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Comment by Salgat | Hacker News Reader

For people confused like me on what intensification means, it means maximizing the amount of attention and interaction that occurs. On Youtube this would be the metrics that drive engagement, including views, likes, comments, shares, and watch time. The issue is that the content focuses on driving engagement at the expense of communicating ideas with coherence and depth, for example by sensationalizing or oversimplifying a complex issue (especially for things like political discourse focused on sound bites and emotional appeals, or with virtue signaling and outrage culture). I think the above commentor is right, in my opinion, intensification shapes our world into being very reactionary, with only a superficial understanding of issues, and platforms like Youtube Shorts and Tiktok take this to its furthest possible level.

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For an excellent, prescient, hilarious, and terrifying book on this topic, I highly recommend "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman.

OP here -- excellent suggestion, I've been heavily influenced by this book and would also recommend Postman's "Technopoly"

Thank you for writing this, and making it available online!

When researching+writing this, did you find it useful to look through McLuhan's "Medium is the Message" lens? If so, what are the "message" implications of this ouroboric/circular/whirlpool medium?

The creators publication frequency is also an important factor. If you don't put out content at least once per week you fall off the recommended and lose a lot of views. Once your content is shallow, simple and without reflection, you are trapped in a hamster wheel of click bait vapidness.

Is this accurate in all cases? Isn't Jenny Nicholson one of the bigger YouTubers, with videos coming out maybe once or twice a year?

Seems like it might be the exception proving the rule. People say “every” restaurant these days needs to use something like Toast to provide online ordering and needs to play nice with DoorDash for delivery and needs to host ghost kitchens to increase income, etc. Of course there’s that one old-school place with the established reputation that does simple dine-in only and is thriving. But the new upstart can’t just not play the game - that privilege is reserved for those who have already won.

Jenny Nicholson and similar accounts rely on other channels than YouTube notifications. basically their video releases become events big enough to get minor news attention, chatter on discord, xitter traffic, etc.

if your channel doesn't have dedicated enough fans to do that it's not gonna work on you. and you almost certainly aren't getting news coverage of your review of a star wars hotel, you know? Jenny is rare for that.

There are a few 'long form' creators like Jenny Nicholson (I recommend the one about the failure of the Star Wars Hotel!).

Contrapoints (eg the Twilight one), Big Joel's (recently made a 6hr one!), FoldingIdeas and so on. It's a very different model, and a number of these creators also make videos for Nebula.

They also use patreon as a significant source of recurring revenue, so they can create a small number of high quality videos instead of putting out content constantly.

It's a very different business model, and it doesn't have the potential to become as profitable as Mr Beast.

Patreon subs also boost their video's performance on YouTube, since a subscriber committed to paying a monthly fee will definitely want to "get their money's worth" by watching videos as soon as they drop and participate in discussions and comment sections.

If you have 15k patreon subs those are guaranteed views around your video's publish time, which presumably is a good thing for their algorithmic weight.

I know it's been a while, but I think Jenny Nicholson grew her audience with shorter content. I recall "script meeting" videos about a lot of movies as they came out, and those were shorter and more frequent. Now that she has a dedicated audience, she doesn't rely as much on the algorithm to surface her.

Well, no:

On the "not even wrong" front, in the Pauli sense of the phrase: she's a relatively minor success, you'll find 20 police bodycam video accounts created in the last year that get 10x views.

There is a pattern with well-known creators that are more video-essay than intensifying whirlpoolers or whatever, where they keep YouTube productions to a handful of high-quality videos a year, and monetize via Patreon with less well-polished videos published much more frequently.

People seem to have a good reasoning for your specific example, but they’re not addressing the question. I can think of a number of YouTubers that have longer schedules that have had success (Mark Rober, Cleo Abram, to name 2 but there’s clearly more).

My guess is that if all you want to do is work the algorithm to get views then you’re going to get worked by the algorithm.

You see this a lot in strange ways these days. Rage bait, feigned ignorance, and things like that. It’s anti-quality and it’s just as effective (if not more) than quality content.

What was the Twitter joke. 'If I want an answer to a programming question, I post the question, and then an incorrect response from a different account.' No ones posting to help, but a lot will post to smugly correct the wrong answer.

I'm not entirely sure if smugness is the entire reason for doing it -- I suspect that for many of us (particularly autistics like me) there's a certain amount "But someone's wrong on the internet!" syndrome going on.

Some of us just can't work up the energy to answer a question, but if we see something wrong, it doesn't sit well with us, and we have to correct it.

And yes, sometimes when I see a question I can answer, it gives me the energy to answer it ... but not always ...

old IRC joke

This trick has been around forever, it's actually got a name, "goodhart's law"

Oh your comment is so clever because now I’ve gone to correct you that it’s actually Cunningham's Law.

This is enabled by the Internet and, weirdly enough, by the robustness of our social norms and legal system.

It's possible to make 80% of people mad, 20% of people happy, and benefit from the 20% while the 80% can't do anything to you.

"at the expense of communicating ideas with coherence and depth"

To be fair, while shorts is clearly designed to generate high virality and compete w/ TikTok, YouTube does incentivize longer form content. For regular videos the platform appears to optimize for engagement at about the 10 minute mark.

Political/social discourse is complex and I believe goes beyond a simple soundbite problem. One could argue this began with 24 hour news cycles with all the time in the world, and news had to become entertainment to fill the space. The movie "Network" presaged this sensationalized this culture situation well before it became a thing, and certainly well before social media was conceptualized.

> YouTube does incentivize long

If they only gave you the option to remove shorts from results...

oh there is an X on the top right corner of the shorts block on the website. but don't you believe clicking it will remove the block for more than a couple days. and you're right, the mobile website/app doesn't even have that

Yes it says 'hidden for 30 days' and every damn month I click it again.

And the stupid ass playables that they're spamming me with now. It's not enough that I pay for Premium.

I think the above commentor is right, in my opinion, intensification shapes our world into being very reactionary, with only a superficial understanding of issues

In fairness, this is how the world has always been.

In the US for instance, back when there were only 3 networks and a channel for public tv, people were "reactionary, with only a superficial understanding of issues".

To some degree yes. Funny enough, llamaimperative's book suggestion goes into detail on how television is where this really started ramp up and how the Age of Reason was likely the peak of rational argument, where the focal point of transfer of information was through the written word.

"He repeatedly states that the eighteenth century, the "Age of Reason", was the pinnacle for rational argument. Only in the printed word, he states, could complicated truths be rationally conveyed. Postman gives a striking example: many of the first fifteen U.S. presidents could probably have walked down the street without being recognized by the average citizen, yet all these men would have been quickly known by their written words. However, the reverse is true today. The names of presidents or even famous preachers, lawyers, and scientists call up visual images, typically television images, but few, if any, of their words come to mind. The few that do almost exclusively consist of carefully chosen soundbites. Postman mentions Ronald Reagan, and comments upon Reagan's abilities as an entertainer."

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

Reagan apparently hated reading and would often skip written briefs given to him by, for instance, the CIA. Then somebody got the idea to put those briefs in the form of a television news style video made just for Reagan. Some of them are on youtube now. They have the tone of spoonfeeding a midwit.

Trump was/is the same. At one point they tried powerpoint like presentations with graphics. I don't know about Reagan, but from my personal experience with dyslexia (though I love to read--and dislike videos--even as it takes forever), I think Trump may be dyslexic. I would not be surprised if Reagan were too. I only wish it was more public (if true). It would help eliminate the stigma and eliminate most of the cheap shots about how he can't read or spell and how his speech is "simple" (as he has trouble pronouncing more complex words). Things that those of us with dyslexia can have problems with also. *I did not vote for him

Having learned in the last year that I'm autistic, and having learned a lot just about what that means, I cannot help but wonder to what degree Reagan and Trump may be dyslexia and not even know it.

It's very easy to realize you're "different" from other people, but can't place your finger on it, yet manage to make up for the differences in odd and creative ways!

It's much simpler than that. Trump needs reading glasses but does not want to be seen wearing them.[1]

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-seen-wearing-glasses_n_...

That's such a wrong take. Sunday TV was so boring because it was filled with panels of knowledgeable people calmly talking about subjects they were extremely knowledgeable about in calm, rational productive manners. Todays panels start with known battle lines already drawn populated with non-knowledgeable grifters.

TV was also required to air a minimal amount of educational television for children under 16 during the day. I learn way more on days home sick (latchkey kid) than I'd learn at days in school.

IDK the over reactionary, fishing for outrage, talking heads were parodied in the movie Airplane back in 1980 i think? "They bought their tickets, they KNEW what they were getting in to. i say let them crash".

I wouldn't necessarily say intensification is the issue, but more misrepresenting the truth or flat out lying.

Shouting "SO AND SO MAYBE MIGHT HAVE POSSIBLY DID THIS BAD THING BUT I DON'T HAVE ANY EVIDENCE!" from the rooftops won't provoke much action as shouting the same but reinforcing that it is definitely true, for sure, of course it is.

Then with human behaviour/intelligence there's the spectrum of people who care about fact-finding or not and will react according to new information depending on this. Some of it is general laziness, they can't be bothered fact finding, and some of it is tribal, they accept x must be true because it's about y tribe where they're a member of z tribe.

That's why it's so easy for politics, big tech, etc to manipulate people; because we're all still monkeys!

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