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Comment by Cd00d | Hacker News Reader

I saw a woodworker on TikTok say he intentionally does something in every video that is against standard practice and appears unsafe, because that drives comments which then drive his revenue.

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I saw this technique in a cooking video, someone called pomegranate seeds “strawberries”. There were a lot of comments, half of them were about the mistake, while the other half were saying that the mistake was intentional. I guess it’s a modern version of a flame bait?

ElectroBOOM on youtube has 5.2M subscribers and that's exactly what he does: Every video he zaps himself, but while also trying to be educational.

I prefer EEVBlog as a result: No nonsense, no clickbaity titles (mostly). He's discussed the merits of "selling out" and had a frank discussion online with ElctroBOOM:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UStV3zyhgnQ

I've watched him for years, and I think what he does is different from what we're talking about with this new form of viral content. Electroboom zaps himself because people think it's funny to see a guy hurt himself, and it's also impressive in some respect that he's good enough at what he does that he can do controlled, but safe stunts like that.

I think what the previous poster is talking about with this woodworker guy is he tries to make himself look incompetent so people will go to the comments and point out his "mistake." Electroboom would never expect people to go "hey, you shouldn't do that, it's dangerous." Whereas it's normal to bait people into engaging in that way on tiktok.

I think the parent comment is really onto something here. Isn’t this just weaponizing Cunningham’s Law?

Few people can resist the pull of being a smart-ass and telling others they are doing things wrong. It’s kind of brilliant.

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