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My Video Went Viral. Here's Why
Veritasium
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.Committed to, actually. He made a video about how they were going to start doing it more: https://youtu.be/fHsa9DqmId8?t=1035. Also, more recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng.
Just like we recognized tabloids for what they were, we need to recognize social media for being the same phenomenon disguised in a "grassroots" cloak (i.e. crowdsourced tabloids)There is nothing organic about the speech that happens on YouTube. Veritasium explains the shift that happened when youtube switched to an algorithmic model from the subscriber model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8 - you need to carefully manipulate people to click your thumbnail based on the picture and the video title.
Making outrageous but believable shit up to sensationalize your content is a well known tactic of tabloids (which does continue today to some extent). YouTube and other social media incentivise exactly that.
This article is only half-right. Some of the other things you don't see because the algorithm doesn't promote them are:- scientists and educators that make 1 hour long videos to explain how something is incorrect. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H95VCYLBh-A (less than 0.1% reach of the original)
- long threads of detailed analysis with cross-references
- long educational material that explaines e.g. confounders in order to explain why some statistical results observed are not possible to interpret in a certain way
The reason you don't see this kind of content is simple: the level of its engagement is low. Its not clickbaity, its not exciting, it doesn't have a rebel perspective, it doesn't claim to uncover something nobody has ever seen before. Its often kind of a downer too, pointing out other people's mistakes.
Social media sites make their money through engagement. The longer you stay on their site, the more ads they can show you. As such, their default algorithms promote engagement at any cost. It turns out that this trains creators to spread clickbaity, potentially misleading, false but exciting and novel "information" (see paper [1] as well as Veritasium's youtube specific explanation [2])
You know what other thing spreads a lot? Outrage. Extreme reactions to spread of misinformation are also engaging. People will fight over them due to strong feelings: one side frustrated by seeing the effort put into debunking having absolutely no effect (because it doens't get promoted by the algorithms, nobody finds out about it) while the other side feeling like the core values we have (free speech) are under attack.
Unfortunately, there is no way for social media companies to fix this problem without taking huge hits in revenue. The only way we can fix it is by becoming aware that what we're seeing isn't free speech, its some distorted picture of the world designed to engage us longer at any cost.
⬐ RealityVoid> The only way we can fix it is by becoming aware that what we're seeing isn't free speech, its some distorted picture of the world designed to engage us longer at any cost.I like your assessment, but the conclusion is depressing me. Because that awareness is never going to reach the wide population and simply understanding something, sadly, does not make you immune to it. You can understand the reason things are the way they are but still feel the frustration and revolt inside you. I know I do.
⬐ spionI have some hope based on the development of awareness of "yellow press" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism). I don't see another solution that can reach "both sides".⬐ spionI just wanted to add - for anyone that thinks the spread of viral false information isn't just as serious of a problem as lack of free speach is, I invite you to read this story https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1460368038859919361.html
You Sir, are a Gentleman and a Scholar :-)>Now everything on the internet is "content," a hyper optimized form of human intellectual output that is devoid of art, minimal on information, excreted instead of created, measured to the lowest common denominator, monetized yet worthless, just enough bait on the hook for the next lizard brain click.
I could not have said it better myself !
The Internet has become a place to publish/share every trivial thought that has ever popped into every mediocre mind. There is no self-regulation/self-censoring anymore. The Noise is just overwhelming and it is extremely mentally fatiguing just trying to get at any kind of Signal. You just give up and start numbing your mind with all the junk available.
PS: Here is Veritasium explaining the insidious effects of "Youtube Platform" Algorithms - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8 Now extrapolate the same idea to other dominant platforms like Facebook, Google etc. and you realize that "The Internet" has become a platform for Expression and not necessarily Information.
PPS: The book Networked Life: 20 Questions and Answers by Mung Chiang gives an inside algorithmic view of how the above platforms work.
The Veritasium channel does this with all its videos; it lets Derek test which thumbnail/titles are effective and which aren't. He talks about it in this videohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8 at about the 15:50-16:00 mark
This video from Veritasium goes into more about Youtuber burnout, self-blame, dynamics and the drive to non-platform revenue streams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8If you find the apparent contradiction between Youtube success and creators needing to built out non-platform revenue streams strange, the video gives a pretty good theory explaining why.
It's possible that a small number of creators are taking most of the revenue at any particular time, and the set of outstandingly successful creators keeps changing, which it might due to the promotion algorithm.
That gives all of them reasons to build out non-platform revenue streams.
I'm not saying Google/YouTube aren't taking too much. But hypothetically, even if they took 0% cut, the above could still happen.
veritasium used to be a really good channel, but a few years ago he tasted what it was like to have a viral video. since they he basically admitted (somewhere near the end of https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8 ) that from then on he will be making clickbait style videos
⬐ MattRixClickbait is more about titles and thumbnails and less about the content itself. The content of this video is hardly what I would consider clickbait.
> The way most entertainers get known is just through sheer luck or connections.Derek Muller has a couple of videos talking about the success of his Veritasium YouTube channel (and work, luck, and success generally):
>but I saw a video of his talking about this. He doesn't actually like these titles, but claims to have proof they improve viewership countsVeritasium also had video on this topic: https://youtu.be/fHsa9DqmId8?t=1041
Long time Veritasium subscriber here. He actually made a great video a while ago explaining why professional Youtubers don't have much of a choice when it comes to clickbaiting with titles and thumbnails, because it's the only way to reliably get lots of impressions and views and grow their channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8It made me gain a bit of empathy for creators using these tactics on Youtube and tolerate it as long as it's not being used to promote content that's devoid of any substance, which is pretty much never the case for Veritasium videos or any of the other educational channels I subscribe to.
⬐ jerfYes, I understand and agree. It makes me sad as well but I've made my peace with it.Nevertheless, I commented about this one in particular because when I saw the title card, I legitimately thought, even having seen many of his videos, that he couldn't possibly deliver on that. He got me; he did. I was impressed.
Can't agree more except for the long-videos thing.The way YouTube works now encourages clickbait crying-for-a-click titles and silly-shocked-faces thumbnails because click-through-rate plays a huge role in video success now.
In his video [0], that youtuber explains that and why he was going to shift toward using clickbait titles in his channel. Because otherwise, you would not thrive on YT.
For long videos, I think sometimes even 10 minutes are not enough to convey a substantial message in a video. But I think you mean those youtubers that prolong their videos longer—without added value—just for more ads.
Regardless how to define what's garbage and what's not, YouTube seems to remove demonetized videos from recommendations. Since I don't think that good content is always necessarily advertiser-friendly, a lot of good videos are just not getting any attention because a few big companies decided that they're not helpful to market their products. Example: Historical or educational videos which are about controversial topics or just have the word "war" in their title.Basically, their recommendations algorithm favors profit from advertising over personalized recommendations because it seems to be designed to maximize click-through rate and watch time for videos with many ads. [1]
What if YouTube just does the same, but the goal of the algorithm is not to maximize like/dislike ratios, but actual click-through rate and watch time? [1] It's an ad company after all. Also, the domain of TikTok videos seems very limited in comparison to YouTube videos, so your like-based algorithm might result in bad user retention with this broad strategy of showing random videos.So the question really is: If YouTube's algorithm is more sophisticated than TikTok's and TikTok is trying to do the same, would they still be as transparent about it?
Immediate counter-arguments:Most professional YouTubers complain about having to tailor their videos to suit the recommendations algorithms. Historically, many short videos were padded out to just over 10 minutes in order to reach the minimum threshold to insert a midroll advertisement; today, many videos are as long as possible to take advantage of the algorithmic prioritisation of view time over view count. There is widespread dissatisfaction with the recent necessity to use clickbait thumbnails and titles, due to YouTube's increasing weighting of click-through-rate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8
Most analysts believe that the high weight on view time is causing the YouTube algorithms to promote the kind of videos that their heaviest users watch. The problem is that these heavy users aren't representative of the general population - they're far more likely to be interested in conspiracy theories or extremist politics.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-youtu...
The vast majority of YouTube video views are as a result of algorithmic decisions by YouTube - what to show in the recommendations bar, what to prioritise on the home page, what to put at the top of search results. Those algorithms are not and cannot be neutral. These algorithms aren't just shaping which videos people watch; YouTube creators freely admit to tailoring the content of their videos to fit the recommendations algorithm.
This seems like it takes some notes from Veritasium's theory on YouTube's recommendation algorithm which he posted after his initial reservoir shade balls video went viral. (edited for clarity)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8 for his theory.
⬐ nwah1Great video. A feedback loop between algorithms and content creators, with the audience's influence being quite weak and indirect.The monetization in general is often heralded as important for revenue sharing. By comparison, facebook just takes all our content and gives us nothing for it.
But it obviously isn't all good. It creates a lot of perverse incentives to optimize for the letter of whatever the algorithm recommends, instead of authentically serving the audience's needs or authentically trying to produce content purely of high quality.
Let me Godwin it up>We're optimizing for click through rate.
and so was Hitler in ~1923. Optimizing something that affects how other people act (same happens on YT Veritasium:My Video Went Viral https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8) leads to bad outcomes (radicalization, race to the bottom, catering to lowest denominator etc).
Veritasium very recently spoke about algorithm optimizing for click through rate in the context of the bad. https://youtu.be/fHsa9DqmId8?t=783It seems okay in this case though.