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A man who uploaded 2M videos to YouTube [video]

232 points by memorable 4y ago

i_like_waiting 4y ago
Is there any other similar channel please? I was using this channel to see if my data stream (about new ytb videos is working) and now I lost point of reference. Any suggestions? You might hate him, but his videos brought value to me.
thejosh 4y ago
Are they banking on youtube videos being a google result, similar to the trash we see at the moment when you Google something and it has these scraped Stackoverflow answers?
mongol 4y ago
Why this guy has not been blocked from Youtube is beyond me. He spams so many search results.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  Every search result spammed in favor of YouTube is an additional bit of attention to be monetized by Google. Why should they prevent people from making them more money?
  - acover 4y ago
    Reputation?
    - jiggawatts 4y ago
      Tragedy of the commons explains everything. Individuals at Google are incentivised to abuse the collective reputation for personal gain. It always seems that the towering reputation of Google is an unassailable monolith that will never be shaken by any individual. So every individual harms it in their own tiny selfish way, gaining promotions, KPIs, or pay bumps as a reward for their behaviour. Decades of promoting the selfish, commons-destroying people eventually results in an organisation that has these values entrenched in its upper echelons. At this point, the demise of the enterprise is inevitable, as the commons is destroyed in bigger, more obvious ways, by people now thoroughly empowered to do so, and surrounded by people competing with them for the right to also destroy the commons even more. Cash reserves and the intangible value of lingering external brand perception can drag this out for a surprisingly long time, but the direction will inevitably continue downwards. In other words, it is precisely "reputation" that enables this kind of atrocious, value-destroying behaviour and quality erosion. Companies without reputation are too busy building it, and can't afford even the slightest slip up.
      - mavhc 4y ago
        They probably should get a leader to control their employees
      - NonNefarious 4y ago
        Confirmed. A good friend and colleague worked at Google. Their employees are forced to use a graphical tool to rank coworkers in comparison to each other by lining pictures of them up horizontally... and you're not allowed to put people on an equal level. The tool enforces disparity. This after Google admitted that they've been douchebags during the interview process and claimed they were going to do better. Yeah, OK.
    - 23B1 4y ago
      I'm so mad at Google I'm going to stop using it entirely! Oh wait ;)
    - ProfXponent 4y ago
      When your reputation is already rock bottom you have nothing left to lose. I stopped using YouTube a while back when it decided that because I like programming, video games, and martial arts I would also enjoy misogynistic pricks like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. There is something deeply flawed in YouTube’s recommendations, and despite my effort to curate content it kept driving me towards alt-right drivel.
  - bspammer 4y ago
    I cannot believe that this guy has made Google more money than he's cost them. Millions of videos is a huge amount of space, and almost all of them have close to no views. His most popular video of all time has 78k views.
- AlfeG 4y ago
  Funny enough that I have never seen this account or videos from this account. Only few weeks ago stumbled on article about this guy. Google him, searched him on You Tube. Still no recommendations and results with his videos.
  - was_a_dev 4y ago
    I've been searching for this comment. This is the first time I've heard of this phenomenon and I'd consider myself a heavy and long time user of YouTube YouTube always amazes me that there can be content creator with millions of subscribers (or number of uploads in this case) that I have never heard of.
    - y04nn 4y ago
      I hit his videos a couple of time, it was on really niche technical subjects for witch I would not expect a Youtube video to exist. If someone would have made one, it would be better ranked. But sometimes Youtube impress me with videos on some really niche subjects, which is amazing, but when you click on one of his videos, it's really deceiving.
- tgv 4y ago
  If your YouTube search offers a (financial) reward, don't be surprised someone tries to win it. You're actively incentivizing these people.
- shp0ngle 4y ago
  What he is doing is technically legal. He attributes the sources, as the CC license requires. And the Q&A is technically correct. The correct action is to not ban him, but not show him very high up in results. The same with Expert Sex Change of yesteryear.
- o_m 4y ago
  Why would they? YouTube earns money on this as well. It's a bad idea long term, but the manager in charge probably focus on the bonuses they are receiving short term.
normaltool 4y ago
People like this guy should be banned from the internet indefinitely.
- beachy 4y ago
  Or lauded for showing that the emperor (Google) has no clothes (decent spam prevention).
- ProfXponent 4y ago
  Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
  - dinkleberg 4y ago
    You can hate the player and the game.
Jenk 4y ago
Knew it was Roel Van De Par before reading. I think this is the next step in social media reductionism, as people find ways to further lower the effort to "produce" content whilst maintaining a relatively high return.
- ge96 4y ago
  There is this thing I discovered recently, they take clips from movies (allowed under 30 seconds) and "recap" them as in snippets from a synopsis, then pass it through the Medium TTS voice... boom easy content (videos with millions of views). Other similar "content farms" dark series, channels recapping any scientific news that comes out... ugh. I've just been mass removing these channels from my suggestions. Fake live broadcasts eg. Elon video from 2021, classic 'give us crypto we give you back 2x'.
  - LeonM 4y ago
    > Fake live broadcasts eg. Elon video from 2021, classic 'give us crypto we give you back 2x'. Ugh, those are the worst. I like space and rocketry, I enjoy watching space related content, so naturally, the algorithm recommends space content. Now, every time I open my feed, there are at least 10 of the fake Elon Musk crypto scam live streams. And no matter how many times I report these fake 'Space X', 'Space-X' 'Space_X' crypto scam channels, they remain up, and YT keeps recommending this junk. Scammers have figured out that YT has a hard time moderating live streams. And it appears to be working too, many of those fake streams have lots of viewers (unless, that is fake too).
  - ProfXponent 4y ago
    For the life of me I could not get this off of my recommendations no matter how many channels I blocked. There must the millions of them.
ssl232 4y ago
Got to give this guy some credit. It's ridiculous that videos showing StackOverflow questions and answers are more discoverable via YouTube than the underlying content via direct search. Not sure if it's Google or users to blame, probably both, but this guy is making a mockery of it and probably profiting in the process.
- ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  StackOverflow is not searchable on YouTube... There is no comparison here between the SEO/search performance of these YT videos vs SO text posts.
  - ssl232 4y ago
    Both YouTube and StackOverflow are searchable in places other than YouTube.
    - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
      Yes, but where is the comparison of their SEO performance on Google search? There is none. His YouTube channel also only has 20M views in total. It seems very likely the SO posts he used would have more than 20M page views.
      - ojosilva 4y ago
        Quick search of one of this guy's videos "ubuntu blank screen blinking cursor" on Google (English, on a Private tab) gets me his result as the 3rd video in the main Google Search page, before I get to the original Stackoverflow answer which is 2 search results below the video.
        ZephyrBlu 4y ago
        I just did the same search and the first result is askubuntu.com, his video is the 3rd video in the "Videos" section (Not visible from initial search page, have to click on "View all") and then the second search result is SO.
kristopolous 4y ago
The problem of web content is the search and recommendation systems have no opinion on skill, effort, scholarship or accuracy. It's become disconnected so much that metrics of quality are seen as arbitrary, unrelated attributes. There is literally zero reward for hard work. It's actually more likely to hurt than help you because original scholarship or novel insights is definitionally more dissimilar to existing things than low effort derivative spam. There needs to be a fundamental redress that combines with categorical human-based systems. Categorical not only in what they "like" but in their modalities of engagement and what the styles of flow mean. For example, if a 4 year old watches a video 150 times over 2 weeks, they're being a 4 year old. If a 40 year old does that exact same thing, then it's a completely different meaning. There's other modalities, do people complete it but take longer then the duration (maybe to look things up) or do they set it at 1.5 speed and scrub through it. There's ways of characterizing these interactions. Choosing to be naive about such things in our search and recommendation systems is at our own peril and it's a big part of the SEO spam and low quality avalanche that we are all awash in. Digging ourselves out of it will require us to somehow capture a human part of human beings we haven't appeared to digitally organize yet.
- onion2k 4y ago
  The problem of web content is the search and recommendation systems have no opinion on skill, effort, scholarship or accuracy. They do, but only through the proxy of 'likes' and 'followers'. This leads to a bigger problem with web content, especially with video - people conflate the quality of the video production with the quality of the content. Someone who can make slick, glossy videos full of effects will almost always have a far larger following than someone who makes videos with better content but worse visuals. The same goes for a well-designed website. People literally believe that the loading speed of a webpage has an impact on the quality of what it says. You could put 30 years into learning, understanding, and explaining a complex topic, but if you can't use AffectEffects or you haven't paid attention to your Core Web Vitals the chances are that YouTube and Google are going to rank you lower than someone who can.
  - Helmut10001 4y ago
phtrivier 4y ago
The next step should be to post spam content in stack overflow replies to get them posted as video on yt so that they can be embedded in TikTok so that, etc... Thank God the advertisers and investors of the world use their hard-borrowed money to fund this kind of crap, instead of paying their employees. So much value would be wasted ! /s
ThePhysicist 4y ago
It's only a matter of time before we'll see auto-generated content that uses AI-generated imagery, text and voice synthesis to produce content that appears vaguely intelligble enough to fool people to watch it. And as the downvote count is private information now it will be very hard to distinguish these videos from legitimate ones. Personally I think creative-commons licensed content is a double-edged sword. It seems every month there's a new Stackoverflow clone popping up, which just blatantly copies all content from there, remixes it a bit and spams the Google index with it. And surprisingly, Google seems unable or unwilling to filter this stuff out. Videos of some of my conference talks were also published under a creative commons license (without my explicit consent) as the organizers wanted to make them available to the world for free, which in principle is a good thing. This only led to people blatantly reposting them on Youtube and misattributing them to farm views. I no longer not agree to any of my talks being released under such a license therefore.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  If it's a good video why should people care. If my favorite content creator turned out to be an AI that wouldn't suddenly cause me to think that their content is now garbage.
- philonoist 4y ago
  Please make your dislike count visible to you like us. 1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/return-youtube-dislike/gebbhagfogifgggkldgodflihgfeippi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/return-youtube-dis... So far as your downvote is concerned, should there be crowdsourced information of a video made out of AI on it? I could get inspired from - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-youtube/mnjggcdmjocbbbhaepdhchncahnbgone https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y... The video will have a small "%/absolute numbers think this is an AI fused video." beneath it. I think we can wait on this until a more robust solution comes along.
- netsharc 4y ago
  It feels like there are already audiences who are already fooled by content narrated by robots, I've seen some where they don't sound totally robotic, they just mispronounce particular terms that you know it's speech synthesis...
charcircuit 4y ago
I wonder how he can upload so fast. At one video per minute he would quickly run into the daily limit. I ran into it before when I was uploading a bunch of videos to run songs through content id to see what was okay to play for an upcoming live event.
- chekibreki 4y ago
  Most developed countries have unlimited quotas for their Internet plans. The US seems to be an exception.
  - seaman1921 4y ago
    I think he is talking about the youtube API limit..
    - charcircuit 4y ago
      Even just using the website directly has a limit.
    - sigio 4y ago
      Probably avoiding the API and doing it with browser-automation
lorey 4y ago
Am I the only one that thinks this blog post is not too different? A blog post about a youtube video, no additional value.
- jwilk 4y ago
  It's much easier and faster to read ~10 lines of text than to watch a 16 minutes video. [Looks like someone silently updated the submission URL to point to the video. The original URL was: https://thenewleafjournal.com/leaf/man-uploads-2000000-youtube-videos/ https://thenewleafjournal.com/leaf/man-uploads-2000000-youtu...]
GabrieleR 4y ago
I got inspired after watching it. There is a clever piece of script behind it. I've planned a full coding session today in order to implement it. Cooking recipes, philosophy quotes, Wikipedia articles (?) and daily news headlines. Still looking for more content. I'm also thinking about TTS functions like the one used in Sir Reddit YT channel. Hate me or join me. Risso.gabriele@protonmail.ch
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  You're late to the party, there are already plenty of those that exist, some read top comments of Reddit threads for example.
- corobo 4y ago
  > Hate me or join me No hate, no join. I doubt this is going anywhere. You seem to be in a stage of fishing for things to do[1] which is a great place to learn new skills but not that great to actually get anything done. Been there, done that.. a few times! Personally I'd pick something easier to do if you're after cash rather than skills, get yourself eased into making stuff. Spam the hell out of YouTube or whatever later, haha You gotta keep in mind this is just one channel that got successful at spamming YouTube in this way, of probably thousands of channels trying, and managed a channel best of 79k views on a video. What's that in 2022 YouTube CPM? $60-100 or so, depending on which bucket of ads you get put into? That's like 10x less than making a decent 10 minute tech tutorial. Much less effort once the code is written, sure, not much more reward. That's not factoring in your script randomly breaking and needing maintenance. Back to Van de Paar - there's only a few videos with that level of viewcount, the rest topping out around 20k or so. I imagine the channel has some terrible watch time stats too as people will be jumping past his little piece to camera to get the answer they were searching, then dipping as soon as they got the answer or realised the video was guff. That probably wont do you any favours long term. To also note that the high view counts are videos that have all been up for over a year. Don't be thinking this is quick money! It's true you have a greater chance of hitting a lottery video by spamming 2 million videos into the void but even that's not guaranteed if nobody ever watches the video in the first place! Focus your brain cycles on video titles and the thumbnail once you've got the code bit down. If nobody clicks the video, nobody watches, algorithm doesn't care about the video, nobody is suggested the video, nobody clicks the video, nobody watches, etc. You're in high likelihood only going to learn how to play with ffmpeg and improve your code skills off the back of this. Good luck with that bit, it should be fun! I love tinkering with ffmpeg :) If you do go for it I'd love to know how the end result pans out time and tech wise! Was the juice worth the squeeze? If you'd done minimum wage somewhere else would it have turned out better financially? I bet that article would get some front page HN attention! :) E: Oh man don't even get me started on the admin side of things if you find yourself on YouTube's radar. Did you know if your Adsense account gets banned.. that's it? You can't re-register, can't appeal, you're just done now. Can't ever use Google ads as yourself again. Not on YouTube, not on your website. You gotta register a new legal entity (LLC etc) if you ever need them again. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31385531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31385531
mwidell 4y ago
I am somewhat surprised he only has 80k subscribers and 20M views. Not a lot considering the amount of videos. But he is probably making a nice side income from this. As a comparison I have done youtube "the honest way", and I posted around 200 videos and have 66k subscribers and 7M views.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  With 20M views he must have made at most around $20,000, no? I would also imagine that the vast majority of his subs are bots.
  - mwidell 4y ago
    It depends on the CPM for his type of content. But yeah your estimate is what I would guess as well, if he only monetizes via youtube ads.
- danirod 4y ago
  Based in my own experience, the amount of videos uploaded at once will affect the initial number of views in a video, and the number of subscribers in the long term. Spamming the YouTube subscriptions feed with multiple videos at once is not something that many subscribers will receive good. At least in my experience as an uploader myself, I see that if I upload a video every couple days or weeks I get positive feedback, but if I upload multiple videos at once, maybe 3 or 4, I often receive negative feedback from my viewers. Looking at his feed right now [1] I see a lot of videos uploaded 4 days ago, on 2022-05-20. I stopped counting rows after reaching 200 videos. I guess that not a lot of people would enjoy to have their feed blasted like this if it's going to cause disruption on keeping up with other subscriptions in the feed. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/c/RoelVandePaar/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/RoelVandePaar/videos
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
nixcraft 4y ago
Meanwhile, Google has removed RedFrost Motivation[1] (over 1.5 million subs and =>120 million views) from the YouTube Partner program stating reason "uses someone else's content without adding significant value for viewers". I kid you not. This is one of my favourite motivational channels with an orignal artistic take. According to post[1], they claim to use talented voice artists and musicians to produce our exclusive poetry readings and narrated quote collections. Their appeal is rejected and ignored by YouTube[2]. So one must wonder why Google allows spam but closes down real content creators? [1] https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxqHIIcsQM91HSVme5jE5PlYQp6ZkBcaTB https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxqHIIcsQM91HSVme5jE5PlYQp6Zk... [2] https://twitter.com/RedFrost_m/status/1526561792243138560 https://twitter.com/RedFrost_m/status/1526561792243138560
- mdoms 4y ago
- smcl 4y ago
  > They use talented voice artists and musicians to produce our exclusive poetry readings and narrated quote collections ... are you telling us you're affiliated with RedFrost Motivation?
  - nixcraft 4y ago
    No. I am not affiliated with them. But, I have been following them for a long time, and I enjoy poem readings and content created by them. That quote is from their YouTube post. Sorry about the confusion.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  The ban seems legitimate since they use copyrighted poems. Every answer on StackOverflow is under Creative Commons SA-BY, and this guy follows exactly the terms of the license. I won't say that this Youtube channel isn't a parasite, but it's doing something 100% legally and the one you talk about is not.
  - 4y ago
submeta 4y ago
A little OT: The guy (Derek Taylor) who mentions the other guy with the 2m videos has some excellent videos about Emacs.
grenran 4y ago
wouldn't be surprised if YouTube suddenly decided to charge for storage
fbanon 4y ago
I hate this trash. If you search for some obscure math topic on YouTube you'll 100% get these type of Wikipedia-to-speech videos instead of actual lectures.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  Can we use the downvote button enough on youtube to get rid of it?
  - Mountain_Skies 4y ago
    I wonder how much engagement with the downvote button has decreased since the counter has been removed. Seems like they harmed the vast majority of the YouTube ecosystem to save the feelings of a very small number of politically powerful individuals.
- passion__desire 4y ago
  What about blind people? Do they not deserve their content?
  - corobo 4y ago
    Does a YouTube video TTS voice work better than the software they use daily? In hearing it in action I gotta imagine a YouTube video version is a hellishly slow way to get information for someone used to interacting with a computer via accessibility software, even if you were playing the video at full speed. Not speaking for anyone of course, just a hunch.
  - 4gotunameagain 4y ago
    Blind people use text to speech. And it will probably be much better than some half ass scrape from a kid's script.
f311a 4y ago
Reminds me of Refbatch. She uploaded more than 100 000 unique videos of herself speaking. She uploads tens of videos per day due to her mental illness.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
truly 4y ago
As an amateur YouTuber myself, this is disconcerting. A real video takes quite a lot of effort to do properly, especially if you try to aim for depth. The guy is obviously smart, but not doing the world a favour. It is similar to what happened to text-based sites when AdSense showed up. I expect that at some point he will be banned, but still...
logotype 4y ago
Free storage space. I wonder how much it costs for Google to store all those 2M videos. Here’s an idea. Encode your data/backups into a video (it’ll display as noise but that doesn’t matter). Store on YouTube for free instead of paying for terabytes on Google Drive.
- bionsystem 4y ago
  They will re-encode it and it might not be reversible I guess ? Also they regularly delete videos/channels with no warning and have absolutely 0 concern about backups.
  - gitgud 4y ago
    > They will re-encode it and it might not be reversible I guess? You can encode information into the audio of video that is resistant to re-encoding. > Also they regularly delete videos/channels with no warning and have absolutely 0 concern about backups. You could use a level of redundancy in the videos which would resist that too, like the [2] RAID concept in hard-drive storage. [1] https://asmp-eurasipjournals.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/1687-4722-2012-25 https://asmp-eurasipjournals.springeropen.com/articles/10.11... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels
    - bionsystem 4y ago
      Thanks for the infos and sources.
- throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
  at quick glance, the videos seem to be in 1.5 - 4 minute range, so taking 2.5 minutes as average, youtube-dl fetches 8 MiB. I don't know what policy does youtube use for storing lower bitrate encodings, but I figure they only keep them temporarily for some time since it was last requested and encode it live. so 2000000*8 MiB = 16 TiB, not counting whatever redundancy they have. with the 20M views that guy has got in total, they probably make more money off him than the storage/bandwidth/compute costs
almog 4y ago
I'm surprised Youtube doesn't rate limit uploads per user. Of course that won't remedy the larger problem of search results ranking, but it strike me as odd that they don't have such limit set up. If no rate limit exists on private videos as well, it could be a fun project to implement a filesystem based on a hierarchy of videos using QR codes as video frames.
dheerajvs 4y ago
Another example of auto-generated video is perhaps this channel[0] that has videos of only "Happy Birthday" songs with names. I visit it once a year :-) [0]: https://www.youtube.com/c/HappyBirthdaySongwithNames/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/HappyBirthdaySongwithNames/videos
marban 4y ago
Anyone aware of an OS project to generate videos from text + images?
fifticon 4y ago
The guy in question appears even stranger if you try to look up "what he is". According to the information he puts up on the internet about himself, he is presumably (..?) an accomplished individual, being affiliated with MariaDB and seemingly being knowledgable about linux/IT stuff (this latter not surprising, to the extent he is the one that has set up that youtube monstrosity.) But then again, if you try to browse his twitter, he comes across as some sort of deranged markov-chain AI. He posts a weird mixture of religious banalities and truisms, and weird vague news/political "news", and again random links to technical topics. I get an uneasy feeling looking at it, like T-800 Schwarzenegger imitating human voices on the phone. Maybe there is no deeper truth than that it is a 'legal' scam he is making money from, but I find it repelling.
- fifticon 4y ago
  He even publishes technical how-to articles, but now you'll speculate 'I wonder where he stole those from - the man pages?'
- criddell 4y ago
  Maybe Arthur T. Murray wasn't a kook and he finally got Mentifex up and running.
  - ajdude 4y ago
    This is what happens when Forth gets networking support.
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    Oh god that page references Gene Ray’s Time Cube and I found someone still maintains a mirror of it https://timecube.2enp.com/ https://timecube.2enp.com/
- jmkni 4y ago
  I worry about putting people like this under the spotlight, especially if their mental health might not be the best.
- 4y ago
xn 4y ago
This video could have been a tweet
- Vladimof 4y ago
  That's true of most Youtube videos...
rjmunro 4y ago
I haven't found these videos by searching, so I tried to find them by searching for the title of a question I answered on Stack Overflow. I still didn't find him, but I did find a similar channel, but fronted by a woman on a bed: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaZL4eLD7a30Fa8QI-sRi_g https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaZL4eLD7a30Fa8QI-sRi_g
elrel 4y ago
maybe the business model of youtube is broken. if their technology is so weak that it cannot establish "value", then they need to apply human skills. if their business model cannot support the cost of those humans, then perhaps they do not have a right to exist.
daneel_w 4y ago
To contrast with some actual and manually created video content: in the early 2010s I came upon a video by a Brazilian man filming himself with his webcam as he lounged in a bed while intensively and hurriedly puffing tobacco in a pipe. I don't know why I clicked his username to check out his other videos, but I found that he had uploaded over 7000 videos. From what I could see, every single one of them depicted him smoking a pipe somewhere in his home for a few minutes.
- daneel_w 4y ago
  Argentinian. Found him: https://www.youtube.com/user/SMOKERSOFCIGARSPIPES/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/SMOKERSOFCIGARSPIPES/videos
  - everly 4y ago
    Thanks for sharing - I scrolled and scrolled and eventually noticed a video called ‘My Dog’ and one called ‘Remember at my wife Ana María, with photo’ both from 9 years ago. Fascinating.
- petercooper 4y ago
  One of my pastimes is to find and look through genuine accounts that post consistently with next to no attention. There are so many. Folks who livestream for hours every day, folks who sing or play guitar every day.. One of my favorites is a woman called "movie reviewer" who posts 5-20 second videos every day which never feature movie reviews but are instead basic observations or questions about the world or replies to Reddit threads she doesn't link to. I originally found this entertaining, but now I'm more in awe of these people's consistency and demonstration of how much the platform means to them in the face of not achieving any traditional type of success on it. YouTube is hugely valuable and one of the best libraries of human experience I can think of – it's absolutely essential, to me, that it stays running for evermore.
- Handytinge 4y ago
  Oh man, Aldolfo Mateo, great channel. Another great one was Jon Eats Carrots, which was a fisheye lens of a man eating carrots for 10-20 minutes at a time. He did hundreds. He also did a series on him counting to 100,000. Also Bryan Ropar has a channel where he talks about his favourite plastic outdoor chairs - he has over 600 of them now (videos that is, probably more chairs). Youtube is a wonderful place.
book_mike 4y ago
I don't care. YouTube sucks. It really, REALLY, sucks. The interface sucks. The algo sucks. The controls sucks. The content is psychologically damaging to kids. The content is barely good for adults. The platform needs to be refactored completely and if the ad guys show up, kill them (figuratively and in jest).
- draw_down 4y ago
postalrat 4y ago
Advertiser friendly content. Exactly what youtube thinks it needs.
- indrora 4y ago
  Absolutely what it needs from a business perspective. YouTube isn't a video platform anymore, it's an ad engine cleverly disguised as a video platform. Their revenue is not from YT Premium or TV. It's the ads and the data you generate (even anonymously)! Google isn't a search company. They haven't been for years. At their core, today, Google/Alphabet are an ad company with subsidiaries that write software funded by the ads in them. And because they pitched themselves as everything but, sold that illusion for so long, Google properties make up a massive mind share of what you do on the internet: Content creators are often called YouTubers. Gmail handles a huge amount of the email in the world - likely 30-40% of non-spam email doesn't leave Google. Android is the de facto non-Apple mobile Phone OS. YouTube and other Google apps are #2-5 in the IOS store usually because they are the dominant platform, not because the UX is great. YouTube started as a dating website that pivoted to a video hosting site, whose first uploaded video was a shaky 120p cellphone camera video with the site's creator going on about elephants for 20 seconds at a zoo, to now being nearly synonymous with the word "video" and easily supplanting the "TV" experience.
iamzozo 4y ago
You spend more time on youtube to find relevant content. Sadly, probably that is also their goal. More video, more viewed ads.
amelius 4y ago
Sounds like a content farmer.
1970-01-01 4y ago
Don't lose the irony here: "Man works the system by making 2M videos, a video"
gennarro 4y ago
The video didn’t mention this, but the 2m videos only had 19m views. He is hardly having an impact on YouTube at all.
hkt 4y ago
When I saw this title, I instantly found myself thinking "could I encode my backups in random videos, with parity bits, and treat them as long term storage?"
Magi604 4y ago
Let me add to the list of channels that are pursuing the "low quality but volume" strategy. I present to you hardreset.info! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLHMs6GoCv7YgsF3ZMxnf8A/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLHMs6GoCv7YgsF3ZMxnf8A/vid... New video every hour!
- Magi604 4y ago
  I had accidentally linked to one of its spinoff channels. Here is the main channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/HardresetInfo/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/HardresetInfo/videos
shanay 4y ago
That's the smartest thing I have seen for a long time.

232 points by memorable 4y ago

Is there any other similar channel please? I was using this channel to see if my data stream (about new ytb videos is working) and now I lost point of reference. Any suggestions? You might hate him, but his videos brought value to me.

thejosh 4y ago

Are they banking on youtube videos being a google result, similar to the trash we see at the moment when you Google something and it has these scraped Stackoverflow answers?

mongol 4y ago

Why this guy has not been blocked from Youtube is beyond me. He spams so many search results.

fxtentacle 4y ago
Every search result spammed in favor of YouTube is an additional bit of attention to be monetized by Google. Why should they prevent people from making them more money?
- acover 4y ago
  Reputation?
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    Tragedy of the commons explains everything. Individuals at Google are incentivised to abuse the collective reputation for personal gain. It always seems that the towering reputation of Google is an unassailable monolith that will never be shaken by any individual. So every individual harms it in their own tiny selfish way, gaining promotions, KPIs, or pay bumps as a reward for their behaviour. Decades of promoting the selfish, commons-destroying people eventually results in an organisation that has these values entrenched in its upper echelons. At this point, the demise of the enterprise is inevitable, as the commons is destroyed in bigger, more obvious ways, by people now thoroughly empowered to do so, and surrounded by people competing with them for the right to also destroy the commons even more. Cash reserves and the intangible value of lingering external brand perception can drag this out for a surprisingly long time, but the direction will inevitably continue downwards. In other words, it is precisely "reputation" that enables this kind of atrocious, value-destroying behaviour and quality erosion. Companies without reputation are too busy building it, and can't afford even the slightest slip up.
    - mavhc 4y ago
      They probably should get a leader to control their employees
    - NonNefarious 4y ago
      Confirmed. A good friend and colleague worked at Google. Their employees are forced to use a graphical tool to rank coworkers in comparison to each other by lining pictures of them up horizontally... and you're not allowed to put people on an equal level. The tool enforces disparity. This after Google admitted that they've been douchebags during the interview process and claimed they were going to do better. Yeah, OK.
  - 23B1 4y ago
    I'm so mad at Google I'm going to stop using it entirely! Oh wait ;)
  - ProfXponent 4y ago
    When your reputation is already rock bottom you have nothing left to lose. I stopped using YouTube a while back when it decided that because I like programming, video games, and martial arts I would also enjoy misogynistic pricks like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. There is something deeply flawed in YouTube’s recommendations, and despite my effort to curate content it kept driving me towards alt-right drivel.
- bspammer 4y ago
  I cannot believe that this guy has made Google more money than he's cost them. Millions of videos is a huge amount of space, and almost all of them have close to no views. His most popular video of all time has 78k views.
AlfeG 4y ago
Funny enough that I have never seen this account or videos from this account. Only few weeks ago stumbled on article about this guy. Google him, searched him on You Tube. Still no recommendations and results with his videos.
- was_a_dev 4y ago
  I've been searching for this comment. This is the first time I've heard of this phenomenon and I'd consider myself a heavy and long time user of YouTube YouTube always amazes me that there can be content creator with millions of subscribers (or number of uploads in this case) that I have never heard of.
  - y04nn 4y ago
    I hit his videos a couple of time, it was on really niche technical subjects for witch I would not expect a Youtube video to exist. If someone would have made one, it would be better ranked. But sometimes Youtube impress me with videos on some really niche subjects, which is amazing, but when you click on one of his videos, it's really deceiving.
tgv 4y ago
If your YouTube search offers a (financial) reward, don't be surprised someone tries to win it. You're actively incentivizing these people.
shp0ngle 4y ago
What he is doing is technically legal. He attributes the sources, as the CC license requires. And the Q&A is technically correct. The correct action is to not ban him, but not show him very high up in results. The same with Expert Sex Change of yesteryear.
o_m 4y ago
Why would they? YouTube earns money on this as well. It's a bad idea long term, but the manager in charge probably focus on the bonuses they are receiving short term.

normaltool 4y ago

People like this guy should be banned from the internet indefinitely.

beachy 4y ago
Or lauded for showing that the emperor (Google) has no clothes (decent spam prevention).
ProfXponent 4y ago
Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
- dinkleberg 4y ago
  You can hate the player and the game.

Jenk 4y ago

Knew it was Roel Van De Par before reading. I think this is the next step in social media reductionism, as people find ways to further lower the effort to "produce" content whilst maintaining a relatively high return.

ge96 4y ago
There is this thing I discovered recently, they take clips from movies (allowed under 30 seconds) and "recap" them as in snippets from a synopsis, then pass it through the Medium TTS voice... boom easy content (videos with millions of views). Other similar "content farms" dark series, channels recapping any scientific news that comes out... ugh. I've just been mass removing these channels from my suggestions. Fake live broadcasts eg. Elon video from 2021, classic 'give us crypto we give you back 2x'.
- LeonM 4y ago
  > Fake live broadcasts eg. Elon video from 2021, classic 'give us crypto we give you back 2x'. Ugh, those are the worst. I like space and rocketry, I enjoy watching space related content, so naturally, the algorithm recommends space content. Now, every time I open my feed, there are at least 10 of the fake Elon Musk crypto scam live streams. And no matter how many times I report these fake 'Space X', 'Space-X' 'Space_X' crypto scam channels, they remain up, and YT keeps recommending this junk. Scammers have figured out that YT has a hard time moderating live streams. And it appears to be working too, many of those fake streams have lots of viewers (unless, that is fake too).
- ProfXponent 4y ago
  For the life of me I could not get this off of my recommendations no matter how many channels I blocked. There must the millions of them.

ssl232 4y ago

Got to give this guy some credit. It's ridiculous that videos showing StackOverflow questions and answers are more discoverable via YouTube than the underlying content via direct search. Not sure if it's Google or users to blame, probably both, but this guy is making a mockery of it and probably profiting in the process.

ZephyrBlu 4y ago
StackOverflow is not searchable on YouTube... There is no comparison here between the SEO/search performance of these YT videos vs SO text posts.
- ssl232 4y ago
  Both YouTube and StackOverflow are searchable in places other than YouTube.
  - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
    Yes, but where is the comparison of their SEO performance on Google search? There is none. His YouTube channel also only has 20M views in total. It seems very likely the SO posts he used would have more than 20M page views.
    - ojosilva 4y ago
      Quick search of one of this guy's videos "ubuntu blank screen blinking cursor" on Google (English, on a Private tab) gets me his result as the 3rd video in the main Google Search page, before I get to the original Stackoverflow answer which is 2 search results below the video.
      - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
        I just did the same search and the first result is askubuntu.com, his video is the 3rd video in the "Videos" section (Not visible from initial search page, have to click on "View all") and then the second search result is SO.

kristopolous 4y ago

The problem of web content is the search and recommendation systems have no opinion on skill, effort, scholarship or accuracy. It's become disconnected so much that metrics of quality are seen as arbitrary, unrelated attributes. There is literally zero reward for hard work. It's actually more likely to hurt than help you because original scholarship or novel insights is definitionally more dissimilar to existing things than low effort derivative spam. There needs to be a fundamental redress that combines with categorical human-based systems. Categorical not only in what they "like" but in their modalities of engagement and what the styles of flow mean. For example, if a 4 year old watches a video 150 times over 2 weeks, they're being a 4 year old. If a 40 year old does that exact same thing, then it's a completely different meaning. There's other modalities, do people complete it but take longer then the duration (maybe to look things up) or do they set it at 1.5 speed and scrub through it. There's ways of characterizing these interactions. Choosing to be naive about such things in our search and recommendation systems is at our own peril and it's a big part of the SEO spam and low quality avalanche that we are all awash in. Digging ourselves out of it will require us to somehow capture a human part of human beings we haven't appeared to digitally organize yet.

onion2k 4y ago
The problem of web content is the search and recommendation systems have no opinion on skill, effort, scholarship or accuracy. They do, but only through the proxy of 'likes' and 'followers'. This leads to a bigger problem with web content, especially with video - people conflate the quality of the video production with the quality of the content. Someone who can make slick, glossy videos full of effects will almost always have a far larger following than someone who makes videos with better content but worse visuals. The same goes for a well-designed website. People literally believe that the loading speed of a webpage has an impact on the quality of what it says. You could put 30 years into learning, understanding, and explaining a complex topic, but if you can't use AffectEffects or you haven't paid attention to your Core Web Vitals the chances are that YouTube and Google are going to rank you lower than someone who can.
- Helmut10001 4y ago

phtrivier 4y ago

The next step should be to post spam content in stack overflow replies to get them posted as video on yt so that they can be embedded in TikTok so that, etc... Thank God the advertisers and investors of the world use their hard-borrowed money to fund this kind of crap, instead of paying their employees. So much value would be wasted ! /s

ThePhysicist 4y ago

It's only a matter of time before we'll see auto-generated content that uses AI-generated imagery, text and voice synthesis to produce content that appears vaguely intelligble enough to fool people to watch it. And as the downvote count is private information now it will be very hard to distinguish these videos from legitimate ones. Personally I think creative-commons licensed content is a double-edged sword. It seems every month there's a new Stackoverflow clone popping up, which just blatantly copies all content from there, remixes it a bit and spams the Google index with it. And surprisingly, Google seems unable or unwilling to filter this stuff out. Videos of some of my conference talks were also published under a creative commons license (without my explicit consent) as the organizers wanted to make them available to the world for free, which in principle is a good thing. This only led to people blatantly reposting them on Youtube and misattributing them to farm views. I no longer not agree to any of my talks being released under such a license therefore.

charcircuit 4y ago
If it's a good video why should people care. If my favorite content creator turned out to be an AI that wouldn't suddenly cause me to think that their content is now garbage.
philonoist 4y ago
Please make your dislike count visible to you like us. 1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/return-youtube-dislike/gebbhagfogifgggkldgodflihgfeippi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/return-youtube-dis... So far as your downvote is concerned, should there be crowdsourced information of a video made out of AI on it? I could get inspired from - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-youtube/mnjggcdmjocbbbhaepdhchncahnbgone https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y... The video will have a small "%/absolute numbers think this is an AI fused video." beneath it. I think we can wait on this until a more robust solution comes along.
netsharc 4y ago
It feels like there are already audiences who are already fooled by content narrated by robots, I've seen some where they don't sound totally robotic, they just mispronounce particular terms that you know it's speech synthesis...

charcircuit 4y ago

I wonder how he can upload so fast. At one video per minute he would quickly run into the daily limit. I ran into it before when I was uploading a bunch of videos to run songs through content id to see what was okay to play for an upcoming live event.

chekibreki 4y ago
Most developed countries have unlimited quotas for their Internet plans. The US seems to be an exception.
- seaman1921 4y ago
  I think he is talking about the youtube API limit..
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    Even just using the website directly has a limit.
  - sigio 4y ago
    Probably avoiding the API and doing it with browser-automation

lorey 4y ago

Am I the only one that thinks this blog post is not too different? A blog post about a youtube video, no additional value.

jwilk 4y ago
It's much easier and faster to read ~10 lines of text than to watch a 16 minutes video. [Looks like someone silently updated the submission URL to point to the video. The original URL was: https://thenewleafjournal.com/leaf/man-uploads-2000000-youtube-videos/ https://thenewleafjournal.com/leaf/man-uploads-2000000-youtu...]

GabrieleR 4y ago

I got inspired after watching it. There is a clever piece of script behind it. I've planned a full coding session today in order to implement it. Cooking recipes, philosophy quotes, Wikipedia articles (?) and daily news headlines. Still looking for more content. I'm also thinking about TTS functions like the one used in Sir Reddit YT channel. Hate me or join me. Risso.gabriele@protonmail.ch

iLoveOncall 4y ago
You're late to the party, there are already plenty of those that exist, some read top comments of Reddit threads for example.
corobo 4y ago
> Hate me or join me No hate, no join. I doubt this is going anywhere. You seem to be in a stage of fishing for things to do[1] which is a great place to learn new skills but not that great to actually get anything done. Been there, done that.. a few times! Personally I'd pick something easier to do if you're after cash rather than skills, get yourself eased into making stuff. Spam the hell out of YouTube or whatever later, haha You gotta keep in mind this is just one channel that got successful at spamming YouTube in this way, of probably thousands of channels trying, and managed a channel best of 79k views on a video. What's that in 2022 YouTube CPM? $60-100 or so, depending on which bucket of ads you get put into? That's like 10x less than making a decent 10 minute tech tutorial. Much less effort once the code is written, sure, not much more reward. That's not factoring in your script randomly breaking and needing maintenance. Back to Van de Paar - there's only a few videos with that level of viewcount, the rest topping out around 20k or so. I imagine the channel has some terrible watch time stats too as people will be jumping past his little piece to camera to get the answer they were searching, then dipping as soon as they got the answer or realised the video was guff. That probably wont do you any favours long term. To also note that the high view counts are videos that have all been up for over a year. Don't be thinking this is quick money! It's true you have a greater chance of hitting a lottery video by spamming 2 million videos into the void but even that's not guaranteed if nobody ever watches the video in the first place! Focus your brain cycles on video titles and the thumbnail once you've got the code bit down. If nobody clicks the video, nobody watches, algorithm doesn't care about the video, nobody is suggested the video, nobody clicks the video, nobody watches, etc. You're in high likelihood only going to learn how to play with ffmpeg and improve your code skills off the back of this. Good luck with that bit, it should be fun! I love tinkering with ffmpeg :) If you do go for it I'd love to know how the end result pans out time and tech wise! Was the juice worth the squeeze? If you'd done minimum wage somewhere else would it have turned out better financially? I bet that article would get some front page HN attention! :) E: Oh man don't even get me started on the admin side of things if you find yourself on YouTube's radar. Did you know if your Adsense account gets banned.. that's it? You can't re-register, can't appeal, you're just done now. Can't ever use Google ads as yourself again. Not on YouTube, not on your website. You gotta register a new legal entity (LLC etc) if you ever need them again. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31385531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31385531

mwidell 4y ago

I am somewhat surprised he only has 80k subscribers and 20M views. Not a lot considering the amount of videos. But he is probably making a nice side income from this. As a comparison I have done youtube "the honest way", and I posted around 200 videos and have 66k subscribers and 7M views.

iLoveOncall 4y ago
With 20M views he must have made at most around $20,000, no? I would also imagine that the vast majority of his subs are bots.
- mwidell 4y ago
  It depends on the CPM for his type of content. But yeah your estimate is what I would guess as well, if he only monetizes via youtube ads.
danirod 4y ago
Based in my own experience, the amount of videos uploaded at once will affect the initial number of views in a video, and the number of subscribers in the long term. Spamming the YouTube subscriptions feed with multiple videos at once is not something that many subscribers will receive good. At least in my experience as an uploader myself, I see that if I upload a video every couple days or weeks I get positive feedback, but if I upload multiple videos at once, maybe 3 or 4, I often receive negative feedback from my viewers. Looking at his feed right now [1] I see a lot of videos uploaded 4 days ago, on 2022-05-20. I stopped counting rows after reaching 200 videos. I guess that not a lot of people would enjoy to have their feed blasted like this if it's going to cause disruption on keeping up with other subscriptions in the feed. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/c/RoelVandePaar/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/RoelVandePaar/videos
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

nixcraft 4y ago

Meanwhile, Google has removed RedFrost Motivation[1] (over 1.5 million subs and =>120 million views) from the YouTube Partner program stating reason "uses someone else's content without adding significant value for viewers". I kid you not. This is one of my favourite motivational channels with an orignal artistic take. According to post[1], they claim to use talented voice artists and musicians to produce our exclusive poetry readings and narrated quote collections. Their appeal is rejected and ignored by YouTube[2]. So one must wonder why Google allows spam but closes down real content creators? [1] https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxqHIIcsQM91HSVme5jE5PlYQp6ZkBcaTB https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxqHIIcsQM91HSVme5jE5PlYQp6Zk... [2] https://twitter.com/RedFrost_m/status/1526561792243138560 https://twitter.com/RedFrost_m/status/1526561792243138560

mdoms 4y ago
smcl 4y ago
> They use talented voice artists and musicians to produce our exclusive poetry readings and narrated quote collections ... are you telling us you're affiliated with RedFrost Motivation?
- nixcraft 4y ago
  No. I am not affiliated with them. But, I have been following them for a long time, and I enjoy poem readings and content created by them. That quote is from their YouTube post. Sorry about the confusion.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
The ban seems legitimate since they use copyrighted poems. Every answer on StackOverflow is under Creative Commons SA-BY, and this guy follows exactly the terms of the license. I won't say that this Youtube channel isn't a parasite, but it's doing something 100% legally and the one you talk about is not.
- 4y ago

submeta 4y ago

A little OT: The guy (Derek Taylor) who mentions the other guy with the 2m videos has some excellent videos about Emacs.

grenran 4y ago

wouldn't be surprised if YouTube suddenly decided to charge for storage

fbanon 4y ago

I hate this trash. If you search for some obscure math topic on YouTube you'll 100% get these type of Wikipedia-to-speech videos instead of actual lectures.

kzrdude 4y ago
Can we use the downvote button enough on youtube to get rid of it?
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  I wonder how much engagement with the downvote button has decreased since the counter has been removed. Seems like they harmed the vast majority of the YouTube ecosystem to save the feelings of a very small number of politically powerful individuals.
passion__desire 4y ago
What about blind people? Do they not deserve their content?
- corobo 4y ago
  Does a YouTube video TTS voice work better than the software they use daily? In hearing it in action I gotta imagine a YouTube video version is a hellishly slow way to get information for someone used to interacting with a computer via accessibility software, even if you were playing the video at full speed. Not speaking for anyone of course, just a hunch.
- 4gotunameagain 4y ago
  Blind people use text to speech. And it will probably be much better than some half ass scrape from a kid's script.

f311a 4y ago

Reminds me of Refbatch. She uploaded more than 100 000 unique videos of herself speaking. She uploads tens of videos per day due to her mental illness.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

truly 4y ago

As an amateur YouTuber myself, this is disconcerting. A real video takes quite a lot of effort to do properly, especially if you try to aim for depth. The guy is obviously smart, but not doing the world a favour. It is similar to what happened to text-based sites when AdSense showed up. I expect that at some point he will be banned, but still...

logotype 4y ago

Free storage space. I wonder how much it costs for Google to store all those 2M videos. Here’s an idea. Encode your data/backups into a video (it’ll display as noise but that doesn’t matter). Store on YouTube for free instead of paying for terabytes on Google Drive.

bionsystem 4y ago
They will re-encode it and it might not be reversible I guess ? Also they regularly delete videos/channels with no warning and have absolutely 0 concern about backups.
- gitgud 4y ago
  > They will re-encode it and it might not be reversible I guess? You can encode information into the audio of video that is resistant to re-encoding. > Also they regularly delete videos/channels with no warning and have absolutely 0 concern about backups. You could use a level of redundancy in the videos which would resist that too, like the [2] RAID concept in hard-drive storage. [1] https://asmp-eurasipjournals.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/1687-4722-2012-25 https://asmp-eurasipjournals.springeropen.com/articles/10.11... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels
  - bionsystem 4y ago
    Thanks for the infos and sources.
throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
at quick glance, the videos seem to be in 1.5 - 4 minute range, so taking 2.5 minutes as average, youtube-dl fetches 8 MiB. I don't know what policy does youtube use for storing lower bitrate encodings, but I figure they only keep them temporarily for some time since it was last requested and encode it live. so 2000000*8 MiB = 16 TiB, not counting whatever redundancy they have. with the 20M views that guy has got in total, they probably make more money off him than the storage/bandwidth/compute costs

almog 4y ago

I'm surprised Youtube doesn't rate limit uploads per user. Of course that won't remedy the larger problem of search results ranking, but it strike me as odd that they don't have such limit set up. If no rate limit exists on private videos as well, it could be a fun project to implement a filesystem based on a hierarchy of videos using QR codes as video frames.

dheerajvs 4y ago

Another example of auto-generated video is perhaps this channel[0] that has videos of only "Happy Birthday" songs with names. I visit it once a year :-) [0]: https://www.youtube.com/c/HappyBirthdaySongwithNames/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/HappyBirthdaySongwithNames/videos

marban 4y ago

Anyone aware of an OS project to generate videos from text + images?

fifticon 4y ago

The guy in question appears even stranger if you try to look up "what he is". According to the information he puts up on the internet about himself, he is presumably (..?) an accomplished individual, being affiliated with MariaDB and seemingly being knowledgable about linux/IT stuff (this latter not surprising, to the extent he is the one that has set up that youtube monstrosity.) But then again, if you try to browse his twitter, he comes across as some sort of deranged markov-chain AI. He posts a weird mixture of religious banalities and truisms, and weird vague news/political "news", and again random links to technical topics. I get an uneasy feeling looking at it, like T-800 Schwarzenegger imitating human voices on the phone. Maybe there is no deeper truth than that it is a 'legal' scam he is making money from, but I find it repelling.

fifticon 4y ago
He even publishes technical how-to articles, but now you'll speculate 'I wonder where he stole those from - the man pages?'
criddell 4y ago
Maybe Arthur T. Murray wasn't a kook and he finally got Mentifex up and running.
- ajdude 4y ago
  This is what happens when Forth gets networking support.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  Oh god that page references Gene Ray’s Time Cube and I found someone still maintains a mirror of it https://timecube.2enp.com/ https://timecube.2enp.com/
jmkni 4y ago
I worry about putting people like this under the spotlight, especially if their mental health might not be the best.
4y ago

xn 4y ago

This video could have been a tweet

Vladimof 4y ago
That's true of most Youtube videos...

rjmunro 4y ago

I haven't found these videos by searching, so I tried to find them by searching for the title of a question I answered on Stack Overflow. I still didn't find him, but I did find a similar channel, but fronted by a woman on a bed: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaZL4eLD7a30Fa8QI-sRi_g https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaZL4eLD7a30Fa8QI-sRi_g

elrel 4y ago

maybe the business model of youtube is broken. if their technology is so weak that it cannot establish "value", then they need to apply human skills. if their business model cannot support the cost of those humans, then perhaps they do not have a right to exist.

daneel_w 4y ago

To contrast with some actual and manually created video content: in the early 2010s I came upon a video by a Brazilian man filming himself with his webcam as he lounged in a bed while intensively and hurriedly puffing tobacco in a pipe. I don't know why I clicked his username to check out his other videos, but I found that he had uploaded over 7000 videos. From what I could see, every single one of them depicted him smoking a pipe somewhere in his home for a few minutes.

daneel_w 4y ago
Argentinian. Found him: https://www.youtube.com/user/SMOKERSOFCIGARSPIPES/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/SMOKERSOFCIGARSPIPES/videos
- everly 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing - I scrolled and scrolled and eventually noticed a video called ‘My Dog’ and one called ‘Remember at my wife Ana María, with photo’ both from 9 years ago. Fascinating.
petercooper 4y ago
One of my pastimes is to find and look through genuine accounts that post consistently with next to no attention. There are so many. Folks who livestream for hours every day, folks who sing or play guitar every day.. One of my favorites is a woman called "movie reviewer" who posts 5-20 second videos every day which never feature movie reviews but are instead basic observations or questions about the world or replies to Reddit threads she doesn't link to. I originally found this entertaining, but now I'm more in awe of these people's consistency and demonstration of how much the platform means to them in the face of not achieving any traditional type of success on it. YouTube is hugely valuable and one of the best libraries of human experience I can think of – it's absolutely essential, to me, that it stays running for evermore.
Handytinge 4y ago
Oh man, Aldolfo Mateo, great channel. Another great one was Jon Eats Carrots, which was a fisheye lens of a man eating carrots for 10-20 minutes at a time. He did hundreds. He also did a series on him counting to 100,000. Also Bryan Ropar has a channel where he talks about his favourite plastic outdoor chairs - he has over 600 of them now (videos that is, probably more chairs). Youtube is a wonderful place.

book_mike 4y ago

I don't care. YouTube sucks. It really, REALLY, sucks. The interface sucks. The algo sucks. The controls sucks. The content is psychologically damaging to kids. The content is barely good for adults. The platform needs to be refactored completely and if the ad guys show up, kill them (figuratively and in jest).

draw_down 4y ago

postalrat 4y ago

Advertiser friendly content. Exactly what youtube thinks it needs.

indrora 4y ago
Absolutely what it needs from a business perspective. YouTube isn't a video platform anymore, it's an ad engine cleverly disguised as a video platform. Their revenue is not from YT Premium or TV. It's the ads and the data you generate (even anonymously)! Google isn't a search company. They haven't been for years. At their core, today, Google/Alphabet are an ad company with subsidiaries that write software funded by the ads in them. And because they pitched themselves as everything but, sold that illusion for so long, Google properties make up a massive mind share of what you do on the internet: Content creators are often called YouTubers. Gmail handles a huge amount of the email in the world - likely 30-40% of non-spam email doesn't leave Google. Android is the de facto non-Apple mobile Phone OS. YouTube and other Google apps are #2-5 in the IOS store usually because they are the dominant platform, not because the UX is great. YouTube started as a dating website that pivoted to a video hosting site, whose first uploaded video was a shaky 120p cellphone camera video with the site's creator going on about elephants for 20 seconds at a zoo, to now being nearly synonymous with the word "video" and easily supplanting the "TV" experience.

iamzozo 4y ago

You spend more time on youtube to find relevant content. Sadly, probably that is also their goal. More video, more viewed ads.

amelius 4y ago

Sounds like a content farmer.

1970-01-01 4y ago

Don't lose the irony here: "Man works the system by making 2M videos, a video"

gennarro 4y ago

The video didn’t mention this, but the 2m videos only had 19m views. He is hardly having an impact on YouTube at all.

hkt 4y ago

When I saw this title, I instantly found myself thinking "could I encode my backups in random videos, with parity bits, and treat them as long term storage?"

Magi604 4y ago

Let me add to the list of channels that are pursuing the "low quality but volume" strategy. I present to you hardreset.info! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLHMs6GoCv7YgsF3ZMxnf8A/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLHMs6GoCv7YgsF3ZMxnf8A/vid... New video every hour!

Magi604 4y ago
I had accidentally linked to one of its spinoff channels. Here is the main channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/HardresetInfo/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/HardresetInfo/videos

shanay 4y ago

That's the smartest thing I have seen for a long time.