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I built a $5k Raspberry Pi server (yes, it's ridiculous)

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: I built a $5k Raspberry Pi server (yes, it's ridiculous)

#121

Post by MisterTea »

szszrk wrote: post #33
MisterTea wrote: post #19

Booo. Its just a pi with expensive ssd disks attached. Nothing interesting here.

Disagree. Plain Pi won't be able to attach 4 sata drives natively and is not a real alternative for actual NAS. This might be. Jeff does a lot of Pi-NAS testing and I'm thankful for that, as I find of the shelf solutions lacking a lot. Mostly software-wise. There is a huge demand for a simple NAS device that is not much larger then drives it uses, but doesn't have Qnap OS installed on it. It has good network connecti…

> There is a huge demand for a simple NAS device that is not much larger then drives it uses, but doesn't have Qnap OS installed on it.

So how did this article enlighten you on software alternatives to Qnap?

Not saying the board is uninteresting, I do like these new PCIe breakout Pi "motherboards". But the whole I built a $5k server is the wrong way to sell it.

Re: I built a $5k Raspberry Pi server (yes, it's ridiculous)

#122

Post by goohle »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #78
colechristensen wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question not being asked is how your audience changes A vs B in other ways than size. You can easily A/B test yourself into mediocrity by constantly optimizing for a larger, dumber audience. They stop liking your old content (despite your dumb faces, etc) so you make new content they like more, keep that cycle up for a while. And you end up making emotionally charged rage-porn political videos and have become the…

Creators are optimizing for money, YouTube's algorithm is the one optimizing for audience size.

Half of general audience has IQ below average.

Re: I built a $5k Raspberry Pi server (yes, it's ridiculous)

#123

Post by Nextgrid »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #56
Aeolun wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, that was what caused me to click. If someone told me they stuck 4 $1000 disks in a PI I wouldn’t have bothered :/

Seeing what a Raspberry Pi can do still has me clicking through.

I mean, it could always do that. You can connect a ton of drives over USB (I think the device limit is 127).

The question when it comes to RPi-powered NASes is whether it can do that well and the answer is as everyone expected: not really; the CPU is the bottleneck regardless of the underlying interface the drives connect over.

Re: I built a $5k Raspberry Pi server (yes, it's ridiculous)

#124

Post by goohle »

II2II wrote: post #115
geerlingguy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe me, I had a nice discussion yesterday with my sister (who helped me take pictures for the thumbnail), and we both agreed it's one of the dumbest things about current YouTube... The thing is, from all my own A/B testing, a face vs. no face will automatically get 20-30% more views (all else equal). And an exaggerated face, a bit more than that.

The perspective of one viewer: Having a face in the thumbnail helps me to identify channels that already of interest me. That is the positive. While there is an element of entertainment to the channel, I usually view your channel for information (e.g. interesting project ideas). I expect the thumbnail to show me what the video is about. If an exaggerated facial expression draws my attention away from that, or leads m…

> Throwing in a face for a 20-30% increase in views is almost certainly worth it.

Tits are better than just a face.

Re: I built a $5k Raspberry Pi server (yes, it's ridiculous)

#126

Post by dark-star »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #86
colechristensen wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question not being asked is how your audience changes A vs B in other ways than size. You can easily A/B test yourself into mediocrity by constantly optimizing for a larger, dumber audience. They stop liking your old content (despite your dumb faces, etc) so you make new content they like more, keep that cycle up for a while. And you end up making emotionally charged rage-porn political videos and have become the…

> The question not being asked is how your audience changes A vs B in other ways than size. That's not how it works. The most important factor to get views on YouTube is the recommendation algorithm. It makes a huge difference. YouTube will not even push your videos to people who are subscribed to you if the recommendation algorithm doesn't favor them. As the click-through rate is an important part of how the algorit…

Youtube algorithms are truly weird. I have a YT account with, I think, 3 or 4 subscribers and maybe a dozen or two views on the 10-20 videos I ever uploaded. I basically use YT to upload things that I want to share with some close friends.

Then, earlier this year, one of my videos suddenly skyrocketed[1]. It was an old video, 10 years or so, and it only consisted of one 10 second scene of a movie that I found funny at that time, and that I shared with a couple friends. It had about 50 views until march.

Then, it suddenly exploded, and now that video has just short of 1 million views, with a peak of ~60k or so per day.

I have absolutely no idea what crazy algorithm suddenly started recommending a 10-year-old video that is nothing more than a 10s snippet from a hollywood movie to millions and millions of people around the world.

The most interesting part (for me) was the psychological effect this had on me. First, my phone started sending notifications like crazy (I turned them off pretty quickly). That changed into a daily morning-routine of "let's see how many people watched the video this night"... Then, when the new followers came (I gained a couple hundred during that time) I had a feeling of guilt because I think they somehow "expect" similar clips from me from now on, and I would be letting them down (of course, totally irrational, I could care less of what some random people expect from me). Then I started researching how much revenue I could have gained from that if that were a "real" video with original content and ads thrown in.....

It was a wild ride :-D

[1] https://imgur.com/a/5sFD9of

Re: I built a $5k Raspberry Pi server (yes, it's ridiculous)

#127

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #118
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I am. It's only a tiny bit worse mind you, but it all adds up. Just because you make something and give it away doesn't entitle you to a pass for making the world a worse place in the process. People make systemd for free and get endless shit about the ways it makes the world worse, google produces chrome for free and gets endless shit about the ways it makes the world worse, etc. Besides, lets be clear here: if…

> People make systemd for free and get endless shit about the ways it makes the world worse, google produces chrome for free and gets endless shit The existence of systemd and chrome have unequivocally made the world a better place. The world would unequivocally be a worse place if they did not exist. > Besides, lets be clear here: if the goal is to produce and give away videos they don't need to optimize for generat…

> The existence of systemd and chrome have unequivocally made the world a better place.

Whether or not that is true is besides the point. The point is that it is valid to criticise them regardless of the fact that these things were given away for free.

> You sound like someone who has never made anything independently in their life.

Incorrect.

> He has chosen to make a living by providing free technical content online.

Let's all take a moment to ponder this particular arrangement of words.

> To support his passion he needs to make sure he can make a minimum profit otherwise he cannot sustain his work of providing you with free content.

Why is he entitled to this? What I mean is, why should I consider his ability to do the kind of work he wants and get paid for it sufficient justification for preying on human psychological quirks to get them to do something they, rather objectively, would otherwise not do?

> It’s like you have a problem with independent creators needing money to live.

Quite the contrary! But we're not paying this creator are we? This creator is "giving" us their product for "free"... with the expectation of receiving ad revenue from our views, a not-insubstantial portion of which were admittedly provoked by exploitation of human psychology.

Re: I built a $5k Raspberry Pi server (yes, it's ridiculous)

#128

Post by BoorishBears »

yessirwhatever wrote: post #98
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The question not being asked is how your audience changes A vs B in other ways than size. That's not how it works. The most important factor to get views on YouTube is the recommendation algorithm. It makes a huge difference. YouTube will not even push your videos to people who are subscribed to you if the recommendation algorithm doesn't favor them. As the click-through rate is an important part of how the algorit…

What the parent comment said still applies. Algorithm or not, you can become a top pop singer either by having a really good voice and being talented or by being singling about how you enjoy something controversial just to create outrage. The only difference is your audience.

The algorithm accounts for that.

If you sound like a dying cat, your click through rate will be high, but your average watch length will be low.

I agree there's a problem with how the algorithm drives creators to this stuff, but it's also not that unsophisticated that clickbait = success

Re: I built a $5k Raspberry Pi server (yes, it's ridiculous)

#129

Post by whimsicalism »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #86
colechristensen wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question not being asked is how your audience changes A vs B in other ways than size. You can easily A/B test yourself into mediocrity by constantly optimizing for a larger, dumber audience. They stop liking your old content (despite your dumb faces, etc) so you make new content they like more, keep that cycle up for a while. And you end up making emotionally charged rage-porn political videos and have become the…

> The question not being asked is how your audience changes A vs B in other ways than size. That's not how it works. The most important factor to get views on YouTube is the recommendation algorithm. It makes a huge difference. YouTube will not even push your videos to people who are subscribed to you if the recommendation algorithm doesn't favor them. As the click-through rate is an important part of how the algorit…

More than that, they are probably training models to predict the click-through-rate based on the image thumbnail, automatically discounting your content if it doesn't look like this, even if it does end up attracting clicks in reality!

Re: I built a $5k Raspberry Pi server (yes, it's ridiculous)

#130

Post by II2II »

pmelendez wrote: post #110

It makes me sad that ~75% of the discussion is around YouTube thumbnails and not the post. A $5k RPi NAS is indeed ridiculous, and was hoping to see some good insights in here.

The only reason why I followed the link to the article is because of the author and it appeared on HN. If I had seen that thumbnail on YouTube, I would have scrolled past it immediately since it looked ridiculous and like the sort of video that would not offer meaningful insight for the amount time invested into watching it. Thankfully the blog post was upfront about the limitations. (I trust the video would be as well, but the blog post allowed me to reach that conclusion faster.)
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