Hacker News Reader

Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

> Linus Sebastian

Something to understand, for those who might have just seen some youtube videos of him being goofy, is that he's an actor. The guy on camera doing stupid stuff is a stage persona. It's an intentionally cultivated image and media persona to get as many video views as possible.

I sort of see him as one possible aspect of the low/medium budget TV production stuff which is common in his home city, Vancouver BC. People who've met and worked with him in person report that he's a much more normal, calm, rational individual off screen.

I won't judge him for being goofy on camera because it's hard to make a living as a working actor. For every person who gets a job in a vancouver-produced TV drama that might last 2 or 3 seasons, there's dozens more people who are working as restaurant servers while trying to get their big break.

View on HN

Sebastian and Linus Media Group seem to be pretty frank and open about a lot of this: see for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzRGBAUz5mA&list=PL8mG-RkN2u... on putting up gurning thumbnails and navigating the YT algorithm (and that whole playlist, including a revenue breakdown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t73wXF8IF-8&list=PL8mG-RkN2u... ), the Gamers Nexus video on LTT's production process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdOBFu-mYpw and the coverage LTT regularly lavishes on its own production setup and process, from a nearly-12m video about the awkwardness of ingesting video from their new 12K cameras https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pocfGBQZUSI to seemingly quite genuine fly-on-the-wall coverage of temporarily losing their data to a RAID failure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSrnXgAmK8k . Obviously you always have to take anyone's self-presentation with a grain of salt. But they're certainly not hiding the fact that there's a more grounded reality behind the "on" personas.

TIL the word "gurn". Never once heard it before and even just now autocorrect tried to insist it was "turn". The description is indeed apt for what I see in a lot of thumbnails.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurn

It's competitive in the UK: https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/41282197

It's also quite well-known to users of certain psychoactive drugs.

I wonder how many potential views he loses due to his gurning? I've never watched any of his videos despite YT constantly recommending them to me because I've got a personal rule about never clicking on a thumbnail that has a picture of someone pulling a face or which has a clickbait title.

I would assume it's a net win for those people to have those thumbnails.

Far less than he gains from doing the same, which is the point.

You are in a tiny minority of users. If this didn't work they wouldn't do it.

If I can be honest nobody wants the high maintenance viewer with personal rules about this and that little thing anyway. It's exhausting and they definitely use adblock haha

Unfortunately, you're the only one missing out by skipping dumb thumbnails. Obviously a lot of dumb thumbnails have dumb videos, but not all.

I agree with your principles but I'm not strong enough to stick to them. I just installed the addon YouTube Clickbait Remover, which uncapitalizes titles and replaces thumbnails with a frame from the video.

That's an oddly specific rule, but okay.

I find enough of their videos to be informative enough that I continue to watch those that I think would interest me. I've become a regular for the their TechLinked channel as I find it entertaining as well as informative but their longer videos and unboxing videos I'll cherry pick: I'll watch reviews of products I'm interested in but I tend to skip the extravagant/outlandish builds they do as I find them pointless since I wont be doing anything like that myself.

Some people will stick to watching because of the content, others will actually click on them because of the thumbnails. As they explained (and I'm sure his is the most cited one), it's a simple numbers game. Min-maxing Youtube, so to speak. Or growth hacking, to put it in hip startup crowd terminology.

I mean the HC community and YC companies have no qualms about discussing and promoting the best practices for a good landing page, every time someone comes in to promote their product there will be unsolicited advice about that. It's the same thing, but instead of saying "you should put caps in your title and have an expressive face in the thumbnail" it'll be about the content on the landing page like "you need a screenshot".

You're getting a lot of flak for this, but I agree with you and stand by this principle. I have certainly missed out on good content – in the case of LTT, I had some friends convince me it was worth it and they were, of course, right.

But on the other hand, I've saved myself many hours of having clicked through a stupid face thumbnail to some bland algorithmic HeyGuysWhatsUpThisIs-type crap.

LTT actually A/B tested this and found out that pulling a face with the item in front + grabby title WAY outperformed the alternative.

Which is crap, but that's the world we live in. They do excellent content nevertheless. LTT and MKBHD are the only two tech review style Youtubers I bother following. They get to the point, know their shit and speak calmly.

Linus learned all of this over the years, and optimized it over time. He's great at it now, but was pretty rough at first -- but he was never an actor, he was a geek that loved technology. He worked for a large computer reseller that gave him lots of resources when he was starting.

He actually built this in spite of all the production resources that Vancouver has to offer, and is more a "growth hacker" than actor I'd say.

SOURCE: Linus is a friend...

I think comedian might be a more accurate way to describe him. "Actor" somewhat implies deception which I'm sure is not what is intended by the GP. Interestingly, in French comédien means "actor", while they have a different word for the newer English definition of comedian: humoriste. In any case, the point is who he is on screen is a character that he has developed. There's nothing at all wrong with that. In fact, such characters are usually celebrated!

(Perhaps you should ping him just in case he might be interested in dropping in to this HN thread?)

Linus Tech Tips is essentially the "Top Gear of Tech" - it's over the top, hammed up, but eminently watchable and there are plenty of nuggets of useful information.

I was an avid reader of tech magazines, LTT has replaced them for me. Partly because those magazines' budgets have kept on being reduced year after year, and the quality has dipped, but also because of the quality of those "nuggets" that you mention.

In French we say "veille technologique" which seems to coincide with "technology intelligence" in English, but it's a lot less intense: I just like knowing what's out there, keep informed, and LTT's format is just that: highly digestible updates on storage technology, network infrastructure, hardware and everything tech.

It's more watchable than Top Gear for me. Maybe LTT employs better actors but in any case I believe in its candid elements more. On Top Gear it's completely obvious it's all scripted but we're expected to believe it's not. I find it very annoying and quite uncomfortable to watch.

They did Lampshade[1] the supposed scripting in an episode of Grand Tour[2]. They've got a huge crew and lots of stuff, so going over borders is a huge hassle without extensive preparation. Basically it needs to be scripted to some point to work at all.

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging [2] S2E4, Unscripted: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6068870/

People watch videos largely for entertainment, even when the subject matter is a review of computer hardware or advice concerning technology. For pure informational value, a written format with occasional short illustrative video clips is usually more useful.

I think every successful youtuber has a cultivated stage persona because that's more entertaining than just watching an everyday person talk about a mechanical keyboard for 15 minutes.

You can in fact watch a professional chemist talk about a mechanical keyboard for 15 minutes on a pretty successful YouTube channel, but he's definitely going to be using his larger-than-life stage persona: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui_wOiUDPvM .

Do you mean that he's an actor in the sense that he's acting while on camera, or that he's an actor in the sense that his aspirations from the start have been the actual profession and art of acting, but he just failed to get into it and this stuff is his backup? I get the impression that you mean the latter, but it seems far more likely that it's the former. Not that it's unlikely he didn't at some point try and get into film, but he's been in tech sales and reviews from before he ever would have had a real go at failing to get into acting gigs.

The first part.

I didn't mean so much that he's a person who tried and didn't get a part on a Vancouver-produced TV show, but that his video production efforts are part of the whole general Vancouver and Toronto "hollywood north" industry scene of people who act, do camera work, set decoration, costume, cinematography, sound, rigging, grips, etc.

No, it's more "roll your own" but has worked well.

From an outsider's perspective it looks like a "roll your own" using some of the existing knowledge base, talent pool and resources that exist floating around in the Vancouver video production industry... Undoubtedly some of what he's done in the past 3-4 years with a serious studio, cameras, editing, sound and lighting would be more difficult if he were not in Vancouver, but were in some location with much fewer constantly ongoing video productions (random example: Portland).

I never really thought of it that way, but I suppose you're probably right to some extent. Though I'd wager you could achieve similar technical/artistic results with a decent local college that has an arts program or an engineering school. I always thought it was a suprising success, because he's actually located quite a distance from Vancouver proper, in kind of a suburb called Langley. As a local, I've been there about once, but there have been locals that have made there way onto bigger productions like Silicon Valley. It would be too far for me to realistically work there even if I had a car, not that they're knocking at my door, but surely some of their staff have attended schools quite a distance from there.

As a person in the Vancouver area: a lot of the film industry is out in east Burnaby, the industrial area of New West/Poco/Coquitlam, Surrey and the Fraser Valley for access to lower cost warehouse space, for sound stages/sets, and parking spaces... I don't know precisely where the Linus studios are but I wouldn't be surprised if they're in the industrial area near the south side of the golden ears bridge.

Most of the Hallmark Christmas movies are filmed around Langley and Fort Langley. All of them maybe. :)

LTT is probably only 20 minutes away, not that there's any association.

Oh, I forgot about those areas. Used to work in South Burnaby and there was definitely some filming happening there. I guess I normally think of North Shore studios, and areas more directly around Van, but certainly you'll save money going further out. Forgot about the Coquitlam areas as well, with such places as the well-known mental hospital. In east-van now, so as is tradition, I assume nowhere else exists ;)

>Vancouver-produced TV

Many shows now make sense.

Yeh he's just amping up aspects of his personality - and didn't Linus actually start as an employee of one of the lager Canadian pc suppliers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com