many distribution channels they end up available on, but the basic style and production methods of these videos hasn't changed a whole lot since the late 1980s. I'd have never heard of Mr. Beast if not for HackerNews talking about him all the time.
My wife is probably closer to a YouTube-native watcher, in the sense that what she's watching is created for YouTube specifically, but even then, it's informational deep-dives, lately on liminal spaces lore, Twin Peaks fan theories, and 3d printing. She raved glowingly lately about a 4-hour long Twin Peaks explainer. I'm sure that is many things, but it isn't flashy, short, there is no skimpy clothing, bright colors, or whatever it is that YouTube is supposed to be incentivizing. Whoever made it almost certainly made no money off of the effort and dumped decades of his life into the study of what ultimately came out there, and nobody is watching it because of the algorithm or a clickbaity thumbnail. The only people watching something like that are the most serious of serious nerds who deeply love Twin Peaks and probably have for most of a lifetime.
I watched one of his videos and quit pretty early because it was boring. Thinking back on what I remember, it seems very weird.
It was the one where he "gave away" a chocolate factory, after he did the Willy Wonka thing with his chocolate bars where you could win a chance to be on the show. I clicked because I was curious what he was actually "giving away", if it was actual chocolate factory property, shares in his snack brand, or some disused industrial building. They had a "candy room" with plants supposedly made of real sweets but it looked like a cheap imitation of the Willy Wonka movie, the walls were mostly white and it seemed like it could have used more set dressing. The actual content was a game show (seems to be a lot of his videos) but it didn't make good use of the space they built, I think it was a basic scavenger hunt. Then the contestants had to throw a giant Mento into a giant Coke bottle, it was impressively large but the game wasn't exciting at all, they just threw the disc at the bottle over and over without any drama. MrBeast even said something like "we're going to be here a while" so he started their ad read, that's when I turned it off.
Unlike a TV game show or reality show the contestants had no characterization, they didn't play up any rivalries or reactions or drama. It seemed like they were there doing the most basic challenges so MrBeast could talk about what they made and give away something expensive at the end. I found it all very odd and it reinforced that I am very far from the median viewer since I found none of it interesting.
I don't, on principle.
A few years ago, if you opened up YouTube without being logged in, the algorithm would show you its default recommendations in the purest state, uninfluenced by your proclivities. MrBeast and similar dumpster clickbait videos were prominently featured. These days, I think you have to at least search for and watch some things before you are told what to watch.
If MrBeast has ever shown up on my YT front page in the past, I slapped YT's hand until it stopped. Haven't had a problem since.
I watched many of his videos. They're pretty good. I dont understand the complaints of click bait. One of the main reasons why he works so well is he makes outlandish premises that seem like clickbait, and then delivers. If he claims they will blow a house up, they literally will pack it with explosives and blow it up. If he says he will show a million dollar hotel room, thats what I'll see in the video. Throw a lambo into a crusher? Its going in for real.
It's not even like he draws it out. Like lets say its time to blow something up as a finale: we see 2-3 shots of them waiting, we see it explode in 3 angles we get 2-3 reactions and boom video is probably over.
Nope, on principle. I’ve tried to make YouTube as “healthy” as possible — disable shorts, disable watch history, only watch subscribed channels — and I’m still not convinced it’s a net positive in my life.
The trick is finding something else to replace it during that time at the end of the day when I don’t feel like I have the mental energy for anything else.
I'd never even heard of him/it until a previous submission here (and I also watch a lot). Still hadn't heard of any of the other apparently big ones mentioned in another thread.
I assume most of us aren't using YouTube for that kind of doom-scrolling click bait scream face 'content' about nothing in particular, but I could be wrong.
I have never watched one, but I consume a lot of YouTube content. My teenager calls MrBeast-type channels "brain rot". He says teenagers watch YouTube when they want to make time disappear. (I guess they are uncomfortable being bored.) I find it sad because YouTube is actually a great source of educational content.
I watch it all of the time but only because of my daughter. I definitely wouldn't watch them on my own but it's tolerable.
I've watched like three. They are quite entertaining but tend to follow a similar formula.
I've watched a few of his videos, they're pretty good.
Never watched any and don't have a desire to.
It's a younger-people thing primarily.
The more I learn about successful people, the more I realize that being an office drone with a satisfactory salary is where I want to stay.
You don't think of yourself as being successful? Do you think of success mostly in terms of what your job is?
You should watch Severance.
Consider the following: my personal youtube feed has never shown a video of MrBeast. I never asked to remove it from my feed. I only know the he exists because I see it being debated in the media. So, this tells me more about what people in general are interested in and click to watch, than about the nature of youtube itself.
> and I confess that I feel vindicated by the analytic approach in the book
I feel the opposite, everything seems reasonable, business-centric, and marketing-aware strategies.
Isn't that the point? By purely focussing on business-centric strategies, the videos no longer have meaning.
This presumes that MrBeast intended to create "videos with meaning" in the first place.
In his defense (!?), most of what's churned out by the streaming platforms, hollywood, and the music industry, is also not very bothered by lack of meaning.
This seems an insufficient analysis. The meaning expressed by contemporary music, film media, or streaming television isn't very profound, but they at least still make a passing effort to "signify" something. The highest grossing movie of 2024 - Inside Out 2 - is not a deep text, but it does have a thesis.
The "Pixar apparatus" is definitely increasingly consumed by audience demand, but they're at a minimum in a transitional phase: something like Seeing Red would never get workshopped out of committees.
Youtube and other social media (emphasis on media) is ground zero for the decay of meaning into intensity; the ultimate incestuous product of auto-simulacra.
I heard a term for a specific version of this that I'm (mis)applying in all such cases: brainrot.
There's no such assumption being made. If anything, the linked article is about how MrBeast is intentionally making vapid slop.
Yeah, what major piece of film of the last 20 years isn’t a carefully crafted business plan?
I think YouTube was so exciting initially because it was so authentic, and now it’s back to big studios.
Megalopolis. I didn't love everything about the movie, but it did come across to me as completely divorced from art created to benefit commerce. I loved that about it...
You could argue the movie being made outside of the traditional studio system is case and point of this phenomenon.
"They have been interpellated by audience metrics; their subjective experience already takes audience reactions into account."
This is great. I think there's a body of research to be done regarding the creation of self in the age of social media. (Not just creators but everyone)
> creation of self in the age of social media
That's a large part of the field of Cyberpsychology, and of course there's quite a body of research already.
Except that it's "interpolated".
Perhaps not:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpellation
(Specifically the top item, "the process by which we encounter a culture's or ideology's values and internalize them").
Edit: Doh! On checking the article, that's even the same link the author embedded!
No, it's "interpellated", i.e. 'brought into being'.
That was my first instinct, too, but instead of reflexively posting about it I double checked and found I was wrong and learned something new.
I sit enlightened, although I don't like the word much.
I suspect they’re using the second definition of the word (per Google):
PHILOSOPHY (of an ideology or discourse) bring into being or give identity to (an individual or category).
—-
I read it as saying the audience and their reaction to the content is what gives the “creator” their identity.
No, that's inserting a value. Interpellation is the international police organization popularized by Carmen Sandiego.
No, that's a different word that doesn't work in that context.
ooof
Really liked this sentence:
"YouTubers are not “Creators” but Creations. Audiences, rationalized by the platform, and the vloggers who upload the videos those audiences consume are not separable either theoretically or empirically."
Breathless navel gazing. It's not that he's wrong, it's just that this article adds nothing new to the conversation other than excessively technical mumbo jumbo. Just read MrBeast's original document.
The actual work underlying the essay - the one published in Cambridge Core - is pretty strong and has a lot of pretty compelling analysis. It's just long.
I disagree that it's strong, I got up to section five and it's written in the same "I am very smart and this is very important" style while saying very little of substance and bouncing around like a rabbit on speed.
The central thesis that demand creates supply is also just very obviously false, no one was searching for "100 identical twins fight for $250k" before Mr beast made that video. People watch Mr beast because they want 20 minutes of whimsical predictably mind numbing colorful emotional fast paced distraction and Mr beast fills that need perfectly with videos of all kinds. He transports viewers to a fantasy land far beyond their real world, where boredom doesn't exist and crazy things are possible. No one knew they wanted an iPod until Steve jobs showed it to them; they just wanted a better CD player. Same thing with YouTube; people just show up and click on something the algorithm puts in their way, there isn't a demand for anything really. No one knew they wanted a Mr beast. The consumer demand is some combination of distraction, entertainment, or education, it's not much deeper than that.
Ironically I think one huge contribution that YouTube has made for the good is elevating the quality of STEM didactics. Channels like 3blue1brown and Veritasium have shown what STEM instruction could look like when not relegated to tenured professors who DGAF about teaching.
I was thrown off by the use of the word, "wordcel," which the author defines as almost the opposite of what I would expect it to mean. Just like "incel" is a portmanteau, I expect "wordcel" to mean "word celibate." It didn't fit the context. The word is linked to a longer article that has the author's definition buried in it, which just distracted more from this article.
I'm perhaps too online, but this is not the author's coining. There was discourse ages ago about how some people are "shape rotators" -- that is, they could reason about complex stuff in their heads, and their counterparts, the "wordcels", that could express ideas through writing. The latter admittedly does not make sense as a portmanteau, likely because a shape rotator came up with it.
> This beauty is an ever-shifting target. The platform architecture and viewer preferences can change overnight; in cybernetic terms, a long lag time in production is deadly. MrBeast needs to be able to adapt to trends, vindicating my audience-driven framework for understanding YouTube.
That's actually not true. MrBest is saying the opposite in the leaked PDF, that fundamentals don't change much since he started.
The "fundamentals" don't change (ie, lighting, pacing) but trending topics are constantly shifting. The stuff he's doing today may not be popular in a month so being able to quickly put out a new video for the current trend is what he's optimized for.
> I am personally bemused to see “authenticity” invoked as a criterion for what is ultimately and obviously a performance
Imagine someone is actually an actor. They might play two different roles, one in a character and show they find boring, and one in relatable character in a show whose message they think is important. Don't you think their performance in the second one might be more authentic, despite being a "performance" in both cases?
This essay starts interesting, but I think it overreaches at the end.
The reciprocal relationship between speakers and audiences is well documented in rhetorical studies. The example of Hitler's development as a speaker is discussed in Ian Kershaw's biography "Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris." According to historical accounts, Hitler's early speeches in 1919-1920 for the German Workers' Party were rather technical, focusing on economic topics like inflation and the Versailles Treaty's economic impact. Through audience reactions, he learned which themes resonated most strongly and adapted his rhetoric accordingly. His latter speeches focused on topics like nationalism, anti-semitism, anti-marxism, etc... topics far more popular with his audience.
totally agree--and I think this is key to Trump's success as well, that he used audience feedback on Twitter to figure out that there was unmet demand for harsh anti-immigration policy and then win the 2016 primary
I feel like I need to see an Adam Curtis documentary* on this.
[*] Spanning 5 hours.
Curtis heavily applies quick cuts, emotive footage, authoritative English narration and emotional music to lull the viewer into his views. His message wouldn't work as written essays or books because they're just not very deep - it's early YouTube MrBeast-like audience optimisation for those who don't want to discover or read on topics.
> As I wrote in the book, “If creators are speaking their authentic truths, how can they also be accountable to audience feedback? I am personally bemused to see “authenticity” invoked as a criterion for what is ultimately and obviously a performance;
Who are you to deny their authenticity, though? If authenticity is being true to one’s own character, and one’s entire character is driven by YouTube video metric optimization (and perhaps ultimately by the profit thereby obtained), then isn’t their behavior on screen authentic?
Put another way, if MrBeast says “your goal is to make me excited to be on screen”, he’s explicitly saying he doesn’t want to have to act or otherwise be inauthentic on screen. Whether his excitement about a certain topic is tied to the views he expects it to garner is immaterial, if that’s his authentic motivation.
Or put yet another way, what drives anybody’s “authentic” behavior? What audience are they playing to? It may not be the entire internet, but it’s certainly influenced by “performance” in front of friends and family. We’re all Creations of our environment. MrBeast has just kind of found himself in an environment where feedback from YouTube videos motivates him and creates a ton of positive feedback loops.
Thanks op. This sums it up pretty well for me:
In what sense is any of this authentic?Interesting experience to read an essay of such insight regarding a subject that is the opposite of insight.
Best thing I’ve read this week. I am happy to say I have never seen a Mr. Beast video, and now I will be sure never to see one in the future.
There's not much you're missing. His videos try to appeal to the lowest common denominator and are relatively vapid. Sort of like the junk food of YouTube.
In analogy with the article: what is the junk food experience, but the craving for more junk food? It is literally engineered to make us want more.
"YouTubers" are one of those things that a lot of people are interested in, yet everything I learn about them makes me not want to start.
The world has so much good film, music, novels, even video games and TV - in a choice between any of those and watching a YouTuber, why would anyone choose the latter?
The 'Youtubers' I watch are those that do things that are also my hobbies or interests, for education/demonstration/inspiration.
Woodworking, machining, 3D printing, electronics, that sort of thing. A modern alternative to magazines basically, or to regional/cable/'public access' (I don't really know how it works, not sure if we ever had that sort of thing here) TV shows like the fictional 'Tool Time' show within the sitcom Home Improvement if you ever saw that.
I got started via 'how to do x' for a couple of DIY things, realised there's so much stuff like that, started watching for fun/interest (vs. actually having the job to do myself) and from there the more 'maker' (hate the term) side of doing it for a hobby to create a thing rather than household DIY/repair.
I mean, there certainly is a genre of "YouTuber", but there's lots of quality content. I just enjoyed a little 20 minute history of the Panasonic 3DO console that I managed to never hear about before.
By never seeing one you are sure to insulate yourself from... something? guilt by association? Makes no sense. See one or don't, it has no moral meaning.
His view counts seem cooked to me. I would be interested to see what countries his viewers are claiming to be from. This article even reads as a guerilla upsell that his numbers are legitimate.
Surely the urge to cheat is unbearable with millions of dollars on the hook. (Alot of apps on the app stores also claim to have quarter million 5 star reviews. Uhhuh)
His viewers skew younger. Kids have a lot of time on their hands. Given how ubiquitously well-known he is among younger people, I doubt there's much fraud necessary.
I agree the kids will take it at face value all the more reason to not tolerate massive deception. What if his teaching them fraudulent representation pays. All pro athletes cheat a little bit at the highest levels but exceptional cheating is never tolerated.
I don't understand what you're saying. Kids don't watch the channel because it has a high number of views. And what "massive deception" are you referring to?
You are using deflection here (deceitful). Without a list of all viewer ip's it's hard to identify where his click contractor is. Just knowing what countries his viewers are from would be sufficient.
What evidence do you have of him cheating other than your feelings?
Go read "Spy the lie". Accumulation of discrepancies (His viewers don't watch other similar content?) indicates deceitful behavior.
> the MrBeast with two backs
> haha just kidding. MrBeast does not have sex. YouTube doesn’t allow pornography, so what would be the point?
Why was this included in the post? What does it add? It seems … just sort of mean spirited and out of place in an otherwise good article.
haha I'm not saying that MrBeast couldn't have sex if he wanted to -- I'm saying that, because he's constructed himself to only care about maximizing audience metrics, having sex would be a waste of his time
>like is there a correlation between better lighting at the start of the video and less viewer drop off (there is, have good lighting at the start of the video haha)
This gives me the smell and sight of red flags in their methodology. It reeks of unsuspected hidden variables. Such as what is really going on is that focusing on lighting in the beginning of the video simply makes people put more thought into the into thereby having a hook that keeps people interested, rather than lighting having anything to do with it.
That means this is just a pseudoscience blog of throwing darts to me. Sure call me a curmudgeon or whatever.
Khbib