How primitive building videos are staged [video] | Hacker News Reader

How primitive building videos are staged [video]

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105 pointsgronky_44 comments

When stuff like this comes up, I always think about the following story about the great Hanoi Rat Massacre.

>During the beginning of the campaign in April 1902 the Government-General of French Indochina hired professional Vietnamese rat-catchers, these would descend into the sewers to hunt the rats down, and be paid for each rat that they had eliminated.

A FEW MOMENTS LATER

>The rat hunters amputated their tails and then let them escape so they could breed and create more offspring with tails to then repeat the process.[10] Furthermore, there were also reports that some Vietnamese people were deliberately smuggling in rats from outside Hanoi into the city.[10] The final straw for this plan was when French health inspectors discovered rat farming operations popping up in the countryside on the outskirts of Hanoi, that were breeding rats solely for their tails as some sort of "tail creation factories".

Made me think of The Cobra Effect, and it turns out the Hanoi Rat Massacre is mentioned in the same Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

"tax the rat farms"

An identical story is told about Seattle in the late 19th/early 20th Century... bounty on rats paid upon presentation of the tail, followed by kids setting up rat ranches in their basements and back yards.

Except for Primitive Technology:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA

The video starts off with this exception. For anyone else out there worried that this video was about him, worry not and go long with your day.

Faith in the internet is restored

Hopefully they will incorporate this exception into their headline; this is the only "primitive" channel with which I was familiar.

> Hopefully they will incorporate this exception into their headline; this is the only "primitive" channel with which I was familiar.

There's only so much you can fit into a headline before it becomes too unwieldy. They pretty clearly indicated that one was legit, and it was used as a truthful example throughout the video. They even used that creator as a kind of outside expert to evaluate the fake videos.

Just one additional word needed. No excuse. Ironically, this clickbait style is similar to the fraud being described in the video.

> Just one additional word needed. No excuse. Ironically, this clickbait style is similar to the fraud being described in the video.

The title is "How primitive building videos are staged," what one additional word to you propose adding to distinguish the Primitive Technology channel's videos from all others? If you're thinking something like "many," that really doesn't really clarify much if anything.

It clarifies that there's more than one and only some of them are fake. if you've only seen the original it reduces the clockbate-iness of the video because you can then presume that the original one you saw is actually legit and it's the second comers that are fake, without watching the video.

> ...without watching the video.

No, it's a mistake to rely on a headline like that. A headline isn't a precis.

I always thought that he was some kind of an engineering/anthrophology/... proessor/TA, and after showing a few examples (eg. how a brick is made), a team of students took over the work for a lab course, each of them made 20 more :)

I also expect people like Chad Zuber (https://youtube.com/@ChadZuberAdventures) and a few other in that style to be legitimate.

Basically you have the ones doing it for fun / as a lifestyle, where progress is slow and that cover many elements of survival/primitive life. And those who build a new house with pool every week or so

I feel bad for the Primitive Technology guy. He started this genre, and there's only so much you can do honestly. People's appetite for ever-iterating content is still there to be exploited, and others have taken his concept and run with it.

The email from Primitive Technology says it all:

>[...] But wanting to stay out of internet drama. I'll leave it up to the discerning viewer to decide what's real or not.

My advice to people who really want to know if the techniques on display are legitimate is to put them into practice and see. If you can follow the steps and get a similar result then it's probably legit. [...]

For people with some dirt in their hands/construction experience it is obvious most of the time, so I kind of suspect that some part of the audience knows that they are served a package here: ordinary construction work delivered in the popular style of PT. A soothing fantasy.

You mean the video of 2 guys building a Disney resort out of mud in few weeks is fake ?

As a programmer, I don't see a problem with that estimation.

I could've done it in an afternoon, they really used the wrong stack.

Ninja Rockstar 100x primitive builder here, I agree!

Seriously, I don't begrudge these people one bit. They saw an opportunity and seized it. Admirable in my opinion. Specifically, the videos are so clearly fake it's hard to understand how anyone can be fooled to believe they're real. I mean "throwing" 50 tons of dirt out of a hole to build these things is just too much.

Building on fakes and lies is not admirable at all

The Tucker Carlson Defense

(Nothing personal)

Are we at a point where the best heuristic is to assume fake until proven otherwise?

Frankly, you have to be pretty stupid if you thought it was possible for 2 dudes to build a waterpark in the jungle out of mud with a couple of rocks.

This has been my attitude for a while, although my use of TikTok really ramped up my disillusion. The amount of cringe-worthy fakery on that app makes YouTube look sane by comparison.

The best heuristic is if there is money to be made then assume some bad agent will find a way to exploit it, always.

Fake videos are just one corollary of this.

That is how I was raised to approach the internet approx. 20 years ago, still seems like good advice today.

> That is how I was raised to approach the internet approx. 20 years ago, still seems like good advice today.

The ironic thing is, back then, fakery was less common and easier to spot.

I'd say most of the time the split between legit or not is fairly obvious:

- legit: focuses on "simple" builds that they usually work on for months. They also cover many topics and techniques relative to primitive life

- fake: build a "primitive" house with pool every few weeks

when have we ever not been at that point?

I think it's important to be honest, but my kids are mesmerized by these videos. I'd rather them watch fake build videos over the videos of kids playing with toys or unboxing videos.

This guy has something like 100M views showing himself totally bored finding comical amounts of surface "gold". He turns off comments on most of his videos now though:

https://www.youtube.com/@MaximovRo

Same is true with some cooking/food videos... and luckily there are people actually debunking them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSBSzWmjXO0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eINllOc0hc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf9lD523C_k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3st8RSq4bq8

etc.

I’ve seen these videos abs thought that this was laughably obvious and didn’t need an expository video. Who’s fooled? The content is still mildly entertaining when understood to be an act.

YouTube ironically also listed a bunch of other videos about faked YouTube videos.

Another fake video trend is some people gluing barnacles on land turtle's shells, then pretending it's a sea turtle and then making a video where they removes the glued barnacles.

Another trend is fake restoration videos, fake animal rescues, etc...

There is also a spate of videos of two different cute animals together (like a puppy and duckling playing, etc.). A lot of those are produced by content farms and heaven knows how the animals are treated when the cameras are off.

I was always skeptical of the amount of people coming across overturned turtles, disgusting behaviour.

Could we skip to the point that in any trend there will be fakes. A trend is a fad and while they reoccur every so often the ones that are prepared stands to make the most.

I am ok being entertained and not knowing the magic tricks.

The magic trick here is destruction of a forest, not confetti in a jacket sleeve.

I mean...did we really think the vast, perfectly square construction projects, filmed with expensive cameras were in fact roughing it alone out in the wilderness?

It feels like this video is a lot of pearl clutching about how many views these projects get...while being a video getting a lot of views and ad revenue.

This video doesn’t destroy a forest while the other ones do.

This and similar investigations are raising awareness of the harm of watching and promoting these scammy channels.

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