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Comment by varikin | Hacker News Reader

Does that matter? Is everyone suppose to be aware of this guy?

What? You aren't familiar with one random guy on the internet that maybe makes some videos in a very niche market that you may have never even heard of before? What? Do you have some sort of life of something preventing from crawling every single crevice on the interwebs?

Not quite as niche as you describe. He figured out how to fairly consistently hit youtube recommendations / top videos. If you use youtube, there's quite a good chance you've seen one of his videos on the frontpage or seen his name a few times, even if you never watched them or aren't interested in his content.

This may be something you haven't considered, but there are ways of using YT with never seeing the front page. Some people don't just "browse" YT, or watch video after video after video following some algorithmically chosen playlist. It is possible to watch a single specific video and then leave the site. Just like you can also read a single tweet without infinitely scrolling through the bedlam.

Please elucidate me as to how you browse hacker news, and then explain how that differs from the method of browsing Youtube you bemoan.

On youtube- I search for a video, select the result I want, watch it, then leave. I browse hackernews and discover random content.

Exactly, isn't it a little hypocritical to say that twitter users are simply "infinitely scrolling through the bedlam", while posting on a website that requires scrolling for content discovery? I admit that Hacker News has magnitudes better content than twitter, but it's ironic nonetheless.

Not exactly exactly though is it? HN isn't infinite scroll. It's scroll to the bottom, mental decision to click More or not.

I mentioned recommendations and top videos. It doesn't matter if you visit the front page - there's a good chance you've seen Mark Robber's video thumbnail, whether you browse YT for content or not.

I have a bad news for you: youtube tailors their recommendations to each person. I know! It is difficult to belive.

Sarcasm aside I don’t know who this Mark person is. Never heard of him, never seen a video from him. And I’m quite okay with that. If you were to ask me what is trending on youtube I would tell you it is woodworking videos, zany snippets from musicals, and people discussing how a windpowered car can travel faster than the wind. But I also know that that tells more about my media habbits than youtube itself so I don’t generalise from this to everyone.

Try reading with a stronger interpretation. Of course I know recommendations are per-person - consider why I wrote that comment anyway. There's also a few videos digging into why Mark Robber's videos are consistently winning the popularity contest while others aren't.

I've been on youtube since the first day. I have no clue who Mark Roper is and have never watched one of his videos, never had them suggested to me. My feed is almost entirely cooking videos. The rest is random electronica.

You are picking a really dumb fight to be frank. It's ok if people have no clue who this Mark person is or what he does.

It's good that I'm not picking that fight then. I wrote "there's quite a good chance you've seen one of his videos". If you haven't, that's not unexpected and it doesn't change that he's a widely recognisable person in current zeitgeist.

I recognized the guy (and the video, which I likely had already seen), but his name wouldn't mean anything to me

I don’t know him by name but the porch pirate glitter bomb project video and subsequent controversy about the legitimacy of some of the footage was sort of front-page-of-the-web stuff for a time.

I also saw the timer arcade beating device prior. It was well done. He makes some cool stuff, but the former nasa thing and sort of YouTube pandering takes away from it for me.

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