Ben Folds Chatroulette Piano Ode to Merton | Hacker News Reader

Ben Folds Chatroulette Piano Ode to Merton

youtube.com

219 pointsMikeCapone59 comments

I think I prefer this on Reddit where I first saw it. This is only vaguely topical here.

Agreed. I think there has been a mass exodus from reddit in the last few weeks. The quality of content there has gone down, and the quality of content here has slid as well as reddit's users bring their brand of news to the site.

Must be Erlang time again.

Agreed. I think there has been a mass exodus from reddit in the last few weeks.

To where? People don't tend to just quit their social media addictions en masse. I'm asking mostly because I don't want to miss out if there's a new cool site on the block ;-)

As a regular Redditor, I'd say the quality of stuff hitting the front page/the "reddit.com" reddit has been a bit lower these last few weeks, but the more mature individual subreddits have remained pretty good.

Hopefully they're working on new social media addictions.

I quit Reddit almost a year ago, and have rarely looked back since. In the case of HN -- my last "addiction" -- I've written a nice RSS reader in the usual LAMP-AJAX way, so I'm getting the articles sans comments and karma, and in a better presentation, which is nice.

I'm now only visiting HN itself if I think there might be interesting enough discussion on a topic to warrant the effort.

Note that the poster "MikeCapone" has been a HN user for over 750 days - the counterexample to your thesis.

Not necessarily. It's possible that he's always been submitting such articles, but only now are there people upvoting them.

He hasn't, as you can readily see by checking his submissions. He does seem to have a bit of a bias toward green energy, though.

I whole heartedly agree. If links like this one keep getting to the front page, HN will suffer because of it.

It's the weekend. The front page is often a little more light and off-topic on the weekends.

I posted it here because there has been a lot Chatroulette entries in recent weeks (most of them either about the business/startup side, or from the "let's hack chatroulette" angle). People on HN seem to keep voting for these stories, so there's definitely some interest among this crowd.

Personally, I think this kind of improv mixed with real-time video technology fits HN just fine.

The chatroulette stuff that's posted here should be posted not because it's "something related to chatroulette", but because it's "something related to hacking/startups".

On the other hand, maybe the high score of this submission indicates that I have a minority opinion.

I agree, but hey, it's the weekend, I guess. We have trivia like "James Randi comes out of the closet at 81", the Iceland earthquake, and a shallow generic time management piece doing well on the front page too.

We have these things because people repost them from Reddit. If you ever want some karma, you can do the same.

Why does it matter where the stories were found? Are they somehow less interesting because they have been on other sites?

You're right. I suspect there are users here who have semi-automated the process too. It seems like a fun project (from a technical perspective) to create a HN "bot" that gets as much karma as possible without getting caught - but I fear pg's wrath more than such a project would be worth in karma ;-)

If inducing such wrath would get pg to fix the problem, then I'd happily spend my spring break on it.

Please don't. If you want to spend your time on this, start by finding evidence that there is even a problem.

Look at all the crap on the front page these days, and the snarky comments with 50 upvotes. HN is looking more and more like reddit. I come here to get away from reddit.

I've seen this happen in many places - any unmoderated, semi-anonymous online community of geeks eventually devolves into 4chan. reddit is basically there at this point; HN is not, but it's certainly moving in that direction.

In all seriousness, would it be helpful for me to compile a list of the articles and comments I'm talking about?

In all seriousness, producing a blog post/report/whatever on the perceived issues and then submitting it to HN would probably yield the best results. Controversial comments in deep places like this tend to do poorly with the karma points.

I don't see it as a problem to be solved. I visit /new a lot and I think the anti-spam stuff here is working pretty well (compared to a lot of community link sites). If anyone is auto submitting stuff, then it all comes down to people flagging it or voting it up as to whether it sinks or swims. Ultimately, the democratic process wins out on HN.

I agree that if it was just "random video from Chatroulette" it wouldn't belong here. But this has a kind of "culture hacker" aspect to it, IMHO.

What on Earth are you talking about? No it doesn't. I thought this meme of posting something about off-topic X and justifying by saying it's about 'X hacking' was over. If you post a picture of a cat with a silly caption, claiming it's about "cat hacking" or "humor hacking" or whatever doesn't make it relevant to HN.

I'd argue that there is a qualitative difference between adding a funny caption to a photograph of a feline and combining a new form of communication (video chat with random strangers) and an established genre (ode) and integrating it into a live performance (incl. audience interaction).

There is, but neither is at all related to hacking.

Nah, I had the same opinion when I first saw this show up here on HN.

At the same time, the chatroulette stuff should be here because, by definition, all of it is a gigantic hack performed by hackers. :)

You can't see anything in the virality/amazing growth of chatroulette that you could take away from? This latest part is quite brilliant. Now people will go on chatroulette hoping to be famous in front of live audiences, youtube vids, etc etc

Agreed. It represents a trending technology use in mainstream culture. It's these kinds of little events that can lead to brilliant start up ideas. Let's stop being such pretentious 'hackers'.

Could you share the brilliant startup idea you come up with after seeing this video?

I sense a tongue being held firmly in your cheek, but I'll play to it. There are at least a few ideas in here, if the video is representative of a trend (that has yet to be determined) or boom area.

One off the top of my head: Provision of camera and interactivity systems for concerts, so remote fans and musicians can interact better. Imagine if Folds could get 50,000 fans worldwide paying $10 to watch a gig with more interactive elements like this.

I think you're overly optimistic about what's going on here and overlooks trolling. I don't know if the video was edited to not show the offending ones. But I'm pretty sure if this becomes a popular trend, you'd have to deal with more trolls than you'd like to.

Maybe you're right and there's some hidden potential behind all of this. But the cynic in me just imagines 4chan members drooling at the prospect of ruining a show with shocking images and videos.

True, and one of the first things I did on ChatRoulette was prank people with it - http://youtu.be/DKTPLTZa6d4

But if people were paying good money to be in such a system (for, say, a live gig).. maybe such shenanigans would be mitigated.

Well for a start, it's brilliant PR/marketing.

People will see this, and think "Woah. If I play on chatroulette, I could be famous".

I can see ways you could integrate that sort of PR into other startups.

If you think content is inappropriate, make sure to flag it.

We're watching the real-time evolution of a new net-mediated interaction style -- randomly-grouped video chats -- that will probably spawn a number of new businesses.

We're seeing people experiment with the medium to create new emblematic characters, and artists with other talents -- Merton/Ben Folds -- use it to find a new challenge/audience. (At the same time their arrival pushes the creative envelope in some ways, it will also moderate the behavior in others -- you might become part of a live show in front of thousands, or a YouTube video viewed by hundreds of thousands! That will police the behavior more than any 'flagging' functionality.)

I find it intensely interesting, with lessons about how technology changes social interactions and creates new collaboration/entertainment opportunities.

Sometimes we get a little different content on the weekends, and thats OK by me.

Right. It's not like Hackers have a sense of humour.

While I like HN's mostly tech/startup stories, something that occasionally make me laugh isn't a bad thing. It's just getting the right mix. Reddit is more about that HN which is fine for them. It doesn't we have to be some kind of spartan counterpoint.

Then flag it and move on.

This video represents an important milestone showing the evolution of the platform as celebrities adopt it.

I personally want to see more stories that indicate further milestones (probably some funding and a recommendation engine/filter I'd expect)

For the original Chatroulette piano improv video by Metron, see:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32vpgNiAH60

When I first saw the Ben Folds video, I thought it confirmed my belief that Merton is Ben Folds, but after thinking about the title "An Ode to Merton", I'm confused. Are Merton and Ben Folds different people, or the same?

They are different people.

Can anyone point to proof that they are in fact different people? I know Merton claims to not be Ben Folds, but the voice, style, and facial structure are extremely similar.

http://www.broadwayworld.com/columnpic/ben-folds1.jpg http://technabob.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/piano-c...

It's hard for me to provide proof but I've been a Ben Folds (Five) fan for 14 years and been to almost as many gigs, and I didn't believe Merton was Ben Folds for a second. His playing style isn't similar (as far as pop rock pianists go) and his voice is quite different (Folds' North Carolina accent usually comes out when doing impromptu stuff - less so with studio recordings). Merton also looks somewhat younger (Folds hasn't aged too well in the last cpl years IMHO).

I admit to not knowing who Ben Folds was until a few years ago when I stumbled onto an entertaining site called improveverywhere.com which did a prank imitating him, which of course somehow drew the attention of the real Ben Folds, and the prank was scaled up to include him... http://improveverywhere.com/2006/11/19/ben-folds-fake/

His old band, Ben Folds Five, also were an early adopter of cybercasting some of their concerts back 'round the turn of the millennium or so. I can see why Bam's where he is in this video-I would probably crap myself as well if this is what I was greeted with while using Chatroulette...

Over on Reddit it was pointed out that "Bam" was probably a masturbator who was too chicken to do it in front of 2000 people.

I think I prefer the Youtube dumbed down (ie no cocks!) edit of Chatroulette.

This makes me appreciate how awesome Ben Folds is.

I've seen Folds live about 10 times over the past decade. He's always had crazy improv skills. It's great to see him getting coverage and recognition of this beyond his rabid but small fan-base...

This guy is absolutely genius. The fact that he can think that quickly in front of a crowd shows a lot of skill. No doubt he will become an internet superstar.

He's amazing at improv stuff - another example where he just wanders into a studio and creates something out of nothing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KI78874qbU

He did even better than that. Before his last studio album was released, he went into a studio and recorded an entire fake album in 24 hours then leaked it to the net.

Funny thing is, a few of the "fake" tracks are better than the real ones that ended up on the album, such as this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTKRckEmKZQ#t=0m22s (a user created music video for the fake "Dr Yang" - the real version kinda sucks)

Another prime example was "For Those of Y'all Who Wear Fanny Packs" from the Naked Baby Photos album. It's a totally impromptu 6/7 minute "song" performed totally on the spot by him and his band. No prepared lyrics, music, or anything - they just riff off each other.

There is only one reason I would log into chat roulette - and that would be to 'chat' with Ben Folds.

That was excellent!

I think I prefer this on Reddit where I first saw it. This is only vaguely topical here.

It's interesting how two identical comments are at the top and the bottom at the same time.

People downvote duplicate posts all the time to express displeasure (and hopefully to get the author to delete the duplicate).

It's not more significant than that.

When I notice a duplicate of an otherwise-reasonable comment, I almost always upvote one copy and downvote the other, not to express displeasure or provoke deletion but to help make there be one canonical one to reply to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com