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There were definitely insane views. When I was a young teenager in the early-mid 00s, I surfed to an article explaining how the moon landing was faked, with ph
by YesBox 2y ago
There were definitely insane views.
When I was a young teenager in the early-mid 00s, I surfed to an article explaining how the moon landing was faked, with photographic evidence and plausible logic (like the "last of dust on the lander"), blah etc.
There was a brief moment when I thought what I was reading was real, because it was the first time I came across something fabricated communicated as fact.
- lurk2 2y agoIt was definitely there, but the scale of it was different back then and it was decidedly less mean-spirited by the early 2010s. I can remember when I first started using YouTube, I had someone from my city threaten to kill my entire family. A few years later when the 2012 Mayan Calendar Apocalypse was trending, another guy tried to justify his beliefs that it was real by claiming to have “top contacts” in a federal intelligence agency. You would run into people like that maybe once every few months. These days you are basically guaranteed to run across multiple people like that every time you log on. YouTube figured it out with comments around 2013 or 2014, but it got a lot worse about recommending videos from low-viewership channels in the last few years, which exposes you to a lot of wackos.
- Gollapalli 2y agoBeing recommended low viewership channels is a positive. Having everything be polished, scripted and ad friendly is tremendously boring. My complaint over the last few years with YouTube was that I missed the wackos. They were the thing that made the web interesting to begin with.
- lurk2 2y agoI used to feel the same way, but something changed in the last few years to make these videos less appealing to me; they are usually low-viewership simply because they aren’t very good. For certain subjects like religion and philosophy, the novelty-seeking factor is completely gone for me - the best channels are the biggest ones, and everything else is guaranteed to be a grift, an inaudibly-recorded lecture, or an embryonic cult. I do still occasionally get some good videos from smaller channels, but smallness is a lot more relative these days. A lot of channels that I have started following in the last few years begin to see growth within less than a year. YouTube has gotten really good at identifying quality content and amplifying it, with the end result being that the 300 view videos in your feed are just market testing. One thing you can do if you’re into the weirder side of YouTube is to append “before:2012” to the end of your searches; I’ve found some cool stuff doing that.
- asdf6969 2y agoYou should respect those people for actually looking into it. I do believe the moon landing is real but it’s based almost on blind faith. Same thing for almost everything I believe about the world. Stay open minded and don’t criticize people who put effort into things you’ve never bothered to research. You’ll be surprised how often you don’t know much about anything.
- kristiandupont 2y agoThat's true, but conspiracy theorists are not typically out on some philanthropic mission. It's a hobby -- they are doing it because conspiracy theories are fun. That's why they aren't actually interested in things where there is real, tangible evidence. They want to find hidden clues and feel like they are in the know. Of course, there is a very fine line between that and actually realizing something that the world doesn't see, but that's part of what makes it fun.
- AlecSchueler 2y ago> it was the first time I came across something fabricated communicated as fact. That you knew of.
- bsenftner 2y agoThis 1000x.
- YesBox 2y agoHindsight is 20/20.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoRemember the tongue map?