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YouTube fed me a couple of these videos before I blocked the channel(s); I didn't completely put all the pieces together that it was abuse like this but I intui
by jerf 6y ago
YouTube fed me a couple of these videos before I blocked the channel(s); I didn't completely put all the pieces together that it was abuse like this but I intuited that they were at least manipulative, because they were just too interesting. My wife had an internship for her degree at an animal rescue facility. Though they didn't deal in pets, real animal rescue stories tend to be more like "someone found this animal; they took it to the rescue facility, it got better or it didn't, and they released it or not". You don't get:
"I'd seen this raccoon around the house for a while, had been feeding him, and had been filming his exploits for a while. But one day, he got caught in {extremely picturesque situation} and I knew something had to be done. So I called up these other people to help rescue him, and he was so cute when we fetched him!" (Real rescued animals, BTW, are often injured in ways that will make most people vomit.) "So we took him in to our facility, where he had numerous cute interactions with our other animals..." (real rescued animals are often quite distrusting; there's a couple of other videos where the main storyline was "and he instantly trusted us after a bit") "... and after we released him he still hangs around and visits us for treats and rollicking fun!"
Especially all the bits from before the injury are just crazy. This is a story line from a kid's book, not something that happens routinely. Maybe in the entire ~2 summers my wife worked at a rescue facility you could get one story of this level of "interest" out of it. You could get quite a few of lower levels of "interest", but not this sort of long-running sustained level of interest, and certainly not over and over, every week or on some other regular posting schedule. It was all just too pat to be something happening like this all the time.
- duxup 6y agoUnfortunately I think it fits the ... "everything is amplified on Youtube" type ecosystem that it stops being a weirdly storybook story and ... it's just what you expect to see so you don't notice it. The YouTube guy who is amped up about everything, the latest movie is the worst ever, here are some videos of me overreacting to myself on video that I've seen before because I edited them but now I'll act like I didn't, everything celeb gossip type content, even videos reposed with slightly altered origin stories to fit a narrative.... It's all so skewed and wild it's just normal....
- hanniabu 6y agoI wouldn't exactly categorize these 2 type of videos in the same basket...
- duxup 6y agoThey're not the same type of video, but the ecosystem is surreal as it is, I think that surreal nature makes folks less suspect of other sort of curious / awfully polished / almost surreal content as ... of course it is, it is on Youtube. Kinda like on Twitter, people rarely just call anyone out for being what would qualify as a jerk IRL... because being a jerk on Twitter really isn't that weird.
- cutitout 6y ago> I think that surreal nature makes folks less suspect of other sort of curious / awfully polished / almost surreal content I agree, and it it reminds me of a very good article: https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-ubiquitous-matrix-of-lies/ https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-ubiquitous-matrix-o...
- Crosseye_Jack 6y ago> real rescued animals are often quite distrusting Will confirm, we have a feral cat living in the garden. We have provided it with shelter (a cat kennel at the top of the garden) he will use during bad weather, we provide him food so he isn’t reliant on hunting and the little bugger will often take a swipe at me while I’m giving him his food. It’s not like I’m cornering him with, he comes running over to me now expecting me to have food.
- HideousKojima 6y agoMy wife and I feed some feral cats in our neighborhood, and it took months of fairly regular visits for them to get brave enough to get within 10 feet of us
- Crosseye_Jack 6y agoYeah same, this ginger cat has been floating around for a few years now. A while ago if he was at the top of the garden he would be ok with me being in the bottom half of the garden, but once I crossed into the top half he would dart off. Its only been in the past couple of months he has got brave enough to run over to me when I bring food out. I find it a bit funny because he still doesn't fully trust me, so while he will come running over to me while I'm putting his food out he will hiss at me while running over to me. It was only a couple months ago I would have to put the food out and return indoors before he would walk over to it and have something to eat. Little steps I guess.
- omgwtfbyobbq 6y agoEven feral kittens take a while (a couple weeks) to become comfortable enough to be held after being caught. You can usually pet them at that point, but will still hiss as they see your hand moving towards them, and end up doing this weird combination of hiss(sees hand)/purr(gets petted).
- yakshaving_jgt 6y agoYour description of the more sensationalist types of stories sound similar to the content that The Dodo publishes. It makes me wonder just how complicit they might be in this form of terrorism.