321–330 of 410 posts
> haha just kidding. MrBeast does not have sex. YouTube doesn’t allow pornography, so what would be the point?
Why was this included in the post? What does it add? It seems … just sort of mean spirited and out of place in an otherwise good article.
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It seems to me there's plenty of conspiratorial thinking on the left. The rhetoric around Project 2025 comes to mind as a recent example. Same with rhetoric around for-profit prisons (e.g., I see lots of people saying our criminal justice system is primarily profit driven). If I had to guess, I'd say such thinking is more widespread on the right, but I find it very difficult to see these sort of things clearly since…
Which rhetoric around Project 2025 specifically? Everything I saw claimed to be in it is actually in it, and Trump’s distance from it was complete bullshit. I haven’t heard anyone say our justice system is primarily profit-driven, and certainly haven’t heard any notable mainstreamers taking that position. One could argue lefties overplay the significance/effects of commercial incentives, but I also think it’s defensi…
"Currently, many think that the goals of [American Prison System] APS are to rehabilitate inmates and help them function properly in the real world. However, the APS’s high recidivism rate and methods of revenue creation support the conclusion that increasing the prison population may be the real goal of the APS."
https://news.law.fordham.edu/jcfl/2018/12/09/the-american-pr...
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It seems to me there's plenty of conspiratorial thinking on the left. The rhetoric around Project 2025 comes to mind as a recent example. Same with rhetoric around for-profit prisons (e.g., I see lots of people saying our criminal justice system is primarily profit driven). If I had to guess, I'd say such thinking is more widespread on the right, but I find it very difficult to see these sort of things clearly since…
Which rhetoric around Project 2025 specifically? Everything I saw claimed to be in it is actually in it, and Trump’s distance from it was complete bullshit. I haven’t heard anyone say our justice system is primarily profit-driven, and certainly haven’t heard any notable mainstreamers taking that position. One could argue lefties overplay the significance/effects of commercial incentives, but I also think it’s defensi…
“Project 2025 is more than an idea, it's a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will. This is an unprecedented embrace of extremism, fascism, and religious nationalism, orchestrated by the radical right and its dark money backers. We need a coordinated strategy to save America and stop this coup before it’s too late."
https://huffman.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/congre...
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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…
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-seen-wearing-glasses_n_...
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The formula for success is more basic than that. Make people watch more YouTube. Crazy videos might become passe or burn people out, at which point the 'formula' will change, but the underlying reality is the same. It's a paperclip maximizer. To succeed at YouTube make people watch more YouTube.
>To succeed at YouTube make people watch more YouTube. Yea but how do you do that? By making more compelling content than competitors. That's the basic formula.
There's whole subcultures of people doing unboxing videos. People framing existing videos as "unintentional ASMR" (https://www.youtube.com/c/PureUnintentionalASMR)
The point is : it doesn't matter what you upload. As long as it allows Google to show ads to people.
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This is a just-so rationalization, which feels good, but people have looked into many of these, and they don't really hold up. The most common one is that poor white people are overwhelmingly voting for Trump. The average household income of a Trump voter is something like 75k - hardly poor (depending where you're at). Anecdata: I know plenty of Trump voters who are very smart. A friend's dad has multiple PhD's and a…
This explains election results (agreed) but I'm more curious why outrage-generators and conspiracists seem to have culturally taken a stronger hold on the right over the course of decades.
Our story-telling media is, if not actually "leftish", generally progressive in the broadest sense of that term. Struggles over gay marriage, contraception, divorce, interracial marriage, civil rights were all, as of 2010 or so, pretty much wrapped up in ways that broadly speaking reflected a progressive win.
So for quite a few decades, the conservative right have been "forced" into their own little culture bubble where you can still ask if a white person and black person should be able to marry, whether contraception violates the will of god, where evil is punished and not "understood", poverty reflects personal failure and moral flaws rather than systemic issues and so on and so forth.
That creates a strange distortion (ask any group that has been an outlier to the mainstream culture they live within), and in this particular case this has manifested as both endless outrage and conspiracy-mongering.
Of course, meanwhile, the same conservative right have won on most economic issues. Union membership and power are down, taxes on the wealthy are down, all attempts at socializing health care have been rebuffed, industries were successfully deregulated, capital gains taxes are low, the share of GDP flowing to labor is down, estate taxes barely exist, defense spending is way up, and more recently Roe has been overturned.
So there's this strange contradiction in which progressive ideas have come to dominate the cultural sphere (though this may be changing) while conservative ideas have been the most successful in the economic and political sphere. Progressives often don't recognize the success they've had, and the failure side just looks like more of the same. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to downplay their successes (because these things are actually not broadly popular) and are left facing their "losses" in the cultural sphere, which can no doubt (Dobbs not withstanding) seem pretty overwhelming.
First of all – the essay is phenomenal and his book is available online for free – https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/youtube-apparatus/36... > “Communication within the YouTube Apparatus has no meaning.” The rapid feedback loop between creators and audiences (as constructed by platform metrics) means that the system more and more responds to itself. Rather than trying to go somewhere (as is the case with politi…
When I was a kid there was Mr Wizard, and then Bill Nye, but it was far more limited than what I watch with my kid.
The land of videos with <1M views is full of gems - and many of the top notch science channels (eg Mark Rober), still give their creators a handsome income. And many of the channels, like Rober, do regularly crack 1M and the recommended list.
> The ideal creator has no distance between themselves and their persona. They have been interpellated by audience metrics; their subjective experience already takes audience reactions into account. Isn't this sort of one of the themes from The Prestige(2006)? That certain magicians were so dedicated to their craft that they became inseparable from it. The performance never actually stopped
One of the problems with modern social media (and digital media in general) is that this is now happening, to some extent, to everyone . This is particularly a problem for children, who are exposed to this so early that they may never internalize the difference between existence and performance. Bo Burnham said it really well in an interview: "I'm saying I feel very stressed because I feel like I'm on stage panicking…
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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" .
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…
> This beauty is an ever-shifting target. The platform architecture and viewer preferences can change overnight; in cybernetic terms, a long lag time in production is deadly. MrBeast needs to be able to adapt to trends, vindicating my audience-driven framework for understanding YouTube. That's actually not true. MrBest is saying the opposite in the leaked PDF, that fundamentals don't change much since he started.