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I've recently heard about this YouTube account named Roel Van De Paar. If you've looked up any error message on YouTube recently, you've probably run into him.

• lkxijlewlf 4y ago
  I wonder how much he earns... Not that I'm suggesting I'll mimic his approach, just curious.
• XCSme 4y ago
  I misread your comment, thinking "2 million views" is not that much, how can it be 0.2% of the entire platform? Then I realized you said "videos" not "views"... That's insane.
• philliphaydon 4y ago
  You've probably ruined my recommendations forever now. :( I pretty much only stick to subscriber channels now except for stuff people send me. Since there's no dislikes I just don't browse the stuff available anymore. YouTube is definitely worse off without the dislike counter.
  • joshbaptiste 4y ago
    yup.. any YT links that are sent by friends.. I open in incognito mode to not ruin my recommendations
  • FartyMcFarter 4y ago
    There's a "don't recommend channel" option if you click the 3 dots button on a video. I use this liberally for all sorts of reasons and it makes my recommendations much better.
    • dwighttk 4y ago
      For some reason that only shows up in certain webviews (I’m not interested in the app)
      • FartyMcFarter 4y ago
        You're right, it shows up on the youtube homepage as well as the recommendations on the right side, but not for a particular video while watching it.
        • dwighttk 4y ago
          I can’t isolate what particular view but there have been times in some list view where I want to eliminate videos but the option isn’t there.
        • sgc 4y ago
          In other words, strategically hidden where you would want it most.
    • hobs 4y ago
      A much better approach is to go to your history and delete it from your history (if you're signed in) this will change your recommendations so much harder.
      • utucuro 4y ago
        Here's one better: just disable the watch history. Your subscriptions then have a much bigger influence on recommendations and you have more control.
    • moffkalast 4y ago
  • drivers99 4y ago
    You can go to “history” and remove it.
  • bcrosby95 4y ago
    I use bookmarks. It sucks that you can't organize your subscriptions into folders.
  • tobiasSoftware 4y ago
    Youtube has a history tab, my advice is to go through it and remove videos that you don't want recommended. I learned this the hard way after watching a few videos about a particular person who had a fatal disease and then overnight my Youtube recommendations all turned into videos about cancer.
• belter 4y ago
  I see a Business opportunity for a new YouTube specific search engine, that will allow for discovery of new content but will filter all that crap:-)
  • jimmydorry 4y ago
    What feedback mechanism would you use to filter the crap? There is no longer an incentive for users to down-vote (assuming you managed to even get that data). And such a search engine needs a literal army of users providing signal to evaluate the quality of content as it is released.
    • mrkramer 4y ago
      >What feedback mechanism would you use to filter the crap? You would use ranking algorithms meaning you should crawl, scrape and analyse YouTube videos which would make YouTube probably unhappy.
      • jimmydorry 4y ago
        Ranking based on what though? Number of comments? Number of references made to each video in other video descriptions?
        • mrkramer 4y ago
          Backlinks linking to the video on the web, number of views, likes, comments, NLP analysis of the title and the description of the video and yea references made to each video in other video descriptions is also good idea.
          • jimmydorry 4y ago
            It's an interesting idea. But my gut feel is that only a minority of content actually is referenced elsewhere. It would be an interesting idea to test though!
    • 4y ago
• hbbio 4y ago
  Obviously, the guy is just ripping StackOverflow. His "latest" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtqJq0OF8eA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtqJq0OF8eA Is a poorly generated copy/paste of: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/164493/whats-the-progress-on-haskell-records https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1644... Probably a tiny Python script. Google is prompt to ban other accounts, hope some Googlers around here can can do something...
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • brador 4y ago
    If he’s disseminating and distributing solutions I don’t see the problem with it other than jealousy. It’s helpful and helps prevent information rot if a platform goes down.
    • corobo 4y ago
      For me at least the main problem isn't so much this person/channel, you can always tell YouTube to stop suggesting a channel. It's the people that now realise this is something YouTube allows (or at least doesn't seem to care about). For a similar issue there was a plague of "Reply girls" for a while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_girl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_girl
      • TheFreim 4y ago
        Relating to reply girls, I really loved YouTube's video response feature. It's understandable why it went away, but it was still really cool to be able to find responses to videos. Now if I watch a video arguing for X and want to see a response I have to search "Response to X" or "X rebutted" etc.
      • Beltalowda 4y ago
        "Although many users would click the "dislike" button on the videos, this was interpreted by YouTube's algorithm as legitimate engagement, and the videos would be ranked more highly." I literally facepalmed.
• the_only_law 4y ago
  Is this guy making income from doing this? I may have to re-evaluate my career if I can pay my rent by mostly just dumping random internet content into a video.
  • gowld 4y ago
    One month of work to build an automation pipeline. $50/mo revenue. still need a real job
    • krater23 4y ago
      You need one month for this?
  • Nextgrid 4y ago
    This guy maybe not yet, but producing garbage content en-masse for social media is definitely a profitable niche. Popular "DIY" and lifehacks pages/channels are making decent bucks especially considering they are often based in third-world countries.
    • jeffwask 4y ago
      The 5 Minute Crafts channel and some other associated channels are infamous for this. A lot of them start out OK and once they have some numbers just shift to pumping out algorithm fodder. Some are associated with large content factories that operate similar to Troll Farms.
  • wasmitnetzen 4y ago
    Probably not all that much. He gets about a million views a month, which makes him something in the order of $1000/month[1]. [1]: https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UCPF-oYb2-xN5FbCXy0167Gg https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UCPF-oYb2-xN5FbCXy01...
    • alligatorplum 4y ago
      I mean $1000/month is pretty good considering he has to do nothing besides keep his script running.
• Phil_Latio 4y ago
  I saw similar bots who copy-paste news content into videos. It's funny to a certain degree. Imagine you are the person doing this, trying to figure out for months how to make money online. In the end, you come to the conclusion that you have to spam YouTube and upload as much as possible - in an automated way... =) A more elaborate scam are those graphic card reviews: They claim for example to test 4 different GPUs and show them in split screen with FPS and memory information. In reality, it's probably just 1 GPU with the displayed information being faked, because from the pictures alone, you can't see a difference. The information one has to display for the different GPUs can be easily acquired from legitimate graphic card reviews. These videos get millions of views, with positive ratings. Some of these channels probably make >10k a month.
• heywoodlh 4y ago
  > YouTube account named Roel Van De Paar > The account has over 2 million videos. Approximately 0.2% of ALL videos on the ENTIRE platform of YouTube can be attributed to this account, and if you check now they've probably uploaded a few videos in the past couple minutes. I thought that this must be an exaggeration but I just looked at the account and at this time the account has 20 videos posted in the last hour. I know Youtube/Google has a ton of resources -- but won't accounts with garbage/spammy content like this cause long-term issues in regard to wasting resources? Surely, Youtube would protect itself against something like this in its ToS, right?
  • dmitrygr 4y ago
    As long as they get clicks, show ads, and compress adequately well, why?
• jeffbee 4y ago
  > 2 million videos. Approximately 0.2% of ALL videos on the ENTIRE platform of YouTube Yeah I mean there's no way that's even close to accurate. You think there are only a billion videos on YouTube?
  • mh- 4y ago
    I can't find any reputable source or even credible estimate about the total number of videos on YouTube. What I did find, though, is that YouTube currently touts[1] "500+ hours of content uploaded every minute", which means 43.2 million minutes of video per day if we take that claim at face value. And a study finding the average video length was 11.7 minutes[2] in 2018. So, naively doing the math suggests that YouTube is currently adding ~3.7 million videos per day. Or another billion videos every 9 months. Keep in mind this doesn't account for a ton of variables and the math is pretty hand wavy. But it's the closest thing I could do to a sanity check on the numbers in 5 minutes. Conclusion: yeah there's way more than a billion videos on YouTube. [1] https://blog.youtube/press/ https://blog.youtube/press/ [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1026923/youtube-video-category-average-length/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1026923/youtube-video-ca...
    • alexb_ 4y ago
      Fair enough - I literally just googled "how many videos on youtube" and stuck with the first result. Not very scientific but I also don't really care that much
      • mh- 4y ago
        Yeah, I just got curious after seeing the reply to your comment. Hadn't really thought about it prior.
• aendruk 4y ago
  > If you've looked up any error message on YouTube recently This tidbit is the biggest news on the page for me. I had no idea people used YouTube this way. It sounds excruciating, though don’t knock it till you’ve tried it I suppose.
• e40 4y ago
  > Hiding dislikes = less people press dislike (no feedback) Wow, I just realized that I haven't pressed the dislike button since the count was removed. I didn't do it intentionally, but I literally just deleted, in my mind, the fact that there was a dislike button. Talk about unintended consequences!!
  • mdrzn 4y ago
    > Talk about unintended consequences!! Talk about intended consequences. That was their whole goal.
• paintman252 4y ago
  >The account has over 2 million videos. Approximately 0.2% of ALL videos on the ENTIRE platform of YouTube can be attributed to this account, This isn't accurate math
• walderf 4y ago
  i learned about him a few days ago. it's logical to me that "Roel Van de Paar" is not the name of a real person and the person shown in the clip on each video (granted, i only watched two, but i think it's the same for every single one) is either deep faked or just a random that got paid $21.50 to read a script on camera. then i found this https://github.com/roelvdp https://github.com/roelvdp in my searching and it kind of made things a little bit more interesting. i didn't look at a side-by-side of the man in the video and the man in the photo here, but from memory they looked like they could be similar enough to be the same person with somewhat of an age gap between time's taken. they also look different enough to be different people. that's not what's weird, though. most of his contributions are for private repos and a lot of his "repositories" are forks from projects involved with machine/deep learning, AI, databases, and all sorts of stuff that someone smarter than me would know what it does or is used for, but they go back 2014ish. i didn't spend more than a few minutes "investigating" and sure didn't touch any of his videos with my own IP/logged in user, because my YT recommendations are screwed up enough. either way, i think the github account is probably whoever is behind this, well, pretty amazing feat, at this point. i hate it, but you just can't deny that it's actually going on and has been for a LONG time. that's respectable in a sense. i did the math for a 10 hour period in which i counted roughly 240 new videos and it equated to an upload every 2 minutes. impressive, right? well, if this were true that would mean only 262800 videos a year and he has uploaded 1 million since ~March 2021, based on some search results i found where "people" were celebrating his 1M mark. heh.
• winternett 4y ago
  YT would probably help this issue quite a bit by requiring thumbnails to be actual captures from the video content rather than up-loadable clickbait images... For years now their uploader only picks the 3 worst possible shots from content to be used, and channels create bright thumbnails that often don't reflect the actual content at all. You get more views on any video by adding totally non-relevant thumbnails with colorful graphics and cleavage in them, and it's totally stupid when it comes to important topics that the absolute worst content ranks first because of what thumbnail it has. I am exhausted with complaining about this issue, search results on YT have been totally maligned with finding the best content that I search reddit and Twitter now for useful YT content primarily. Also, the filter options are a total joke, and spammy titles are now rampant on the platform for everything. MGMT should really feel ashamed for the lack of meaningful scaling over the years on the YT platform.
  • QuietCF 4y ago
    This is how it used to be but people would put a thumbnail into their video for 1 frame to then use it as the thumbnail. I think at that time YouTube used to take the frame in the center of the video but I’m not so sure about that one.