Yet another data point on why nobody should be wasting a second watching Mr Beast content. Complete algorithmically optimized garbage.
I recall Mr Beast showing up in a Colin Furze video for a few minutes and Mr Beast was very clearly incapable of being a normal person. He was obviously out of place, being in full makeup and styled, and couldn't seem to be bothered to actually engage or express real interest in the subject. I think the guy has replaced his real persona with some manifestation of the YouTube algorithm. If he's not actively making money, he's just a shell.
It's scary imagining people getting sucked into that :/
When you click over to subscriptions, you see only the stuff that you subscribed to, and nothing else.
Recommendations on a video are based on you subscriptions and the current video, and nothing else.
I could never go back.
The day youtube disables the "turn watch history off," is the day I'll stop using youtube.
I, too, could never go back.
Huh? Opening the front page of youtube in a private view (with no existing youtube history) shows you a completely blank page.
You can still get a glimpse of what is out there by watching a specific video in a private window and looking at the recommendations.
nah turns out it sucks for everyone.
That guy is so over the top that I cannot bear watching his videos, despite them theoretically being exactly up my alley. I like tinkering videos, I like his ideas, and the high-quality results, but I hate his mannerisms.
[0]: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c8/84/8e/c8848e81afa88a42bd4d...
For instance: when reading/writing/both many files of differing sizes on traditional drives there is an amount of latency per file which is significant and not always predictable. Whether you base progress on total size or number of files or some more complicated calc based on both, it will be inaccurate in most cases, sometimes badly so. Even when copying a single large file on a shared drive, or just on a dedicated system with multiple tasks running, the progress is inherently a bit random, the same for any network transfer. Worse are many database requests: you don't get any progress often because there is no progress output until the query processing is complete, and the last byte of the result might arrive in the same fraction of a second the first does¹. The same for network requests, though IE (at least as early as v3) and early versions of Edge did outright lie² there to try make themselves look faster than the competition.
The progress bars in videos are a different beast (ahem): the total time is absolutely known, any inaccuracy is either a deliberate lie or gross incompetence.
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[1] I once worked on a system that kept logs of certain types of query so it could display a guess of how long things were going to take and a progress bar to go with it, but this was actually more irritating to the users than no progress display as it would sometime jump from a few % directly to done or sit at 99% for ages (in the end the overly complicated guessing method was replaced by a simple spinner).
[2] It would creep up, getting as far as 80%, before the first byte of response is received. This also confused users who thought that something was actually happening when the action was in fact stalled and just going to time-out.
In the Tiger era, the OS X start-up progress bar worked this way—it kept track of how long boot-ups would take, and then displayed its best guess based on that.
My first thought is that the person has a strong grasp of their profession and they love money. A hack like that has to have a really high value/effort ratio.
I loved making custom progress bars really fun so people didn't mind watching the huge sites download.
I HATED when they had me mess with the time so that it got to 90% really fast and then spent AGES finishing the last 10%.
- I brewed my own kombucha (I have GI issues and I am so lactose intolerant that even kefir and yoghurt would give me a reaction)
- I ride a bicycle everywhere (I exercise daily and like to stay active, bicycle is often the fastest way around London)
- I buy expensive locally farmed produce (the quality is usually night and day vs other sources)
There were plenty of other signals by which I superficially seem like a hipster but my wife would attest I'm the opposite of an actual one.
In the words of my ever wise mother "keep the good bits, leave the rest"
What he’s creating is fame and money for himself, the fact that it’s by doing videos is incidental. That’s why he also got into ghost kitchens, a game show full of corner cutting, and a theme park in Saudi Arabia open for under two months.
at least 50 cent, who got into rap strictly for the money, made something fairly entertaining
I take your point, but I am still baffled why people find this appealing.
Fashion swaps styles fast enough most people can’t afford full wardrobes before it changes, which by default keeps each style looking fresh.
You’re subject to it every bit as much as me or anybody else, but for whatever reason, we have different triggers than the Mr. Beast crowd. People that think they’re immune to it after having it pointed out to them are likely just less aware than most how their emotions are being manipulated by things they don’t even consciously perceive. Sales guys love people like that.
> Sales guys love people like that.
You can also easily never speak to them. I know they exist, but as a consumer I can't think of anytime I've had a sales interaction with a salesperson. I understand that some people do, and might even actively seek a salesperson - but if I go to a physical store I already know what I want to buy before I get there and the only interaction I might have is to ask how to find the thing I want.
I know it's a common argument/appeal to authority that advertising must work, because companies are still doing it - but there are economists who think that it might not[0].
[0]: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
This is not specific to YouTube. It’s billboards, product placement, etc etc etc.
> You can also easily never speak to them. I know they exist, but as a consumer I can't think of anytime I've had a sales interaction with a salesperson
Ok, so you make every major purchase online, probably don’t own a car, never purchased a home or lived in a city where its extremely difficult to rent without a realtor, never go out to restaurants or bars in the US where the service staff essentially works on commission in the form of gratuity… sure thing.
Thinking Sony would sell just as many products entirely based on word of mouth is absolutely absurd.
I live in a city, have a car (bought second hand), buy things in person, go to restaurants. We have no tipping or gratuity, apartments have a fairly standard application process and often it's a previous tenant showing you around because they want you to take over their lease, unless the apartment is empty.
Car crashes are not appealing, and yet it is something most people are tempted to look at. Many people think of dopamine as the pleasure hormone, not really, it is the motivation hormone, pleasure is one way to achieve that, but so is horror.
It makes evolutionary sense, if something horrible happens, you better pay attention, to get prepared so that it doesn't happen to you.
I don't know the details of the psychological response to Mr Beast thumbnails, and I think neither does My Beast himself, the analytics say it works and that the only thing that matters to him.
https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/393332200/you-can-...
So like a month ago. How did Beast A/B test before then?
He also changes the thumbnails and titles of videos once published, sometimes up to dozen times in the first day.
He also has dozens of channels for different languages, so can test thumbnails and other tweaks with those.
It was a compromise that let us focus our limited attention on the things our project could uniquely do, without needing to refactor or do fast-and-slow-passes to provide subtask-count estimates to the UI. I'd make those same choices again, in that context. But in an ad context, it's inexcusable.
(Yes, I know it's mostly the ad's fault, but there's no practical way to punish them directly. So force apps to pick better-behaving networks.)
Another trick that I’ve noticed on the Reddit app is that the tappable area is much larger for ads than normal posts. If you tap even near the ad it will visit the ad
They're very very clearly click-fraud tricks, and most platforms will ban them if they're caught. But by clicking on the ad, it closes the ad, and there's no way to go back and report them, nor incentive for ad-viewers to do so. By design, IMO.
The whole industry runs on scams like this, there's no incentive for large platforms to proactively block any of them because they lead to money moving through them, where they can extract their rent. They only move against the most egregious, to keep fraud at the same barely-acceptable level as all the others.
Wasn’t there an article here a few days ago about Facebook specialising in hiding such malicious ads from testers and law enforcement to maximise gains?
if(testdetected == 1)
ecm.lowemissions
else
lmao.fuckyouregulatorspetrol goes in, toxic gas comes out, so make toxic gas less.
most of them have 0% understanding as to how data mining works or how online ads (and scams) function
They did work with a bad ad network though so it's a valid enough reason to complain imo.
“Hey you bought socks that one time! Want more socks??” -> Unsubscribe.
“Hey it’s your weekly sock news! What’s new in socks!” -> But I unsubscribed! Haha no, you only unsubscribed from the “product releases” list. Not the “weekly news” list or our 10 other fabulous mailing lists!
-> Report all emails from this domain as spam. May god have mercy on your soul, cute socks.
Interacting with a company/organization immediately turns into a lifelong "legitimate relationship" that supposedly entitles them to contact you forever and ever.
Meanwhile, near immediately, they would love a review! They want Participation in OUR new oven.
It's overwhelming, and most frustrating is it seems 'communication' is rapidly become a one way st.
You got served an ad from "one of our partners". That's all you'll get to know, and there's no mechanism to even report the app's shitty behavior to Google or Apple (and they don't care when the app becomes too large, either).
They could have a separate ad-reporting UI in every ad-running app (so you can report stuff later), and they could reward valid reports by skipping all ads on their network for a month or something, but doing that would reduce fraud, and that means reducing their profit. So none of them do it.
I'd say they probably need an oversight committee with teeth, to strongly punish every single violation (so the networks develop functional defenses), but they'll probably just VW-emissions-fraud their way around it.
(If you're using a mouse, forget what I said. But I haven't run into an ad where the close button didn't close it... if you were able to click the close button.)
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[0]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
Everything is trying to scam you nowadays jfc