Perhaps the main issue is that the guy has a point, nobody want’s to see an uncle.
The majority of “influencers” are young women, and only a minority would want to follow a 50 year old uncle. I don’t think there’s much we can do about it, it’s human nature. It does however limit the diversity and world views people are exposed to and sometimes it’s nice to see the world through the eyes of a 50 year Japanese biker.
It was probably so successful precisely because it was seeing the world through the eyes of a 50 year old Japanese biker with the face people expect in influencers.
Most young people aren't that interesting. Older people tend to be more interesting, but no one wants to look at them.
It's like when movies show Charlie's Angels or James Bond fluently speaking multiple languages and efficiently wielding various weapons and skiing like Olympic skiers. You know that's not real. Any one of those things takes all your time to master. But it makes for a cool movie to bundle them all together.
And maybe people fell for it in part because we watch nonsense like James Bond. So it hit that note and didn't immediately set off alarm bells.
You can definitely do the James Bond semester at college if you're so inclined, which iirc is: wine tasting, handgun safety, cross country skiing, swedish massage, and ballroom dancing.
"I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study." -Ezra Cornell.
I'm not sure if they're offered anymore, but they used to have Basic Rifle Marksmanship and Epee de Guerre. My friend once told me he thought my major was "weapons".
It makes sense, given there are academic fields where a gun might be needed. E.g. if your research involves inventorying songbirds in the jungles of Colombia or whatever. Even in the U.S. a lot of mycologists carry weapons, so if they get shot at while accidentally stumbling on an illegal weed grow or whatever they can shoot back.
The description looks like it's about competition, not just safety, akin to a class on poker. Perhaps the title is a bit of spin for defensive reasons.
Thats what I was thinking, safety is critical, but an easy 2 day class. There are so many more interesting angles for engineering students to approach handguns whether self defense (more Bondish) or marksmanship, engineering principles etc.
I think Bond is good with a sailing yacht, pistol, and fencing. Just missing the archery unless some Bond nerd wants to point to some Bond archery (and I'd believe it).
Depends entirely on how much time you’ve spent on it. In my experience people become pretty good after 1hr of lessons every week for 3 years (and pretty low intensity training at that), so I imagine you can condense that into 6hrs of lessons every week for half a year.
Distributed practice is a lot more effective at teaching than massed practice per hour[1]. You might need 12 hours a week, double the number of actual hours of instruction.
Are you really learning the skill, or are you sampling it? One semester is maybe 40 hours of instruction. Even twice that in practice puts you at 120 hours. I hardly think that is enough time to become a good skier, etc.
40 hours of skiing is 10 4-hour sessions. For a young adult in decent physical shape and with good instruction, that's enough time to establish a base of technique and confidence.
That's pretty much all you get in most undergrad courses anyway. It's usually an intro to, or first taste of, a sophisticated subject that would take a long time to master. It's only after many such intros (i.e. many hundreds of hours of study) that the student will begin to develop a more sophisticated understading of their chosen field.
In that light, is a 1-credit skiing course any different from a 1-credit astronomy course?
People are different. I knew a couple newbie ballroom dancers who picked it up incredibly fast. But they were one in a few hundred. Ballroom dancing looks natural, but it isn't. Every move works against natural body movement. It takes a while.
For example, when walking, one sets the foot down heel first. With ballroom dancing, it's ball first.
Absolutely not! If he understood physics he would understand that the landing is impossible, and would therefore die in the attempt. That he doesn't know the landing is impossible is what makes it possible, and he lives. Simple.
"Is a Mongolian horse archer applying physics even though he has no idea what physics is and it hasn't even been invented yet" is a pretty deep philosophical rabbit hole.
> You can definitely do the James Bond semester at college if you're so inclined, which iirc is: wine tasting, handgun safety, cross country skiing, swedish massage, and ballroom dancing.
Pretty sure James Bond's handgun use is more on the unsafe side of things. I mean, he does have a license to kill and uses it frequently.
nit: "deadly" is not "unsafe". You can be perfectly safe in your firearm handling and still wield the power to kill other beings. "Unsafe" presents the risk of being unintentionally deadly, but being intentionally deadly is perfectly compatible with being safe in the gun's handling.
Both movies and books agree it's downhill. Also what we would call "skeleton" today. And if you go by the books, a course in Bentley repair is not necessary because James "has a guy."
> It was probably so successful precisely because it was seeing the world through the eyes of a 50 year old Japanese biker with the face people expect in influencers.
I can't read Japanese and I used Google translate for the post text (so maybe there's more depth that's lost in translation), but the pictures look to be pretty "generic influencer". None of those pictures look any different than what you would expect from a random 20 something influencer. Additionally, the text on the tweet is pretty much "I like motorcycles" along with "her" age and height. Everything here seems to be pretty much the same "here's a pretty girl in front of something" post that instagram is full of.
Again, I'm only going off the pictures and Google translate, so if someone who understands the culture better wants to correct me, feel free, but until that happens, I'm going to believe there's nothing more to this than a bunch of people wanting to look at a pretty girl.
Edit: Ran the tweet in the article through DeepL at the suggestion of some replies. Here's the translation so you all can come to your own conclusions:
I don't know anything about motorcycles. I wouldn't trust Google translate because one of my son's hobbies is looking up the original Japanese (and translation notes, etc) for anime and other works to figure out what in the heck went wrong with the translation because Japanese culture has all these honorifics that English lacks and that goes weird places, along with the gender neutral pronouns, among other things.
If you know nothing of the language, culture, motorcycles, motorcycle gear, etc, I am going to guess there are a lot of really important details that are utterly lost on you.
> If you know nothing of the language, culture, motorcycles, motorcycle gear, etc, I am going to guess there are a lot of really important details that are utterly lost on you.
I know bikes, I know Japanese, and I lived and road in Japan.
The translation is largely accurate (just minor structural stuff that doesn’t matter).
The only content that might matter, and it doesn’t really seem to, are the hashtags for the tweet that were not covered above (roughly “connect with bikers” and “quick biker self-intro”).
While I agree with your general characterization of Google translate when dealing with Japanese content, in this case it did a decent job, largely because the content was very simple and straightforward.
I can’t edit my reply, but I just realized another comment i made might be what you mean in terms of something “being lost” on someone who is using Google translate.
Specifically, even though “Showa ??” was translated accurately, that doesn’t necessarily mean that someone knows what it means (born before Jan 89, that is, the Showa era).
I agree with you about Google translate not being perfect. I actually wrote most of my comment up before running it through translate. Even without the text, none of those pictures seem especially deep, so even taking the text out of the equation, I still stand by my comment.
That being said, this is the Google translation of the tweet in the article:
Minasan ٩ (ˆoˆ) ۶
Do you have a motorcycle?
Spring is coming soon
Age: Showa ○○○
Height: 166
Living: Ibaraki
I love: messing around with bikes
Like I said in my last comment, I know Google translate is far from perfect and I'm very open to being proven wrong, but I have a hard time believing that there's some deep insight in this post when that is what Google translate put put out. The translation seems pretty "influencer" to me.
I've been up all night and I feel awful and I'm not trying to pick a fight here. I'm just thinking of some novel I read where some nouveau riche fool paid someone for their riding boots because his were too new looking and he wanted to look like he had been riding a long time. He wanted worn-looking boots. He didn't want to look like it was his first time.
And the guy took his money with a straight face and sold him the boots even though the color of the boots signaled he was a trainer or something, which is something the nouveau riche guy had no way of knowing. But it would have been immediately laughable to most people who were in the know.
I am not going to go through the account and try to make up BS, but the bike may be custom built, the gear he's wearing may be amazingly good, the locations he is posting from may be something incredibly special in some way and not commenting on those details may be part of the appeal.
I'm a writer by trade and I get paid by the word and also have to meet other constraints and you can sometimes say very little with three paragraphs or you can say a metric fuck ton with a few well-chosen words.
I absolutely don't know enough about the topic. I just know that when things get popular, it is often due to some value-added detail that no one explicitly talks about. The fact that it gets slipped in and not commented on is part of what makes some things wildly popular.
A density of quality info and yadda is often some element of that and that is often not obvious to outsiders who cannot readily tell that this photo is some superficial tripe and that seemingly similar one is worlds apart in quality, data, informativeness, whatever.
Anyway: This is my insomnia talking. It is absolutely not intended to be ugly or pick a fight or yadda.
I think you are onto something. He's very comfortable with his hobby. Going through his twitter, there are many photos of him doing motorcycle maintenance with his own tools. He also has a broad variety, like an old dirtbike he rides on ice or quirky 90's sport bikes he's keeping alive and modding. I hate to gatekeep, but he's not just showing off the flashiest new things off the showroom floor like "influencers" gravitate towards.
Most of his posts are very casual, but his goal is still to ride the bike rather than fix it everyday so that is the bulk of what he shares. His tone is definitely targeting a less experienced audience. In some of the posts, there's light-hearted trivia about niche topics. He's appealing to a younger generation. Getting new people involved in what looks like an exclusive hobby is always exciting to see online.
The original comment I was replying to was claiming that the account might have been successful because it presented the wisdom of a 50 year old with the face of a 20 year old.
All the examples you gave are totally possible. There may be something about the bike or the locations being visited that are special, I really don't know. Even if that is the case, that's not really what OP was claiming and not really what I was responding to.
There are tons of little reasons this account could be popular, but based on the little research I did, I don't think it's because "she" is making posts full of wisdom, years beyond "her" age.
>>> I absolutely don't know enough about the topic. I just know that when things get popular, it is often due to some value-added detail that no one explicitly talks about. The fact that it gets slipped in and not commented on is part of what makes some things wildly popular
^^ this
Thank you. Wish I could pay you per word for this. Hmu@samir.ist
> The fact that it gets slipped in and not commented on is part of what makes some things wildly popular.
A dogwhistle, basically? "Dog whistles use language which appears normal to the majority, but which communicate specific things to intended audiences."
Dogwhistles are most often associated with politics, but the idea goes beyond that (unless you classify all asymmetric/broadcasted communication as political, which is not without merit.)
That's just one of the things I do. I also blog and do resume work and my blogs get some support from Patreon and tips.
But I have learned a whole lot about writing well doing it on a paid-per-word basis. That's been a real growth experience for me as a writer developing my craft.
> I wouldn't trust Google translate because one of my son's hobbies is looking up the original Japanese (and translation notes, etc) for anime and other works to figure out what in the heck went wrong with the translation
These are meaningless differences that only people who don't speak Japanese notice. Because once you do, you'd know that the text being in English instead of Japanese is already such a large difference that picking at individual words doesn't mean anything. (And honorifics definitely don't mean much. Even if you "leave them in" for "correctness", that actually means leaving in the ones the kids know and taking out the ones they don't.)
Actually one of the translators for a lot of popular works recently left Twitter because kids kept harassing him because he was "wrong" because the official work didn't match rumors they'd started based on their incorrect Japanese knowledge. Hope he's not doing that.
> None of those pictures look any different than what you would expect from a random 20 something influencer.
Fwiw, being born in the Showa era (ended Jan 89) would put her at 31 as a minimum.
Minor nitpick, but I just noticed the Showa ?? birth year in the tweet, and that would have raised red flags for me. Even for Japan, the doctored pic doesn’t really look 31, much less mid-30s or older.
Edit: Your translation is mostly correct (The second line is more like “Do you bike?”, but it sounds more natural in Japanese).
Note that this tweet also has a self-intro for motorcyclists hashtag.
I think it would be fairly rare for a 20-something female “influencer” to say she was 31+ unless her age was part of her schtick. In this case, I wound have expected her to lie the other direction — she could pas for younger than 25, so “Heisei ??” seems like it would have been more likely.
The shift from 20s to 30s for females in Japan is generally not a welcome one — pressure to marry, have kids, “settle down”, etc. are very real. It is also perceived that women in their 30s are not as “cute” (something often sought after, especially by public entertainment figures).
Double edged sword. The shift from 20s to 30s also reduces attention from perverts and weirdos, just as it does from gentlemen suitors. And if someone joined a site back when they're a minor they often had to lie.
Or if someone is just privacy conscious about details that may be used to steal their identity, they may have just randomly chose January 1, 1970 or whatever was the top choice on the little menu.
To be fair, a very large chunk of old people are likewise uninteresting. Aside from the general dulling of the mind that comes with age, you have to actually do things with those years for them to mean something.
Ahem they said "older", not old. 50 is middle aged.
Even if a person is a simple product of their times, as one gets older that gets increasingly interesting. Because the times change so much over the years.
Middle would depend on life expectancy. The lower and upper bound is probably 30 to 50 respectively. 50 feels straight up old though. I thought 40 was considered to be the "middle"
And you need opportunity to do it, and other people need to find it appealing. You could do 1 of the 10 old / young people tropes and get clicks.
"Meaning something" personally and "being interesting" are not the same.
Also there isn't that much wrong with just exploiting popularity machine. So a bunch of people thought you were a young girl, and you're not... who cares! If anything you are teaching people to stop putting so much credence into the SM sphere... which can only be good.
Exactly. The one thing I immediately noticed was the ~30 year old vintage Yamaha TZR 2-stroke model complete with pics of open engine etc (check the small diameter exhaust pipes). Which youngster would ride such a bike, let alone touch its internals? This stuff is very niche, maybe not so much in Japan but over here in Europe you would have to search for it or pay some decent money to get it in that condition. The owner probably has bought it in his 20s :)
Edit: the power output curve is also not for the faint of heart and there's no electronic helpers, overall very different to ride compared to a current 600cc model with all the bells and whistles :-)
This is why Batman and Superman are perpetually 35ish in the comics. Young enough to be in their physical prime, old enough to have a clue about the world.
In the Ian Fleming novels, James Bond is clearly intended to be in his late 30s / early 40s. The same seems to hold true for all the movies. Bond is not a young man by any stretch of the imagination. He is a world-weary traveler well-versed in high culture, espionage, elite military tactics. His cultural knowledge is explained by virtue of his upper class birth and upbringing; its likely he served in the military before being recruited by MI:6, and of course the espionage is the hallmark of the latter agency.
That said... when Jonathan Goldsmith was auditioning for part of The Most Interesting Man in the World, the ad agency called his agent and said, "We really like him, but we think he might be too old," and she replied (quite masterfully), "How could the Most Interesting Man in the World be young?", implying it would take a lifetime to acquire the achievements.
So I guess the answer is, be old and good-looking, like Goldsmith, or Sean Connery.
They are not, but I think people will get better at realizing this the way many now know what it means for something to be "photoshopped" whether they can identify it and subsequently dismiss it or not.
I believe that physical "good" looks, analytical and social intelligence, trade and athletic skill, and artistic talent will eventually converge as our future "stars."
I worry that the norm is moving more towards specialist and away from generalist. Things have been pretty stable for a while. And people who invest ridiculous amounts of energy in stuff like the stock market or social media tend to get serious returns.
Those are not truly useful skills anywhere except this one ecosystem.
Efficiently wielding weapons is not terribly difficult. It just takes practice. My parents bought a number of guns and became quite proficient at firing them accurately within 2 years.
I have many relatives and friends who are amazing at skiing. My cousin posts pictures every winter of the sick lines he skis down.
I'm neither an excellent marksman nor skier, but I don't think it would be difficult to become excellent at both given an excessive amount of free time within a few years.
I can though drive a manual very well, own a sports car, and have no fear of drifting it.
A coworker of mine was a pro skydiver, and recommended it to everyone. I've met other skydivers as well; it's supposedly easy and affordable.
Another coworker owned his own plane. Planes are costly but he wasn't James Bond rich...
My brother-in-law owns a few hundred guns including fully automatic weapons.
Being James Bond is a bit idiotic in real life as he engages in a lot of high risk stuff, but it is certainly doable.
Yeah, that's my take. You see it often in other areas too - it's a lot easier to get thousands of followers as an attractive person (especially an attractive young woman, but it works for men too). The ability to more easily build a large audience and then leverage that is huge (and can make a ton of money).
My general heuristic is online personas from attractive people are often over valued (specifically considering the value of things they say/do - not their ability to make money which is huge) and when you compare pretty people with high follower numbers to unattractive people (or just people that don't lead with their prettiness) with high follower numbers, the latter are often better quality/say more interesting things. Someone leading with their prettiness has a big advantage in getting attention, even if what they say is dumb.
There's a lot of pseudo-intellectualized bullshit on twitter that gets a lot more attention than it would otherwise because the person is young and pretty, but would not get nearly the same attention if they looked different.
It reminds me a lot of Liking What You See: A Documentary, which is the last Ted Chiang story in his first short story collection - I think it's worth reading.
Obviously attractiveness is only one factor among many, but I suspect it's a much bigger factor than people currently think.
I think most top YouTubers are considered "creators" more than "influencers". It takes a substantially different set of skills to create videos people want to watch than photos people want to view, and intuitively you'd expect the latter to tilt more towards first-impression attractiveness. Instagram fits more closely with the way this guy used his Twitter account (pictures and text), I can't seem to find an authoritative list of independently-famous Instagram influencers, but the lists I've seen consist primarily of models.
Almost every guy in that list is pretty damn handsome. The notable exception is Luisito Comunica, who I'm guessing makes up for it by being exceptionally interesting.
"Pretty handsome" is relative. Pewdiepie is a good-looking guy, but his analogues on Instagram are 1000x more so. And I can't imagine someone like Casey Neistat becoming remotely as big an Instagram star as he is on YouTube.
When people say “influencer” they’re usually referring to the long-tail of people with 10k+++ followers who don’t really create anything other than a curated snapshot of their life. They’re usually on platforms like Instagram and Twitter where the bar to post content is very low. They make their money by posting sponsored content, because they have no other way of monetizing their audience (they have no skills except for building audiences).
The top 26 list of YouTubers is filled with influential people, and many people would say that they’re influencers, but they’re not typical examples.
I follow a lot of rock climbing on insta, and the top men definitely have more followers than the top women, but if it's a pic of an average climber on an average climb, it'll get way more likes if the climber is a woman.
In the old world of professional climbing, when the magazines decided who was worthy of attention and accolades, sponsorships were generally handed out according to merit.
Now days, sponsorship is shifting more and more to climbers who are media friendly and good at drawing attention to themselves. Top tier climbers are now refashioning themselves into mediocre youtube celebrities, with mixed results.
It's worth noting that platforms tend to have a gender(sex? sorry I'm bad with the terminology), bias that skews male/female. I seem to recall hearing that Youtube skews male (in viewership) and IG female. (if someone has links to stats, thanks in advance)
It is such a bizarre market. I sometimes browse it for sociological amusement, but it creeps me out quickly.
For actual enjoyment, if a video starts begging for "like subscribe share" I just turn it off. I have no idea why people like watching other people begging impersonally for attention.
The issue here is that YouTube (and other platforms) encourage this. It works, in that if you ask people to like comment and subscribe, they like comment and subscribe more. (And that boosts your standing within the system getting you more impressions.)
Plenty of good creators do this (as it works), just to keep up with their peers. It really has nothing to do with the quality of the rest of their content. Don’t blame the player, blame the game IMO
Okay, I'll hate the game. The game has existed since the first radio ad spot in 1922, the first TV ad spot in 1941, and the first banner ad in 1994.
I would far rather pay an honest few cents for a page view or a video roll than be subjected to in-content advertising and begging from the creators. Certainly, creators would prefer to do their thing instead of beg and scrape.
What can we do to accelerate micropayment tech and patronage communities for creators?
Let’s imagine the video wasn’t ad-supported, but instead viewers had to pay some money a la carte (and YouTube gets a cut of that). Creators would still want to get more viewers to make more money, and YouTube would still have a recommendation algorithm that used signals such as likes, comments, and subscribes to decide what to recommend. So I think the ad business model isn’t really at fault here. Or rather, it’s only at fault to the extent that it’s the only viable business model for a video service as large as YouTube.
The ad supported model made sense for newspapers and magazines but it doesn't scale. Anytime you obscure the price or separate the payer from the benefit you get distorted and unforseen consequences. It took scaling this model to facebook levels before the failure reared its head and it is indeed much worse than we had ever predicted.
Indeed many YouTube creators already plug the opportunity to pay an honest few c̶e̶n̶t̶s̶ dollars for their content on Patreon or their private course website in exactly the same way they ask for likes other interactions, especially if the nature of their content means they don't see [much] ad revenue.
YouTube quite literally has a subscription service. With the service you don't see ads on videos and creators get a cut based on how much you watch different content. It's been around for years, but has remained rather unpopular.
You're not wrong though. Most creators probably hate asking for stuff.
There's a few creators who often have a block at the end who tell you that they won't ask you to like or subscribe because even though it's good for the channel they hate doing it and refuse to do it.
well youtube has a premium service without ads that presumably brings money to the creators. One of the music subscription services actually is about to change their system so that the money of every subscriber actually goes to the artists that THEY listen to (sorry, forgot which service it was, not spotify). So, there actually is movement in this direction. And with ads becoming ever more obnoxious (and privacy threatening) it becomes more interesting for users, too.
Surprisingly, tiktok is better at this: it surfaces new content to people based on factors other than existing popularity.
> far rather pay an honest few cents for a page view or a video roll
I don't think this holds true for most people. PPV TV has always been kind of a minor thing, and eclipsed now by all-you-can-stream services. The feeling of continually inserting coins, or the taxi meter running, is uncomfortable to many people.
This is true, but I think fails to be a good counter-example. PPV has always been expensive and focused on single events. What we haven’t seen is AWS style small payments.
Imagine if instead of paying $100/mo for cable TV, we could pay $0.25/hr. If you watched TV 24x7, you’d pay more, but the vast majority of people would pay much less.
The main problem with smaller amount PPV and micro transactions in general is that it is hard to get the billing/accounting right. But this is something that could vendors get right. You only pay for what you use, and what you get is billed in small enough increments that it makes sense for everyone involved.
How this could be applied to online videos, I’m not sure.
AWS style small payments existed at coin-operated arcades. They're all dead, Jim.
Micropayment news services have existed (Blendle). Unpopular.
Pay-as-you-go prepaid cell phone service is also niche. So is the a-la-carte gym membership. It's not that billing/accounting is difficult. It's that it plain straight up makes less money. SAAS vs one-time upgrades, etc.
> Pay-as-you-go prepaid cell phone service is also niche.
The reason for that is that it's much more expensive than paying by the month. I wanted pay-as-you-go specifically because I have nearly zero need for cell service, but would prefer to be reachable even if I'm not at home.
But you can't get a pay-as-you-go plan with pay-as-you-go pricing. T-mobile's monthly plan now is "$15" (actually something like $16.60) per month. The pay-as-you-go plan would cost less than that, given usage rates, except that it also costs $1 for each day you use it to any degree. The incredibly high minimum fee overwhelms the already small advantage of not paying for service you don't use -- as soon as you use any service, you get charged for more than a full day of every service, and then you have to pay a usage rate on top of that!
It might be somewhat irrational, but I prefer the fixed-cost-for-unlimited-use model, as it makes the cost of looking at a new thing zero. If I have to pay per use, I'll be discouraged from exploring new content I might like or might not and will look at things similar to what I already see.
Ah, the Roddenberry universe. I think that will begin after the cost of clean, limitless energy approaches zero. At that point anyone can turn dirt into a house or a hamburger so compensation becomes much less of a concern.
> What can we do to accelerate micropayment tech and patronage communities for creators?
Make them nonprofit foundations democratically run rather than middlemen biding their time until they can increase their margins or sell to a megacorp.
There's this minecraft youtuber I've been following for ages, who has been on youtube for like 10 years and still doesn't ask for likes or subscribes (ethoslab). Especially in that space the absence of it is remarkable, I haven't found anyone else who does this. Occasionally he does collabs and the collaborators will do it, and you can really see that it does work, it makes a big difference.
He is the only one I can think of that doesn't do this and it makes me personally much more inclined to watch him. He also feels "uncommercial" even after 10 years I think it's fantastic that he is able to keep it that way.
This. I run a... moderately popular by niche standards channel myself, and asking for likes, subscribes, comments etc gave me way more of them than I was getting before. I'm not particularly interested in the monetary side of things, but for getting a bit more popular on the platform... it's worked well.
Yeah, occasionally a reputable channel will show how many views are from non subscribers and it’s a pretty massive ratio. These creators aren’t begging, they are just trying to carve out an audience.
Is there evidence to show that it actually works? Me I instinctively want to close the window anytime a Youtuber asks me to "smash that like button and hit the notification bell" 5 seconds into the video. At a minimum I think less of the Youtuber and am less likely to recommend them to friends. Some of the fastest growing and most popular channels never beg their viewers for likes/subs.
I also hate this, but if people don't ask, they don't get, and typically those who don't end up with far fewer subscriptions. After a while they get demoralized and give up.
While I haven't taken time to measure this out to academic standards, it's extremely obvious in niche interest channels - eg I'm into synthesizers, and there's a whole little subsystem of review videos, technique videos, not-talking demos, jam sessions etc. The more heavily branded/self-promoting presenters tend to get vastly more views. My favorite reviewer centers the equipment under review and makes occasional appearances talking to the camera, but his maximum views tends to be near the average minimum for reviewers who center themselves, eg always being on-screen in a box, mirror, or direct-to-camera shot and always showing their face and a relevant emotional reaction to the subject of the video in the poster frame. I'm sure the same patterns play out in many other specialist topics.
To some extent this may be a product of the Infamous Algorithm, but it might also reflect cognitive preferences of viewers in that many people prefer to have information mediated by a recognizable presenter whose reactions and emphases become more meaningful with repeated views, while others like me find an overly-expressive presenter distracts from the material under discussion and gravitate towards a more subdued/restrained communication style.
In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan distinguishes between 'hot' and 'cool' media which employ more or less intensity to solicit and maintain attention. 'Hot' styles with a charismatic and overtly solicitous presenter seem to be more popular in general, so even people who don't like that style may end up adopting it to gain viewership in a competitive market. There might be a market opportunity here for catering to different kinds of viewers, eg a 'CoolTube' for people who strongly prefer a more low-key presentation format.
Incidentally, I sometimes do prefer hot 'in-your-face' sort of media, especially on things like experimental music videos or the occasional guilty pleasure of a cheesy monster movie. It's just a hunch, but it seems to depend on things like a rapid tempo of editing and high levels of discontinuity/unpredictability rather than spatial maximalism.
The average youtube user and the average hn user are two very different populations. Things like ads etc don't make me buy things, at least in most instances. But they are effective, otherwise companies wouldn't make ad campaigns. They are just not meant for me.
> For actual enjoyment, if a video starts begging for "like subscribe share" I just turn it off. I have no idea why people like watching other people begging impersonally for attention.
Same here. There are some YouTube channels I really want to watch and follow as I can learn new skills from them, but the constant begging and over-dramatization is a real turnoff so I cannot watch it without feeling bad about it.
I have a similar feeling about people who takes photos of themselves all the time and their social feed is filled with the photos they take of themselves. I can't take a photo of myself without feeling vain, and I'm getting passive-vain feelings when I see friends of mine posting selfie after selfie of themselves...
Been using this for a month or so - game changer. Can skip in-video advertisements, interaction reminders, introductions, (configurably) via a user-submitted and curated database.
Well, The UI, Logo etc., feels like my browser blocked me from going to sponsor.ajay.app url - insecure, evil site. I closed the browser window. But went there again to see what it says.
If you're curious why asking for subscribers is so prevalent, I recommend taking a look at this Twitter thread (https://twitter.com/stalman/status/1369082704138883073) that describes the before and after effects of asking for subscribers, here's a quote: "Just the subs that came directly from the video page were 5x what they are on similar size videos".
I've never done any of these things, and I'm not sure I have the stomach for it, but I consider it required knowledge for anyone with any interest in leveraging online attention.
> I have no idea why people like watching other people begging impersonally for attention.
I am aware two things:
1.) If they earn money from youtube, they need likes and subscriptions so that youtube algoritm shows them to more people.
2.) I as a programmer earn more money with less effort then them. I also very likely have to deal with less bs (like harassments and jerks trying to insult you or take you down for lolz).
A combination makes me accept that these people are doing entertainment as work, I consume that entertainment for free and thus am absolutely fine with them trying to succeed.
There is also absolutely nothing wrong with entertainers wanting attention. That is what pays their bills, without attention they cant be successful. Attention is not dirty word to me.
This is a very reasonable way of looking at the situation and I completely agree with you. It's important to consider that producing content to put on YouTube is the primary source of income for some people. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Without a subscription, the visibility of their content is at the mercy of the algorithm. What choice do they have? It's no different from subscribing to someone's email list. It's annoying, but nobody bookmarks anything these days.
It’s just how economic of YouTube works. If you don’t have likes, subscribes and views, you don’t make money. And if you want high quality content, it costs money.
Lots of educational channels I watch do it, and I fully understand why they do it.
For me it's when they do that faux: "hey guys, I was looking at my metrics and <insert percentage here>% of you who viewed the last X videos aren't subscribed, so it would be really great if you hit that bell"
I mean really? Do creators realize that viewers could be interested in several dozen channels and don't want to swamp out their own notifications since Youtube's prioritization gets shittier the more you subscribe to? Sorry you aren't in my top 10? Maybe a video got popular on an algorithmic whim...
I'd much rather they ask me to join a Patreon, which I am very keen to do if the content is good and continues to do so. But pulling that "peek behind the creator curtain" crap puts me very off because it's like trying to shame you into behaving differently as if you're part of the problem.
No... you decided to make Youtube your source of income. I don't owe you crap.
Sometimes content is good and I feel I owe them crap. But exactly! Youtube recommendation system is so cretinous and only gets worse that sometimes I end up adding videos to a special playlist that I can consult later and check a channel without subscribing. Clicking something state-changing on youtube as a viewer is like eating a trash food that seems tasty, but you’ll regret that later.
It’s actually a problem with all “favorites” on every platform. A browser bookmark system with notifications (a little dot) would be great, because then you can sort/categorize/describe/thimbnail/speeddial it, but platforms crave for stupidity and make it a non-configurable list instead.
Youtube could simply inverse that and make their “don’t recommend channel” actually fucking work. Then people would just unsubscribe from what is not needed periodically and watch a feed full of what they actually like automagically. But of course it is much easier to leave creators on their own and profit from those who survive, while doing your job with a left heel. Youtube doesn’t deserve a penny from these hardworking guys.
Nagging and soliciting subs and likes is fucking annoying. If you want me to like a video, make a good video and stop nagging.
If I dislike those naggers enough, maybe Google's stupid artificial non-intelligence will eventually learn to recommend only videos from non-naggers. I try, even though I don't have much faith in Google's algorithms.
This is nothing to do with "Google's algorithms". The simple fact is, people do not subscribe without being prompted to. The reason all the top YT'ers are annoying about it, is precisely why they are successful. Things work like that in the real world, too.
Yes, I know exactly why these annoying naggers are being annoying. I don't like it.
And here I'm telling that maybe people should stop listening to annoying naggers and just dislike & close the tab, maybe block the channel too if it keeps coming up in recommends.
Btw, it is not clear whether a dislike drowns the content – people believe it’s inverse, and you’re helping. Best you can do to counteract is closing a tab.
Want to influence people? Use faceapp to change yourself into a face people feel good seeing (pretty girl strikes the correct neurons in majority of viewers). In the best case limit everybody does this and hopefully it stops being effective. Worst case every influencing person does this anyway?
He's rediscovered the second meaning of MMORPG: Millions of Men Role Playing Girls. People have been representing themselves online as female to gain some advantage for a very long time.
Many do so openly but with animated avatars that duplicate their facial expressions by way of facial motion capture.
They effectively play an animated character live and voice it as they perform it's facial expressions.
On the subject of Japanese gender changes, a most interesting one is played by a Japanese female artist who plays a male character that looks like a female once again. — this artist has a particular habit of creating male characters that look as though they be female.
That might contribute to a diversity of perspectives but I wonder what would be the consequences for society when everyone needs to reconcile their online appearance with their real world appearance.
Can we clarify what a real world appearance is here? Does your real world appearance involving nice looking clothes, makeup or having showered recently?
Why do we even really care about real world appearance, appearance is something that we have very little control over and if we've accidentally created something in the internet that allows folks to escape their appearance can't we just celebrate it?
We seem to be accepting that gender identification and body dysmorphia are both real things that people deal with and this meta-society where you can look however you please is probably a really helpful outlet for those who don't like how people judge their appearance from day-to-day - I think it's important that we preserve this freedom and try and ascend beyond judging people by their meat-bags.
This isn't entirely surprising. They're much more rare so there is lot more competition for their services, piled on top of the usual biases in our society against paying women equally.
Or it could be that since women are more desirable there is a larger section of women paid lower than the top earners. C.f. print media sales, top 5 authors are making all of the money.
I can't see the full data, but as I assume they didn't just blatantly make that up men also likely receive more deals. In normal business terms, women would get 31% less per hour and also x fewer hours.
> "Though women make up 77% of the influencer market, male influencers are paid almost 100% more. " [1]
But thats how suply-and-demand workforce always work doesn't it? Too much people doing the same job tends to lower the wage for that job; and because a lot of companies compite for different markets when sponsoring a male influencers vs female influencers (e.g. "this is the shaving cream I use" vs "this is the bra's brand I use") they are income-wise 2 different jobs.
I would like more data for [1], with a breakdown per gender of each category and size. The data they show could be under the effect of a Simpsons paradox from the way they present it.
I think it depends of your style. Of course I wouldn't want to see an uncle if I were looking for sexy girls being rad, but I would love to see a 50yo uncle tell biking stories, motorcycle repair, or his brand of manly zen.
Definitely no one wants to see an uncle posing as a young girl, and I am also intrigued by why did an uncle wanted that badly to feel admired on Twitter in the first place. Someone younger I would understand.
Rather think about "What portion of the population wants to follow a sexy girl on a bike?" vs "What portion of the population wants to follow an uncle?" rather than "does a population that wants to follow an uncle exist?" I think it is pretty clear that the size of the group that wants to follow the sexy girl is larger than the group that wants to follow the uncle. Larger audience to be able to pull from.
Curiously, it seems like the portion of the population that wants to follow a sexy girl on a bike that acts like a biker uncle (i.e. getting her gloves dirty maintaining the engine) is even greater. I think this has more layers than I suspected at first.
I wish people use this trick to create dent in the universe. For eg. use face of pretty young girls to bring positive changes in the planet - assuming everyone wants to follow young girls & believe in what they say.
Say you need a safety warning tables for your railway station - pandas dangerously fussing with selfie sticks on a crowded platform are much more enjoyable and memorable than just some more generic stick figures doing the same.
You can also encode culture into mascots - everyone probably knows the bear mascot Kumamon (yes, there are many bears in Kumamoto and they occasionally eat somebody) but take forever example Shimaneko, the mascot of the Shimano pprefecture. Neko means cat and indeed its a cat mascot - with a strange hat! And that hat is the roof of the ancient and famous Izumo shrine located in the Shimano prefecture.
On the picture you can see a young female anime character in a summer kimono (yukata).
This is the mascot of a limitted express train (!) that goes from Osaka and Kyoto to the famous onsen (hot spring) town of Kinosaki (hence the Kinosaki in the name). The the other name Kounori is from the name of the train, Kou no tori - oriental white stork.
Which goes right back to the founding legend of Kinosaki about how they built the first bath after observing a stork using the natural hot spring to heal its wounds.
And the last thing - the summer kimono/yukata. If you look closely she also has a ticket stamping tool and a railway company employee badge - that's because station employees really do wear yukata in the summer in Kinosaki instead of their usual uniforms! :)
And the kimono pattern includes of course the oriental white stork but also - fireworks! And that's because of course in the summer there are regular fireworks shows in Kinosaki! :)
Really some much culture and symbolism (not to mention hard work!) goes to japanese mascot characters!
> The majority of “influencers” are young women, and only a minority would want to follow a 50 year old uncle.
One interesting side effect of this is that some of the most popular male YouTube channels I follow never show the host's face. Everything is carefully staged to only show their hands / body.
Its strange because random old people channels produce great content. Its just that, most of them don't try to be annoying influencers. I follow some old dude who repairs his motorcycle and writes music. He doesnt talk, and its great.
Very true. I came across a channel run by a 60 something man where he sits in his music room, puts on a record and talks about what that piece of music means to him, when he first heard it.
I usually don't watch the whole video as it can get a bit dry, but otherwise it is nice to just see someone expressing themself without shilling their Patreon or using clickbait thumbnails and titles like the more commercial "personal" channels do.
(BBC radio is at the very opposite end from begging for likes; once someone establishes a show, if it's not in a highly contended timeslot it can basically run forever no matter how obscure or unfashionable it is, until the presenter dies)
Doesn't that sort of depend on the channel? eg Radio 1 has always been Obnoxiously! Trendy! Pop! Music!, Radio 2 a lightweight blend of news, musical standards, and entertainment, Radio 3 classical or music and Very Serious Discourse, and Radio 4 intellectual topics, politics, and and quality news, little or no music. I know there are a few other radio channels but I can't remember what their focus is. And of course all of these channels have variations of their own depending what time of the day/week people are listening.
It's so refreshing to have content that is actually just good content and isn't some trainwreck of seeking attention from an increasingly more vapid audience.
The Signal Path? Largely just hands, although he has appeared occasionally.
Wendover Productions? Disembodied voice.
CGP Grey? Disembodied voice.
Real Engineering? Disembodied voice.
Not to mention innumerable video game streamers.
Of course, disembodied voices aren't in-and-of-themselves a new cultural phenomenon: Radio has existed for years, as have podcasts. And there are TV formats like nature and history documentaries where the narrator may rarely or never appear on screen.
And even on Youtube, there are a number of female voice-only celebrities - for example "vtubers", where a female voice actor plays games while pretending to be a cute anime girl. Of course, one could say that's an example for the theory people want to see beautiful women, not against
There's several more factors to vtubers than that. It's more interesting if you like lore, it fits with the aesthetic of the rest of the video better, you don't need to get dressed or do your makeup, etc.
As far as privacy it doesn't necessarily apply because the famous ones almost all have previous careers as face streamers, and their fans know who they are since they use their real voices. But if you are doing it to hide yourself then it works, and it means that everyone else can interact with you and seem to be in the same world.
Part of it's just the medium. Uncles write lots of good books, I imagine they teach lots of great classes. I've seen plenty who have great youtube channels or podcasts. But, instagram (and services like it) is all about aesthetics and nothing else.
Every day I give thanks that I live under a system of government that protects the individual from the wishes of the majority. It's not perfect of course, but it does work.
No doubt people felt good about following "her" because of her authenticity.
Not to put to fine a point on it, but aren't influencers essentially a type of very soft-core porn? I don't think they really expose people to world views, superficial or otherwise.
They're more like clothes models. The women are doing Instagram to sell things, not for male attention.
Although sometimes amateur models don't realize what the job of a model is, or they get groomed by fake photographers and end up making bad softcore porn by accident.
I'm still sorting out what we really mean when we keep referring to the guy as "an uncle". Is he also a father? Is he married? What's the description of "uncle" adding or informing us of? My immediate reaction makes me think he's a 50yo with no kids, maybe a girlfriend, but his sister had kids. I don't know that this is an accurate perception or if it even aligns with how other people read it. Just seems kind of weird that he's summarized as this title.
"An uncle" is just a way to refer to someone mature, unrelated to family connections. Kind of like the popular "Uncle Roger" https://www.youtube.com/c/mrnigelng (usually I'd expect a "generic uncle" to have no family of his own)
I think you're right, sans the bit about human nature. Traditionally influence is a function of understanding and wisdom, and that is a function of time and years.
The internet changed that.
Now it's a function of perceived popularity and perceived influence. That has become a (cheap?) proxy. It's not the person per se, but the "social proof" attached to that person.
We've been trained to use quantity instead of quality. Is that human nature?
Attacted to a pretty face? Yes. That is human nature.
Beauty is a skill like any other that has both a factor of talent and training to hone it, that, as with many skills, declines with age.
It happens to be a skill that influences require for their work.
Here, I see no problem; where I see a problem is that often those who hire judge those on their beauty where their beauty would play no factor in their performance, not only hurting those whom they would hire, but their own finances in the processes.
Of course, the scariest part of all is how much more easily the ugly are found guilty on the same level of evidence than the beautiful.
A skill is something that can be learned, your looks are something that you are born with.
And while there is a skill to "beautifying up" people, that only works to a certain degree and can't change the looks you were born with, it can only enhance/hide them in parts.
But you can't learn to uncrook your nose just like you can't remove your acne scars trough learning or straighten out your ears. These things don't require learning a skill, they require surgical procedures you most likely can't perform on yourself even if you had the skills to do so.
> A skill is something that can be learned, your looks are something that you are born with.
As I said, any skill has a component of talent and acquisition.
Most men can train their entire lives and will never have the skill at chess José Capablanca had when he was six, simply from watching others play the game. — every world chess champion that ever lived was born with talent of the game most others can only dream of.
> But you can't learn to uncrook your nose just like you can't remove your acne scars trough learning or straighten out your ears. These things don't require learning a skill, they require surgical procedures you most likely can't perform on yourself even if you had the skills to do so.
Just as an average man cannot ever reach the level that chess grandmasters had when they were 8 years old, even if he trained for his entire life.
> Most men can train their entire lives and will never have the skill at chess José Capablanca had when he was six, simply from watching others play the game.
This is a massive exaggeration. There's no way it's true.
> Just as an average man cannot ever reach the level that chess grandmasters had when they were 8 years old, even if he trained for his entire life.
I found the results of the world chess championship 2018 U10. [1] The best ones of the 10-year-old kids here are rated slightly higher than 2000 elo. And 8-year-old ones play significantly worse. (Also with the Internet these kids have access to all the knowledge in the world and typically have top coaches which Capablanca hadn't.) Do you really think it's impossible to reach 1900-2000 fide for an average man who trains the entire life?
> This is a massive exaggeration. There's no way it's true.?
It is indeed only an undocumented family story of the family that is hard to prove. However, such things as that Bobby Fisher at the age of 13 played what is now known as The Game of The Century against the best North American player at the time to victory, or that Capablanca beat the Cuban Chess Champion at the age of 11 are documented facts in history.
These chess prodigies amassed skills in the game at very young ages that most could never achieve in their lifetime.
> I found the results of the world chess championship 2018 U10. [1] The best ones of the 10-year-old kids here are rated slightly higher than 2000 elo.
And none of them will rise to the exceptional levels of Capablanca or Fischer, will they, many of them will be forgotten and never become professional to begin with.
Apart from that, 2000 Elo is already a higher rating than many serious club players will ever achieve. 2000 elo is candidate master level.
> Do you really think it's impossible to reach 1900-2000 fide for an average man who trains the entire life?
The average man? absolutely. Those that train their entire life are already 90% skill in chess.
And that's hardly the issue, even if he could if he trained his entire life, the exceptional professional players in chess that so earn their livelihood achieved 2000 at around 8-9 years old. 2000 is not close to a level that allows one to play chess professionally, for which 2550 is probably needed these days.
Most human beings on the planet lack the talent to ever be a professional chess player, no matter how hard they train, — it is no different from tennis, football, darts, or beauty.
As a transhumanist, I'm fine with this. It's clear that a lot of people would physically transform themselves into whatever illusion FaceApp provides today.
I certainly would.
I know this is being perceived as "fraud" right now, but the same people who were attracted to that person and now feel betrayed are overdue for some well-deserved self reflection.
It's hard to make an argument that the world would be worse off if everyone could just have the body they want. Regrettably, I was born too late to live to see it become reality.
It’s human nature to follow only young influencers? That’s a weird claim. Sounds like we take the current situation and justify it afterwards by saying “that’s human nature”.
> It’s human nature to follow only young influencers?
Marketers have known this for years before the appearance of "influencers" - youth sells, and a young women have better cross-gender appeal than young men. Go ahead an open any pre-WWW paper magazine, count the number of women vs. men who appear in the adverts for non-gendered products
Sex sells. Young attractive women attract the most sexual attention of any demographic (see any online dating/hookup site's stats, porn stats, etc).
And the commenter didn't say "only". Yes, people follow non-sexual influencers all the time, but it's much easier to get followers if you're sexually attractive.
Not a weird claim at all, you have to be very self conscious not to click and watch young people doing whatever. It is a natural tendency humans have. It has worked in any entertainment industry (from Hollywood to Youtube) because it exploits how our brains are wired.
That’s ignoring how much control and influence the platform itself has. It’s not a free market, the platform decides who trends and what matters or not.
No. A majority of people doing something in a particular moment doesn't mean that it is an intrinsic quality of people. Otherwise we'll start to say that Coca-Cola and The Simpsons are genetic destiny.
There have been plenty of times during history during which nobody cared what young people thought. I'd venture to say the majority of it.
Nobody cares about what young people think now either. We are talking about a very small subset of model-like stylish youngsters (mostly women). 99.99% continue to be ignored as usual.
I don't know if they're literally uncles, but men in that age-range like Elon Musk, Louis Cole, Joe Rogan, brooklyn dad defiant, Donald Trump, etc. are huge influencers (orders of magnitude more so than @azusagakuyuki). It's a bit handwave-y to say "nobody wants to see an uncle".
Is this actually true, or just bias from your own interessts?
If we look at technical stuff and gaming, we see far more successful male influencers. Similar with entertainment-industry.
> and only a minority would want to follow a 50 year old
This more or less is true, because not many like to see unattractive people doing boring things. But the point here is, this in not because of gender or sex, it's about the quality of content and chemistry with the consumers. An old ugly guy without any real skill, would be usually as unsuccesful as an old ugly woman without any real skill. Though, for both there always is chance to find niche to sellout your content over something, the chance is pretty low.
With younger and more attractive people, the chances are significant higher, because they have more selling points besides the content itself, thus they sell better. But it also depends on the target-group and content.
> it’s human nature
No, it's human culture. People sell according to the crowds reception on what the gender is suposed to do. So woman sell better in female-stuff, men better with manly stuff. Woman do have a slight advantage, in that they are the gender which in most cultures is educated from early days to sellout. They dress up, use fancy cloths, catter to the people, etc. This works better for laymen when becoming influencers, because woman have more likely the skills to sell themself on a broader are, while most men need to learn it first.
Are they?...Take the girls from BoutineLA (an Instagram account), give them some training and send them to sell B2B, I would bet easily on their potential returns
The majority of “influencers” are young women, and only a minority would want to follow a 50 year old uncle. I don’t think there’s much we can do about it, it’s human nature. It does however limit the diversity and world views people are exposed to and sometimes it’s nice to see the world through the eyes of a 50 year Japanese biker.