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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

> How an animal lover’s hobby of recording himself feeding stray cats exemplifies the glory of the anonymous web.

When I saw this subhed, I thought immediately of Robin Seplut, a Youtuber I had never heard about until a month or so ago when Youtube put a 5-year-old video of him into my recs for some reason [0] (I like cat videos, and have clicked on them for years, but this was the first time I've seen one in my recs).

In any case, Seplut has 900K subscribers and dozens of videos of him feeding the 5,000 feral cats in his city. And the videos are a hoot – his most popular video has 46 million views [1].

The guy at the subject of this article seems to have videos with the same kind of appeal. I wonder how much of his obscurity has to do with his videos just not being labeled well?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTZUTvv_1Onm-f-533Hyurw

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfIqLAyNLY8

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Some of this guy's lack of popularity is down to his videos not being labelled well, but I think most of it is really due to the fact no one's promoting his work at all.

Because nowadays, that's pretty much the only way to succeed in any form of content creation. * Getting people/companies/sites with thousands or millions of viewers to share your work, and using their audience to bootstrap your own.

This guy obviously doesn't have that. So no one's finding his content, even if they'd enjoy watching it.

Or at least he didn't. Since thisa rticle was posted, his channel's gone from about 2000 subscribers to 12,000 subscribers, just like how it'd gone from 100 to 2000 once it was posted on those deep into YouTube style subreddits.

So he's finally getting a following, because people now know he exists and makes videos.

* For 99% of creators anyway. There's always the 1% of people who strike it big from pure luck/timing alone, usually because they managed to catch an upcoming trend before it hit the mainstream.

>> Some of this guy's lack of popularity is down to his videos not being labelled well

I do not envy the life of a struggling content creator. Having to always come up with titles like...

"Man feeds CATNIP to crazy fail dog"

...sounds like a special kind of hell to me.

If working life is about being paid for your time by providing valuable skills, paying, or learning for yourself, to get useful clickbait seems like every other skill to me. Ultimately it's a bit like all other interpersonal communications so if you enjoy making headlines or captions or brand spiels you can probably learn to love clickbait titles.

Though if all of that is wooly to you then yeah it's probably not your cup of tea, but I can assure you for people who have invested in that skill they probably quite enjoy the thrill of trying to craft the perfect clickbait title and now in the age of data the success of it is measurable, creating a tighter feedback loop...

> they probably quite enjoy the thrill of trying to craft the perfect clickbait title and now in the age of data the success of it is measurable, creating a tighter feedback loop...

They probably do, but they get that thrill at the emotional expense of the consumers. It's a fundamentally selfish act.

"Clickbait" really means that the title sets an expectation in the viewer that is more engaging than the content itself actually is. The viewer clicks and then ends up disappointed because the actual content is less rewarding than the title suggested. But at that point, the author's already claimed their precious ounce of attention and got what they wanted.

The name stuck for a reason. Fish don't end up happy that they ate the bait. Only the fisher does.

So I don't think we should be happy that people find this skill thrilling or rewarding any more than we should laud the thrill of a skilled pick-pocket or con artist.

Headline writing has been a skill since long before there were clicks.

Sure, headlines can veer into the misleading and there are certain particularly annoying online patters. But the whole purpose of a headline is to entice you to read.

Thumbnails have gotten mad too. To get CTR, they have to be obvious and alluring to a 3 year old with 0.1 seconds of attention. Having a detailed thumbnail appropriate to your content is throwing away revenue. Some content creators cycle through 5-10 thumbnails based upon metrics during the first 12 hours.

> but I think most of it is really due to the fact no one's promoting his work at all

Anecdotal evidence time. I write and self-publish my own poetry chapbooks, distributing them (via Smashwords) to places like Apple Books.

Most of the chapbooks will get downloaded from various venues once or twice a month. Except for one chapbook which averages around 10 downloads a day (7ish from Apple Books, the rest from Google Play). Given that the average print run for a traditionally published chapbook of poems is around 400 total, that is a phenomenal rate - especially as I do nothing whatsoever to promote my books.

How did this state of affairs come about? As far as I can work out, soon after I uploaded the chapbook in question Apple decided to "recommend" it for a week or so, which put it on the front page when searching their site for "poetry". And after it made the front page, it just stayed there, bobbing up and down in the top 100.

Why did this happen? I assume they chose to promote it because the chapbook's title is (unintentionally) a bit clickbait-y. Either that, or pure luck.

Its actually mostly about not being labled well (or at all) and being to short, sound qualitys not mega good.

I suspect this is a labour of love by a Cat Otaku, who wasn't concerned with views subs etc.

Most views from yahoo come from being in the recommendations side bar.

> Some of this guy's lack of popularity is down to his videos not being labelled well, but I think most of it is really due to the fact no one's promoting his work at all. Because nowadays, that's pretty much the only way to succeed in any form of content creation. * Getting people/companies/sites with thousands or millions of viewers to share your work, and using their audience to bootstrap your own.

Isn't this one of the reasons for recommendation engines--to surface content that users might like, as opposed to the traditional way where he who spends the most on promotion wins? Why are all these tech companies investing $billions into AI and recommendations if simple payola is still what drives popularity? Whenever an article points out the negative effects of recommendation engines (filter bubbles, etc.), someone always says "Well, AI is better at surfacing long-tail content that would never get promoted." Yet, here we are in 2019 and content creators are still relying on promotion to get views.

> I thought immediately of Robin Seplut

Ditto. His videos are great, I've been watching them for a long time. He never says anything other than the now infamous "ksksksksks." But he does at least label his videos so if someone searches for cat, they will find it.

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