The Strange Online Aesthetic of the YouTube Shooting Suspect | Hacker News Reader

The Strange Online Aesthetic of the YouTube Shooting Suspect

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40 pointsrhema51 comments

My YouTube channel also used to net closer to $1k/mo (about 100 coding tutorials) and as a result of frequent algorithm changes and algorithmic demonetization now nets shy of $100 per month.

I am not fond of Google's censorship first philosophy, their willingness to push their own viewpoints (many times not backed by logic, reasoning or data), or the fact that they build platforms marketed for the users and than once these platforms hit scale they kill off the teams that took care of the users in favor of all-in monetization of any kind.

It is very sad what happened, but for a company with such a large monopoly in search and in online user-generated video I have expected better. I can see how this person would be furious if she lost nearly all of her income to a change with no way of fixing it.

To clarify, I also lost my highest grossing video to a copyright troll and YouTube ignored my support queries for 6 months before resolving it (about $400/mo lost in that time). They did not make any efforts to replace my lost income, and did not ban the copyright troll. I would have not been able to reach them to resolve it either if I just went through support. I had to send emails to support 3 times and than reach out on social media.

EDIT: And after a copyright troll steals your content, even if Google re-instates it the video seems to be lower in the search results. Being #1 for a search result is basically how you make money on YouTube if you aren't a YouTube personality. After several months of your content being removed it will lose several positions when it is visible in results again.

EDIT 2: http://youtube.com/devfactor

EDIT 3: Does anyone fear this is how large corporations in the "gig" economy will treat the people making them money in the future?

YouTube now treats creators as second rate citizens. It was definitely not like that when the platform was younger and still growing.

Many people make their living on YouTube, operating as a 1099 contractor similar to how many people are now making their living driving Lyft, Uber or similar services.

Once Uber and Lyft hit market saturation can we expect massive QoL declines for their drivers as well when the companies decide to pursue maximum profits since they no longer need market share?

Live by $PLATFORM, die by $PLATFORM.

The same story happened at YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and doubtlessly more that I am unfamiliar with; likely also with older media like TV and newspaper.

The problem is mostly lack of competitors for a specific item. Vimeo might work for you, but discoveribility on Vimeo is much lower - you’ll have to actively promote yourself more.

Creative section on Twitch is much more likely, as there is a culture of donation.

There's some demand for programming content there, especially if it can be applied to game development.

Here are three questions for content creators (not just you) that I have been turning over, because I have never considered their motivations until the past few months.

- What made you choose to make your living off YouTube?

- What was your perception of "making YouTube content as a livelihood" back then?

- Would you still do it if you were starting out today?

I didn't make a living off of it. Just fun money when I was in college.

I wouldn't waste time on that platform again. It takes far too much time and effort to fight things like demonetization and copyright trolling. Ad rates are continually dropping, search and discover are the worst they have ever been.

Most folks are at-will employees. 1099s should have no expectation of long term employment from a particular client.

This extends to YouTube. You may get money today, but they could easily cut you out tomorrow. You don't have a "right" to post videos on someone else's website and make money.

You don't have a right, but if a platform owner creates an expectation and then undermines it, people are going to get upset. People are animals, and animals like consistency. Mess with that and they will mess with you back.

This is one of those things where just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right. It's same thing with Facebook saying "we value your privacy" and then when it turns out they didn't, saying "yeah but did you read the toS it was right there in paragraph 73(n) lol", or governmental organizations passing laws and regulations that are virtually impossible to ever be in full compliance with.

This isn't employment, it's digital serfdom.

The benefits accrue almost exclusively to the Lord of the Manor who owns the digital territory on which the villeins seek to eke out a precarious existence.

If content creators removed their content en masse, we'd soon see more considerate behaviour from the distributors.

It is absolutely not serfdom, no one is compelling you or anyone else to 'work' for YouTube.

Serfs couldn't leave. You can quit whenever you want.

>My YouTube channel also used to net closer to $1k/mo (about 100 coding tutorials) and as a result of frequent algorithm changes and algorithmic demonetization now nets shy of $100 per month.

Please correct me if I'm missing something here: It appears like that channel hasn't had a new upload in some time. That could explain the drop in revenue, I wouldn't expect a channel to maintain the same revenue indefinitely without new content. At some point videos get saturated.

Making shooters and other kinds of serial killers into celebrities does a lot more to encourage future killers than it really 'educates' society on how to prevent it. Promoting these kinds of stories for sheer titillation purposes does more to undermine prevention of such crimes than anything else.

Yup. Here's the American Psychological Association statement about a study on the topic:

http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2016/08/media-contagi...

> “Unfortunately, we find that a cross-cutting trait among many profiles of mass shooters is desire for fame,” she said. This quest for fame among mass shooters skyrocketed since the mid-1990s “in correspondence to the emergence of widespread 24-hour news coverage on cable news programs, and the rise of the internet during the same period.”

> She cited several media contagion models, most notably one proposed by Towers et al. (2015), which found the rate of mass shootings has escalated to an average of one every 12.5 days, and one school shooting on average every 31.6 days, compared to a pre-2000 level of about three events per year. “A possibility is that news of shooting is spread through social media in addition to mass media,” she said.

> “If the mass media and social media enthusiasts make a pact to no longer share, reproduce or retweet the names, faces, detailed histories or long-winded statements of killers, we could see a dramatic reduction in mass shootings in one to two years,” she said. “Even conservatively, if the calculations of contagion modelers are correct, we should see at least a one-third reduction in shootings if the contagion is removed.”

Reading through her site and the like I see a lot of conspiracy - it's a theme - that things are far bigger than can be controlled - there is a secret and I am revealing it.

It's interesting how common that thread is in troubled people. Were there signs that could have been seen? Not many people saw her videos or site and if they did she was probably just skipped over as "the weirdo" and if someone suggested she seek help she might have seen it as part of the bigger conspiracy.

Not really going anywhere with this comment to be honest, it's just scary and I don't see any real easy solutions to this kind of situation. There are thousands of people with similar sites, similar youtube channels that will continue. They probably wont do anything horrible but maybe they will. They might seek help, they might not. It's kind of scary to me.

Unless you're a complete bore, if you look at someone hard enough you can make the case that they're a mental invalid. It's a useless thing to talk about, because prior to her shooting anyone yesterday, the only thing that could have warned us were just warning signs. Just as easily as she walked up to that office and shot people, she could have changed her mind and gone about a normal day and done nothing wrong. Does our society now support the idea of precrime?

I sure as hell don't. It bothers me when every time something like this happens, the question is always, "How could we have caught this?" or "how can we make sure she didn't get a gun?" or "how could we have institutionalized her?"

It's much more useful to talk about how to come to terms with the absolute chaos in our world and structure your life around the principle that the world is a fragile and dangerous place. Anyone can drive their car across the centerline. Any two-bit dipshit can learn how to make aluminum powder bombs and terrorize an entire city. Some crazy incel can walk up to your office and fuck your whole life up as you're leaving for lunch.

This will always be the case. I don't understand why people think it's reasonable to suggest that we can ever live in a world where your mortality isn't seriously exposed, or that it would be a world that would be nice to live in. Unless you're completely out of your fucking mind, most people are incapable of truly coming to terms with it and going about their day, willing to die at any time. Everyone else is afraid, and probably always will be.

I think some people cope with the fear by deluding themselves into thinking security is just around the corner, if only we can just fix a few things like gun access and mental invalids. We just need to do a few things just a little bit better, and then it's all going to be great. These people live in a fantasy world.

Others cope with the fear by isolating themselves and their families, avoiding cities and anyone unlike themselves, maintaining a small circle of trust, neanderthal style. This is antithetical to classical liberal values and thus is unappealing for most young and open-minded people.

If you think you reject both of these approaches, I think you're probably just in denial.

While I mostly share your point of view - not every horrible event is necessarily preventable short of some extremely draconian measures - I don't think it's just a matter of throwing our hands up and acquiescing that "Anyone can drive their car across the centerline" for example (and indeed there are sometimes barriers or physical space between opposing traffic lanes).

So the question isn't, "how could we have prevented this particular tragedy from occurring, at any cost?", but more "can we reduce the likelihood of an event like this in the future, in a way we're comfortable with?"

For example, locking cockpit doors on airplanes is a pretty low-consequence action we now take as a result of 9/11. Not entirely without tradeoffs, sure, but a fairly effective action nonetheless.

Air travel in general is actually a pretty great example of making something relatively chaotic considerably safer over time.

There is something to what you say but in this case, as with the Parkland shooting, law enforcement received specific warnings from family members that were not followed through on sufficient to prevent the incidents. The police likely already have all the legal powers they would have needed in these two cases to prevent the shootings if they had acted and a specific warning from a family member is a long way from treating some odd Internet postings as thought crime. Indeed there have been cases where police over reacted to much lesser warning signs. The biggest question to me is how can law enforcement do a better job of acting appropriately on warnings and tips they receive?

http://www.businessinsider.com/nasim-aghdam-youtube-shooter-...

If none of having guns, being inclined to commit crime, or having guns while being inclined to commit crime are illegal, there is little police can do to intervene before those things combine to manifest in an actual attempt at violence.

If police are incapable of intervening to prevent a crime then citizens certainly need guns to protect themselves.

It’s true absolute security is impossible, but mass shooting is much more prevalent in the UD than anywhere else not at war, so there is likely a chance to provide much more security by figuring out what goes wrong in the US that is less so in other places.

I am partial to approach 2, although i live in the city and agree that it is rather backwards and impractical. I have a third approach that I use, I go on adventures. Whether its backpacking in the wilderness for a week, summiting a mountain or swimming down a river and riding rapids with friends, the point is to expose yoursef to the dangers of the world, to have to rely on yourself to not make mistakes and to be hardy enough to overcome. Coming into camp after dark, freezing, tired and wet, setting up camp and sleeping through the night only to wake up at dawn, put on cold wet shoes and pack it all up and get to walking puts in perspective, for me at least, how powerful of a driver the will to live is. Experiencing the raw primal power that a life-or-death situation has on you, when your life is in your own hands(vs driving a car which is a team effort and much more controlled) really puts in perspective how dangerous society isn't.

My thinking wasn't to "stop" this fully - but seeings signs of mental health and offering support can vastly lower the occurrences. Something we as a society are terrible at. There's always a chance of course no matter how good we get at lowering the harm but if we can lower the harm that's always somethign to strive for.

Mental illness doesn't predict violent behaviour.

Drug or alcohol addiction do; previous exposure to violence or previous violent behaviour does; but mental illness by itself is a poor predictor for violence.

Increasing the amount of mental health support available is a good thing to do, but it probably wont do much to stop gun crime.

I'm just making a point. Of course there is a middle ground that we should strive for. I would just caution that hindsight is 20/20. There's plenty of stuff on /r/deepintoyoutube that is made by perfectly sane individuals that, if you were told it was made by this shooter, we'd call it a clear warning sign.

That is a great thought process that I agree with but haven't been able to put it in words. I ascribe it to 'hindsight being crystal clear'. Of course it is. There always seems to be dots that can be connected once 'something' happens - regardless of what that 'something' is. But until that 'something' happens, the dots are without meaning and who cares about connecting them.

We should all learn about the conspiracy fallacy: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla... (Which doesn't claim that no conspiracies exist, only disputing the claim that the conspirators are hiding the evidence against them as evidence itself)

I also see an external locus of control worldview. "Things are done to me" instead of "I star in my own show". That is associated with depression and possibly other psychological disorders.

http://www.kellevision.com/kellevision/2009/06/depression-he...

>We should all learn about the conspiracy fallacy

I'm not sure where you're going with this. Conspiracy fallacy is trivially observed by outsiders, and mentally ill people aren't going to suddenly back down from their arguments just because you pointed out their logic is fallacious.

> and mentally ill people aren't going to suddenly back down from their arguments just because you pointed out their logic is fallacious

This assertion is tantamount to saying the entire field of psychology and psychotherapy is bullshit. That is literally all they do, talk you out of your erroneous beliefs about yourself and erroneous worldviews or habitually negative thoughts.

Well, the notion of fixing people by telling them whats wrong with them is bullshit. Lucky for us, most of psychology has moved beyond this antiquidated fruedian thinking.

No it isn’t, and one of the tenants of dealing with delusional people is that you don’t engage with their delusions, don’t try to refute them.

That would be like trying to help treat someone’s cold by preventing them from sneezing.

To be honest I find the content on her website pretty normal according to my standards. Only the paranoid about the dictator part can be called conspiracy but that's just a very broad idea and nothing specific. Other contents are just rants and strong opinions on issues on demonetization or animal abuse.

There are far more incomprehensible and scarier content on the Internet if you know how to find them.

Humans are logical and rational, but can be illogical and irrational in the same breadth. Sometimes people are configured less trusting, some too trusting, everyone is trying to figure out the world.

Many of the things you mention, that there is some bigger power and belief being bigger than the reality, could also be applied to religious people which can also be troubling in many extreme areas such as cults or killing people that don't believe. Terrorism is largely a religious side effect of some belief that is avenging against a conspiracy. Conspiracy in a way is a religion, but some conspiracies are true and most people have seen humans be devious in small groups even at their workplace or in business, so it goes back to trust/belief as some challenge authority, some trust too much. Conspiracy has ranges just like religion but they may come from the same place, people trying to simplify their world with many unknowns or to deal with emotional issues, standing in society, trust in authority or too much confirmation bias.

All of this just goes back to the irrational side of humanity and the human condition where people are figuring out their world, anything that doesn't have a least a good hold in reality, solely based on belief over common trust and facts, can go off the rails.

been thinking lately, we might have a bias towards fear because it's better to mistake a stick for a snake than the reverse, some people's genes go too far with this and get anxiety disorders.

maybe we also have a bias toward detecting betrayal, reciprocity being a big thing for mammals. humans needed to constantly track who was allied with whom in order to predict their behavior. so maybe some people's genes go too far detecting betrayal and they end up paranoid.

There were certainly signs that could have been and were seen. Her father warned police: http://www.businessinsider.com/nasim-aghdam-youtube-shooter-...

Those symptoms are classic paranoid schizophrenia[1] (which is not uncommon, but many 'troubled people' have other problems).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoid_schizophrenia#Symptom...

I don't think it's a good idea to do psychiatric diagnoses on the basis of a comment about an article about her website.

> They probably wont do anything horrible but maybe they will. They might seek help, they might not. It's kind of scary to me.

It also goes without saying that there are many other more prosaic dangers to you than a vegan scizophrenic conspiracy theorist with a grudge against YouTube. But if it bleeds, it leads, I guess.

> It's interesting how common that thread is in troubled people.

Probably because it sounds like a symptom of schizophrenia.

It certainly is a symptom but when you have massive subreddits dedicated to conspiracy just saying having those kind of thoughts means you should seek help probably wont help much...

I don't think that it's correct to pathologize this. Aghbad had a pretty clear radical vegan agenda to her output, and a history of campaigning in that space. She became angry that unilateral changes in YouTube policies wrecked her income stream and felt that Youtube and other firms engaged in non-transparent behavior to promote some content creators and suppress others.

Not many people saw her videos or site

Her site includes screenshots of videos with ~300k views/mo for which she received $0.10 in revenue. That's quite a respectable number for a fringe artist. I don't put out videos myself but I have to agree that $0.10 is a pretty crap payout for 300k views a monetizable video, and have long thought that YouTube's general lack of transparency about revenue is unfair to the people who use the platform. This is the basic problem of commercial platforms as described by our own patio11: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/939907045985107968?lang=e...

If they did she was probably just skipped over as "the weirdo"

It's weird to you but there's an audience for this style of art, which originates with a style called Vaporwave. It's deliberately lofi and DIY, and her web page points out that her (quite respectable) numbers of followers on various online platforms are organic rather than gained via SEO and so forth.

Look, the tech industry's basic invitation to content creators is "if you find your passion and build organic followings our blog/video/music platform will help you to monetize that relationship."

But the reality, and one I've been pointing out here for several years, is that online marketplaces tend to yield highly artificial bimodal income distributions rather than the approximate Pareto distributions that obtain in the natural world. We don't know how income is distributed on most platforms because the platform operators are not transparent about their pricing or revenue distribution, but it's not unreasonable to infer that different contributors are paid different rates for the same number of views depending upon their ability to drive ad growth, stickiness and other metrics. The problem for content creators is that the revenue is a black box, and so they're effectively playing a slot machine.

Monetizing content is a topic that often comes up on HN, and a frequent argument is that people shouldn't rely on view revenue but monetize with a Patreon, or selling merch, or using crowdfunding to support each project whose output is then later distributed free and so on. The problem for content creators is that the revenue model keeps changing and anyone who becomes invested in a business model is constantly playing catch-up as platform operators continually move the goalposts for all but the most successful contributors who are popular enough to negotiate a payout rate. It shouldn't be a surprise that if you put people in a state of constant economic anxiety then some of them will eventually snap and get mad about it. The lack of transparency or agency in digital micropayments is a stressor that platform operators choose to impose.

I want to be clear here that my argument is not that YouTube owed Aghbad an audience or popularity. Rather, she managed to cultivate an audience only to be told at some point that it was no longer eligible to be paid for and that her audience (~10k views a day) wasn't even worth the price of a sandwich.

It’s a warning sign for delusional and paranoid ideation, which can be the result of a pretty startling number of issues. Drugs can cause delusions/paranoia, schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder, delusional disorder, mania, and so on can all present in that way. It’s important to remember that it’s quite rare for that kind of person to be a threat to anyone other than themselves though. Most poled who think like her, or think they’re being “gang stalked” or any of a myriad of strange-to-delusional beliefs are just miserable, exhausted people, not a threat.

However it’s also true that of the small number of mentally ill people who on to harm others, people with paranoid ideation are one of the two groups who are more likely to be violent. The other group are people who are psychotic, and may harm people under the instructions of “voices” or in extreme cases, just not have any idea what they’re doing.

Again however, those “likely” groups are still seriously unlikely to be violent against anyone other than themselves, in general.

Looks to me like she was always a bit 'out there' – possibly even in productively creative ways! – and wanted to be an avant-garde YouTube star.

But, because of her own limits in finding an audience (or tuning herself to an audience), or simply never having a lucky lightning-strike of fame, she didn't get the attention and wealth she wanted, and simmered with resentments.

Some background mental disorder(s) flared up – maybe due to some recent personal relationship or financial crisis, or drug/medication issues – causing a larger delusional/paranoid break from reality and civilized behavior. (Though, it may come out that she'd had other less-violent breaks in the past.)

Her known behavior before the violence doesn't strike me as that different from lots of other histrionic online personalities, or righteous ranters (either on mass media or in online niches), many with gigantic followings.

> Critics and audiences have always been interested in the difference between an artist who seems to “mean” what they say, and one who is subverting that meaning. Does Cortright “mean” her videos, and if not, what makes them different from the “authentic” material created by Nasim Aghdam?

Jesus this article. It's grasping for some higher relevance beyond what we had here: a troubled, mentally unstable woman with an online aesthetic that didn't jive with what we in the West consider normal design standards.

It's not that we shouldn't be examining material like hers for patterns that could potentially prevent future tragedies like this. But this is just feels amateur and needlessly judgmental.

That's too dismissive. You may not be familiar with this aesthetic but it's actually got quite a following for the exact reasons the author mentions. So she was mentally unstable; so was Van Gogh and so have many innovative artists been through history (often due to their fraught economic circumstances). My read of this tragedy is "starving artist attacks the corporation that exploited her."

I wish there was more to this article. I think it's an interesting point, almost of an @dril flavour. But all this article seemed to boil down to was "hey, before anyone else covers this, look how weird the homepage of the shooter is".

I agree. The author did not even bother to make their point clear (something something aesthetics something virtual illusions something personality), did not even bother to speculate as much as they hinted they might. Shame.

I posted some ground school videos years ago when YouTube only allowed 10 minutes of video and they were monetized making around $100 every 3 months. YouTube is keeping that money now and even though it is a small amount I feel it is unfair. I can see how this woman became really angry. There is no alternative source to monetize videos other then YouTube and now the only way you can earn an income from it is to have a huge following.

Right, I think they said your content isn't monetized unless you have over 10k subscribers and X number of uploaded videos. This makes it hard to make money off of your cat, for example, as people click and share but don't subscribe. It's also harder to have a stream of these viral videos.

It's kind of sad that it went this way but I think it can open opportunities for alternatives to youtube.

It almost seems like a scaling thing at this point. If .1% of people will at some point commit a violent crime, at some scale you will have users that are in that .1%. At 1,000 users, it's only one person. At 1m users, you've got a sizeable population.

As an aside, I don't see much discussion surrounding the physical security (or lack of) at Youtube HQ. Not saying this could have been prevented, but most of my employers have had some form of card access system to limit the impact of events such as this.

Google uses a card access system.

Her site is 503 at the moment.

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