
YouTube’s fake views economy - lnguyen
https://theoutline.com/post/3804/inside-youtube-s-fake-views-economy
======
dalbasal
Discovery on youtube is pretty poor, imo.

I suppose it's a lot better than FB (we decide what you see), and the
navigation model (search & browse a database) is what I want. But overall,
it's worse than most porn sites.

These things have feedback loops and 3rd order effects. If discovery worked
differently, it's not just what people see that gets affected. Pretty soon,
what gets created is affected as the market reacts.

This problem is kind of reminiscent of Google SEO/spam problems, but youtube
seems a lot worse than search ever was. SEO-spam, clickbait & stuff that
hovers just over the spam threshold.. these are pretty dominant.

"Monetization" was another example of market poorly handled. It just did not
reward the kind of thing youtube should want to reward.

~~~
John_KZ
Discovery was ruined on purpose. I will always rant about this. Youtube wants
to control what you see, that has always been the case since Google took over.
Right now it's nearly impossible to research something specific on youtube.
You searches are automatically "corrected": I search terms in one language and
get results in another, google tries to semanticaly interpret what I search
(and typically wrongly, ie "temperature differential" \--> car differntial
videos because they're more popular and profitable). Results aren't complete
(they probably create a short search table/cache every few hours based on a
finite, semantically-defined number of categories), you can't properly filter
by dates, views or any other criterion. Also the "related" videos are often
non-related extremely effective clickbait, based on what they know you'll to
binge on, even if you don't want to.

I hate youtube wholeheartedly and Google by extension. I don't know if I'm
lucky or unlucky to be aware of the vast amounts of data they hide from public
view.

Every day hundreds of people create new channels making interesting, thought-
provoking and informative videos, and youtube decides to hide them in favour
of clickbait garbage and shitty ads, and take away all means you have to
discover them.

~~~
zombieprocesses
> Discovery was ruined on purpose.

Bingo. And it has gotten worse in recent months as they had to censor and
cater to the mainstream media.

> Results aren't complete (they probably create a short search table/cache
> every few hours based on a finite, semantically-defined number of
> categories)

Also, heavily weighted towards paying customers and their own pet projects.
Some days, youtube is just filled with SNL, late night show, movie trailers,
logan paul, youtube drama, etc.

> Every day hundreds of people create new channels making interesting,
> thought-provoking and informative videos, and youtube decides to hide them
> in favour of clickbait garbage and shitty ads, and take away all means you
> have to discover them.

I remember just a few years ago, one of the fun things to do was go down
youtube's rabbit hole. Now, youtube is just another managed and curated
platform to funnel you to certain corporate interests.

Even when stephen hawking pass away, the only thing on youtube was CNN's video
of it. What a marked difference from a few years ago when steve jobs passed
away.

Sadly, youtube is just becoming a "tv platform" now. Which is a shame.

------
Mononokay
That site's ads were . . . surprisingly tasteful. Got around my adblocker
because they were hosted by the advertisers, not an ad company, and, while I
wasn't a fan of the Samsung auto-playing video, the Mailchip ad was novel. It
felt like reading a classier newspaper, which I can't say I dislike,
personally. Plain-CSS ads are the way to go.

~~~
erickhill
The perpetually animated squiggle at the top of the article, though, was super
annoying. I felt an odd sense of relief when I scrolled down to get that thing
off my screen.

Then each link I hovered over squiggled, too.

~~~
sverige
Squiggle is the new blink, only more annoying, which I didn't think was
possible. It should be sent straight to hell, no cigarette.

------
philfrasty
The far bigger problem from my POV which is not described in the article is
manipulation of YouTube trends. This is to some extent related to buying views
but needs a special kind of attention.

A few weeks back I noticed weird videos in the German YouTube trends, things
like "cheap iPhone cases buy now" with channels that had zero subs. A day
later there were 3 of these videos in the trends, the next day 6, then 50% of
the trends were full of this. A guy with 0 subs even made a video explaining
that he does this kind of manipulation for a living...and unsurprisingly the
video made it into the trends the same day.

Simply buying views has very little effect (except on maybe advertisers that
pay you) but gaining massive exposure through being featured in the trending
videos is big.

------
gnicholas
I'm curious about how the viewbotting is actually carried out and whether this
impacts inline video ads on Youtube. I experimented with these video ads and
did some very narrow targeting for our audience (searches related to dyslexia
or ADHD). I know that a sizable percentage of people with dyslexia or ADHD
love our tools (and our video ad contained a demo), but the click-through rate
was next to nothing.

I wondered at the time if this was an issue with how Youtube does their
targeting, or if it was something else. Seeing how popular viewbotting is, I
now wonder if the bots end up getting categorized as relevant to different
types of ads and are subsequently shown them. Of course, this would depress
the click-through rate and the overall efficacy of Youtube video advertising.

Would be interested in others' thoughts.

~~~
anonymous5133
I used to do viewbotting back in the day but it isn't as lucrative as you
would think. Basically, the creme de la creme is views from residential IP
addresses, especially from the United States. Most proxy and VPN IPs are
allocated to datacenter IPs so those IPs are easy to detect by youtube.

When you run the viewbotting app all it does is scroll though various youtube
videos. Sometimes it likes the video and other times it will add a fake
comment. Occasionally it will subscribe to the channel. The software is
designed to mimic real user behavior. In exchange for running the bot you get
credits which allows other bots to view your video. Since it is residential IP
addresses, you do get paid for the views.

The big downside is that there isn't that many people using it so you don't
really make much money from it at all. In fact, you are better off just
spending your time making quality content.

From what I understand, the services mentioned in the article are not quality
views. Youtube will most likely delete those views eventually.

------
alexozer
I'm honestly not sure I can trust anything this author says.

In this article he links to another he's written [0] which posits that
Professor Jordan Peterson is recruiting depressed men for the alt-right. It's
full of nothing but false emotionally-driven insinuations, and is especially
ridiculous considering Peterson's very explicit stance against extremist
ideologies on either side, including the alt-right.

[0]: [https://theoutline.com/post/3537/alt-right-recruiters-
have-i...](https://theoutline.com/post/3537/alt-right-recruiters-have-
infiltrated-the-online-depression-community)

------
z3t4
Social proof is so important, even as I am aware of it I still fall for it,
for example Github stars and contributors. I kinda feel special when I am
watching a youtube video of less then 100 views though.

------
frgtpsswrdlame
Past youtubers were able to buy views in order to generate social proof. Any
new youtuber won't be able to take this same shortcut. Maybe youtube should
consider hiding the viewcount of videos under a certain amount, say <5000, in
order to give people a shot again.

~~~
justrobert
The view count itself isn't why they are buying views, it is the ranking in
search and related videos.

I find youtube/twitch have the same problems as the CPM industry. If you
punish the provider of content for negative viewer action you provide a means
for competition to cheaply force the content creator out of the market.

This is why twitch doesn't punish view botting, as any viewer could spend $5
to shut down a $50k/day stream.

If youtube really does use a guilty until proven innocent method then they are
just punishing honest content creators that don't understand the dynamics of
online media.

------
rwz
The article starts with putting Jordan Peterson in the same cohort as Alex
Jones and crisis actors conspiracy peddlers. I’m not a Peterson fan, but those
kind of comparisons strike me as extremely misinformed and dishonest, and
undermines the whole credibility of the article by a lot

~~~
wincy
A lot of links are just other stories written by the same author, as well.
Pretty clearly has an agenda.

I’ll say it. Jordan Peterson has been a positive influence in my life. I’ve
watched hundreds of hours of his lectures on YouTube. I started a book club to
read his recommended books such as Gulag Archipelago, Brave New World, 1984,
and The Rape of Nanking. It has been a difficult and important experience for
me.

Reading Dostoyevsky was eye opening, if just for the fact that as much as
people change, we stay the same, and the Communists were using some of the
same idealistic arguments for changing the world in 1860s Russia that they are
now. The idea that we are simply products of social conditioning, the tabula
rasa and nothing more, the victims of our upbringing, were all central tenants
in the severity of punishments for people being sent to Gulag in the Soviet
Union. Prostitution was 3 years and being a nun was 10 Years. It technically
wasn’t illegal to be a Christian, but teaching your children Christian values
was! Families were purposely torn apart.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that learning more history, and just
how badly things can go wrong, is very important and anyone who encourages
people to seek out that history on their own is good in my book.

~~~
snowpanda
The downvotes of your comment once again confirm how tolerant HN is of
different opinions. The people downvoting you are the same people who call
themselves progressive and open-minded. As long as they agree with it of
course.

