Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by timpattinson | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

timpattinson

Welcome to the era of the fully automated youtube channel.

Reddit scraper -> voice synthesizer -> Programmatic video editing tool -> youtube API

For extra credit add some kind of ML tool to identify "stories" in comments

Trash content, but a lot of people seem to watch it [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QIh3GSgPPk

View on HN

Your comment also reminds me a lot of the James Bridle piece from a few years ago about creepy, semi-automated YouTube content targeting kids:

"Other channels do away with the human actors to create infinite reconfigurable versions of the same videos over and over again. What is occurring here is clearly automated. Stock animations, audio tracks, and lists of keywords being assembled in their thousands to produce an endless stream of videos. The above channel, Videogyan 3D Rhymes — Nursery Rhymes & Baby Songs, posts several videos a week, in increasingly byzantine combinations of keywords."

https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...

I already view the “meme” phenomenon the same way: a creepy, possibly semi-automatically generated image based on random keywords.

Also, some of these videos are pretty disturbing or inappropriate for their intended audience. This phenomenon has been dubbed the "Elsagate" on Reddit.

I was talking to a friend about these about a week ago and it hit me how easy it would be to fully automate one of those channels. I started looking into scraping and automatic screenshots with selenium. After a little bit, it didn't feel right and I did a bit of thinking. I decided that (for me at least) it's not cool to use other people's experiences to profit off of in such a way. I really like the idea of completely automated workflows, but if it's going to be taking advantage of people's personal experiences, I don't think it's the way to go.

I'm with you on this. But if we think of this process as akin to a funnel, I really wonder about the people making it all the way to the bottom. It suggests a lot of stuff is getting created by people who just blow right past the ethical considerations.

It's mostly because YT actually pushes this garbage, while demonetizing or banning real people with tons of subscribers.

And then post that video back to reddit.

And then scrape youtube comments in videos posted on /r/videos and pass them as your own comment on the corresponding reddit posts.

Free karma.

Very strange indeed. I think I started seeing videos with content from AskReddit on YouTube last year with several thousands of views. My first thought was well why don’t these viewers just go on Reddit and read it there instead.

I prefer audio over text, so text to speech is my preferred medium if a high quality voice is used, such as the ones from Google. No TTS browser extension I have tried has a good ux. Article Reader and Evie on android are okay.

I read Reddit often and I honestly do enjoy those TTS compilations.

They're low effort, sure. But it's a different format and allows me to do other things while hearing creepy stories or whatnot.

Until now couldn't the "Programmatic video editing tool" step be replaced with ffmpeg via CL?

Not just Reddit. The other day I googled a fish my brother was interested in for his aquarium. There was a YT vid composed of a text-to-speech of a popular aquarium site's page on the fish, along with scrolling images from a Google image search on the fish variety.

It's been going on for a few years, but seems to have gotten worse lately.

I look forward to someone building Narrated Hacker News.

Startup idea: auto twitch highlight to youtube aggregator as a service.

Put in your channel, upload your intro, outro, and paid testimonial for raid: shadow whatever, profit.

Last I checked ByteDance (TikTok) bills itself as an AI company. This may have just been a pitch to woo investors, but this sort of thing would naturally fall into an AI business' revenue model.

I remember an old Maya demo where it would lipsync a face mesh with an audio track. The technology is there to have a fully automated news mascot read you the stories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_farm

Reply on news.ycombinator.com