Comment by leggomylibro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leggomylibro | Hacker News Reader

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I honestly wouldn't be surprised if this wound up being some ML grad student's channel who was playing around with generating audiovisual content. If it started getting picked up by big algorithms and making money...

Although actually, huh. Maybe it's a little more organized and is just a general memetic malware scam; con youtube's algorithms into putting your junk which was generated in 0.4 seconds onto a few million screens and pocket the ad revenue.

The point is, it might not be any more malicious than anything else that advertisers do on a daily basis, if they were just auto-tweaking the videos to optimize for revenue and hey, presto, colorful crap topped the list. After all, it's just an impartial algorithm.

Kinda makes you think about all the other stuff we happily let advertisers get away with, huh?

Correct. I don't see this as different than content farms that generate low-quality webpages to monetize with ads.

I think the real issue is that online advertising platforms are allowing this to happen and charging advertisers for it (even though these views/clicks are often not valid – whether they're people who click a fake 'Download' by mistake or kids under 13).

I suspect that, at this point, it's a number of overlapping phenomena.

I remember some time ago watching a video discussing weird flash games and videos with the same sort of pain-and-comfort themes that some of these videos have, also including Disney and other licensed characters, and also the oddly repetitious and low quality "children's videos" related to (and possibly spun off of) toys (lacking violent or otherwise disturbing content,) likely just attempts at clickbait. These would pop up in compilations of "weird Youtube channels" from time to time, no doubt driving traffic to their channels, and making them aware of their potential virality.

So it may be impossible to know, at this point, what the reality is behind this content because a lot of it may well be attempts to cash in on a meme.

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