YouTube’s fake views economy

Indeed. I've been waiting for discovery on youtube to get better, and waiting, and waiting.

I'm subscribed to a lot of channels (mostly sciency and maker stuff) and whenever I got to the "home" tab it's basically just everything from the channels I've already subscribed to, which isn't very helpful. There is some sort of deep laziness going on at youtube which extends across the entire platform. It's very frustrating to watch so many creators put up good content and then have the platform basically fumble handling those creators year after year.

Discovery was ruined on purpose. I will always rant about this. Youtube wants to control what you see, that has always been the case since Google took over. Right now it's nearly impossible to research something specific on youtube. You searches are automatically "corrected": I search terms in one language and get results in another, google tries to semanticaly interpret what I search (and typically wrongly, ie "temperature differential" --> car differntial videos because they're more popular and profitable). Results aren't complete (they probably create a short search table/cache every few hours based on a finite, semantically-defined number of categories), you can't properly filter by dates, views or any other criterion. Also the "related" videos are often non-related extremely effective clickbait, based on what they know you'll to binge on, even if you don't want to.

I hate youtube wholeheartedly and Google by extension. I don't know if I'm lucky or unlucky to be aware of the vast amounts of data they hide from public view.

Every day hundreds of people create new channels making interesting, thought-provoking and informative videos, and youtube decides to hide them in favour of clickbait garbage and shitty ads, and take away all means you have to discover them.

I got so frustrated with youtube discovery that I built my own search, although only for talks - https://www.findlectures.com/

Is it possible to even find small creators in a large category? For example I was looking up pubg videos the other day but it's just pages and pages of videos with 1m+ views. I was a bit curious to see what the lower-end creators were like but I wasn't able to figure out how.

If you're looking to discover more videos / creators, I run https://channelsuurf.com. We curate under-viewed / under-subscribed channels from YouTube. If you have any favorites you want more people to see, definitely send them my way!

I agree, YouTube search is very poor, I don’t understand why Google video search is so much better. This is OK on iPad since it’s easy to open videos from a browser into the app, but this shortcoming is a real pain on Apple TV, which i use the most for watching video, relaxing in the evening bug screen and glass of red wine (or two).

The Outline is really beautiful. They do a great job of designing a modern digital publication.

I don't even try blocking the Outline's ads. They blend so easily into their actual content, and they're unobtrusive.

The perpetually animated squiggle at the top of the article, though, was super annoying. I felt an odd sense of relief when I scrolled down to get that thing off my screen.

Then each link I hovered over squiggled, too.

I used to do viewbotting back in the day but it isn't as lucrative as you would think. Basically, the creme de la creme is views from residential IP addresses, especially from the United States. Most proxy and VPN IPs are allocated to datacenter IPs so those IPs are easy to detect by youtube.

When you run the viewbotting app all it does is scroll though various youtube videos. Sometimes it likes the video and other times it will add a fake comment. Occasionally it will subscribe to the channel. The software is designed to mimic real user behavior. In exchange for running the bot you get credits which allows other bots to view your video. Since it is residential IP addresses, you do get paid for the views.

The big downside is that there isn't that many people using it so you don't really make much money from it at all. In fact, you are better off just spending your time making quality content.

From what I understand, the services mentioned in the article are not quality views. Youtube will most likely delete those views eventually.

The view count itself isn't why they are buying views, it is the ranking in search and related videos.

I find youtube/twitch have the same problems as the CPM industry. If you punish the provider of content for negative viewer action you provide a means for competition to cheaply force the content creator out of the market.

This is why twitch doesn't punish view botting, as any viewer could spend $5 to shut down a $50k/day stream.

If youtube really does use a guilty until proven innocent method then they are just punishing honest content creators that don't understand the dynamics of online media.

Yeah, that struck me as odd, also. Whatever your feelings are about Jordan Peterson, he's definitely not in the same camp as Alex Jones.

A lot of links are just other stories written by the same author, as well. Pretty clearly has an agenda.

I’ll say it. Jordan Peterson has been a positive influence in my life. I’ve watched hundreds of hours of his lectures on YouTube. I started a book club to read his recommended books such as Gulag Archipelago, Brave New World, 1984, and The Rape of Nanking. It has been a difficult and important experience for me.

Reading Dostoyevsky was eye opening, if just for the fact that as much as people change, we stay the same, and the Communists were using some of the same idealistic arguments for changing the world in 1860s Russia that they are now. The idea that we are simply products of social conditioning, the tabula rasa and nothing more, the victims of our upbringing, were all central tenants in the severity of punishments for people being sent to Gulag in the Soviet Union. Prostitution was 3 years and being a nun was 10 Years. It technically wasn’t illegal to be a Christian, but teaching your children Christian values was! Families were purposely torn apart.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that learning more history, and just how badly things can go wrong, is very important and anyone who encourages people to seek out that history on their own is good in my book.

Not a Jordan Peterson fan but don't think you should've been downvoted for complaining about the comparisons.

Peterson galvanizes the alt-right and he also pushes ridiculous conspiracy theories. His conspiracy theories are much more mundane than the likes of Alex Jones and crisis actors proponents, but that likely makes him more dangerous.

I'd say he very much belongs there.

I don't even know who he is, but the blatant politicization of the issue immediately turned me off to the whole article.