This is product thinking. Let’s get deep: Story time!
I initially liked the guy but grew a bit tired of him using what could be veiled racism for views — I’m not accusing him of anything; it just felt cringy-er than I like my YouTube. The ethics are more complicated than that, but something bothered me, especially since that special episode where they sent someone physically there, let pests in the building, etc.
I couldn’t put my finger on why. I didn’t particularly appreciate using animals, but that wasn’t it. I wasn’t a fan of the tall Serbian guy and his friend: they felt like standard prankster YouTubers, and I wouldn't say I like those. It felt like Mark Rober was part of it (He’s my favorite YouTuber, like everyone here) but didn’t like it; he should have been more active but wasn’t… More on MR later. It’s relevant—I promise.
In the meantime, my partner (a medical doctor) has been watching those for a while. She loved it: administrative nightmare, people taking advantage of older people, computer glitches… there was so much schadenfreude to keep her giggling for hours after long shifts. I liked watching over her shoulder, recognizing the episode, and telling her if something good was coming (those are long).
I have this pet theory that some jobs are intensive (you work as much as you do, like clinical work for doctors, plumbers, bakers, or therapists) or extensive (you do things that work for you, like teacher, software developer!). Anyone with an intensive job has a terrible life because they have to work too much in construction. So I’m very tolerant of what you do after a shift to rebuild yourself. (And I think we, the tech community, should turn every job into an extensive one because that’s a better life).
But there still was something that bothered me. It was about how he needed the views to justify his time hacking them, and the views relied on a show that was always the same, and the poor, desperate, upset, and soon openly racist Indian “call center” operator had to be the bad guy. Having the bad guy always have the same skin color didn’t make the viewer any less problematic.
I thought about the theory of Moral luck (some people are in a position where they have to make hard choices, neither option is moral, and judging them for their worst decision without the context is complicated), but it wasn’t it…
I thought about how, after that big bust and the subsequent one, authorities arrested many people. They let most of them go because, of course, the police are deeply in the pocket of the owners that you never see in those videos, who are never really risking much. It felt performative: nothing structural happened. It also felt possibly “culturally racist”: again, good reason to suspect corruption in India, but without evidence, it still felt prejudicial. But obvious.
But then I say this video (the first two minutes, I’m waiting for my partner to come from her shift to watch it together — she’s going to love that one). Kitboga didn’t just find something better, automating him wasting time with others: I recognize that team huddled around a table. That’s a product team. It felt more like a physical product team, like what you see in Mark Rober’s video about his toy company, but suddenly it clicked:
I didn't like Kitboga videos, not just because they were ineffective, but because they couldn’t scale. He had to spend time wasting their time, “making content” to get one caller to waste his time. This video is about someone who has done intensive work until now, switching to automation and opening himself to extensive work.
This time, fighting spammers doesn't rely on at least enough of them being “minstrels” (caricatural entertaining stereotypes: the thing that led to the expression “black face”) to make “good content.” It works as a video based on the excitement around building and iterating on a product, led by data.
Well, presumably led by data: I haven’t watched beyond the second minute when he says they were tracking “EVERY click,” so my product analyst self suddenly felt very involved in that part.
That’s why I like (and I’m assuming everyone on HN likes) Mark Rober’s videos: he builds a product. There’s some story-telling, but he clearly follows the ups and downs of trying to build a systematic solution to a given problem. This is something that MR wasn't able to do in the video with spies getting inside the call center.
I sometimes struggle to explain my theory about intensive and extensive work, or what makes a company “product-driven,” and why it’s so important. You rarely have both options that are easy to compare favorably in an industry without the gap in quality being so prevalent: industrial bread vs. hand-make baker, ready-to-wear vs. bespoke fashion. But for so much software, having an industrial option is usually better because quantity has a quality of its own.
Here, Kitboga is trying to fight an industry. It doesn’t matter that he’s witty every time he’s talking to an agent; he just needs to be witty enough to edit it into his video. To fight scammers, he needs scale — a different scale than what millions of viewers can give him. This automation will allow him to waste so much scammer time that he might make the sector unprofitable. Not sure when, where, or how… (indeed, they’ll notice when they step in a maze?), but that glimpse at possible success where no one thought that was possible. Everyone who started a company knows that moment, the product-market-fit, the Road-to-Damascus glimpse:
“Are you a billionaire?
- Not yet, but soon.
- How?!
- That one guy said that I’ve made his day a little bit better.”
Seeing someone work on something for years and finally change—that’s a rare sight. I’m happy it was all filmed.
Plus, those look like horrifying UX dark patterns. I love those. Now that I’ve wasted everyone’s time with my theory, my partner is finally home: let’s watch it.