4 ms·

Mr. Beast on youtube is guilty of that. Matt Parker of Standup Maths fame did an in-depth look at how that works. Whoever came up with that type of progress bar

by xoxxala 10mo ago

Mr. Beast on youtube is guilty of that. Matt Parker of Standup Maths fame did an in-depth look at how that works. Whoever came up with that type of progress bar must hate people in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc0OU1yJD-c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc0OU1yJD-c

drcongo 10mo ago
Not the only thing he's guilty of.
- red-iron-pine 10mo ago
  explain
  - drcongo 10mo ago
    It's all a scam.
x187463 10mo ago
A fantastic video from Matt, as usual. Yet another data point on why nobody should be wasting a second watching Mr Beast content. Complete algorithmically optimized garbage. I recall Mr Beast showing up in a Colin Furze video for a few minutes and Mr Beast was very clearly incapable of being a normal person. He was obviously out of place, being in full makeup and styled, and couldn't seem to be bothered to actually engage or express real interest in the subject. I think the guy has replaced his real persona with some manifestation of the YouTube algorithm. If he's not actively making money, he's just a shell.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- m4tthumphrey 10mo ago
  That Colin Furze cameo was so weird.
  - x187463 10mo ago
    From what I can tell, based on an excerpt of an interview with Colin, Mr Beast had a bunker-related video and visited Colin's bunker. As a viewer of Colin's channel and not Mr Beast, it seemed very strange, but makes more sense if there was a more substantial collaboration taking place in a different video stream.
- duped 10mo ago
  They somehow got him doing a cameo on this upcoming Survivor season and it's going to be terrible.
- climb_stealth 10mo ago
  Luckily the recommendation system does work to some extent. I'm glad I don't get to see any of that stuff on my youtube. Opening the front page in a private view is a scary place of hyper-optimised drama and attention seeking. It's scary imagining people getting sucked into that :/
  - physicles 10mo ago
    If you turn off you watch history in account settings, then youtube.com is just a passive-aggressive black screen telling you to turn it back on. It’s beautiful. When you click over to subscriptions, you see only the stuff that you subscribed to, and nothing else. Recommendations on a video are based on you subscriptions and the current video, and nothing else. I could never go back.
    - mc3301 10mo ago
      Fully agreed. The day youtube disables the "turn watch history off," is the day I'll stop using youtube. I, too, could never go back.
    - andrepd 10mo ago
      This is basically what I do in NewPipe! Just a good ol' chronological list of my subscriptions, nothing else. Ahh if only everything could be this 2006...
  - thaumasiotes 10mo ago
    > Opening the front page in a private view is a scary place of hyper-optimised drama and attention seeking. Huh? Opening the front page of youtube in a private view (with no existing youtube history) shows you a completely blank page.
    - jasonfarnon 10mo ago
      The blank page where it asks you to enter a search? This is a recent change I think. I want to say the last year or 2.
    - 10mo ago
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- Hendrikto 10mo ago
  Mr Beast not looking like a normal person next to Colin Furze is impressive. That guy is so over the top that I cannot bear watching his videos, despite them theoretically being exactly up my alley. I like tinkering videos, I like his ideas, and the high-quality results, but I hate his mannerisms.
- hermitdev 10mo ago
  Every time see Mr Beast (I don't watch any of his stuff, just accidentally see promos on Prime sometimes), he reminds me of Homer Simpson's forced smile in the Simpsons' espiode "Re-Nedufication" [0]. [0]: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c8/84/8e/c8848e81afa88a42bd4dcdacc966289e.png https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c8/84/8e/c8848e81afa88a42bd4d...
cons0le 10mo ago
MrBeast is a hack, but its worth pointing out that all "progress bars" are bad design. You could make the same complaint against most of the progress bars in MsDOS. There was never a consistency in timing so you can never really use them to gauge how much time is left.
- Vegenoid 10mo ago
  We’re not talking about a measure of computational progress here. We’re talking about visually representing how much time has elapsed out of a fixed duration. This is exactly where progress indicators shine, the total time for the thing to happen is perfectly specified in advance.
- dspillett 10mo ago
  The difference between a lot of OS/app progress bars for IO (and sometimes CPU) operations and these timers, is that the total length of time for a lot of IO operations is often unknown with any accuracy so you have to use a heuristic to guess the current % done. For instance: when reading/writing/both many files of differing sizes on traditional drives there is an amount of latency per file which is significant and not always predictable. Whether you base progress on total size or number of files or some more complicated calc based on both, it will be inaccurate in most cases, sometimes badly so. Even when copying a single large file on a shared drive, or just on a dedicated system with multiple tasks running, the progress is inherently a bit random, the same for any network transfer. Worse are many database requests: you don't get any progress often because there is no progress output until the query processing is complete, and the last byte of the result might arrive in the same fraction of a second the first does¹. The same for network requests, though IE (at least as early as v3) and early versions of Edge did outright lie² there to try make themselves look faster than the competition. The progress bars in videos are a different beast (ahem): the total time is absolutely known, any inaccuracy is either a deliberate lie or gross incompetence. -------- [1] I once worked on a system that kept logs of certain types of query so it could display a guess of how long things were going to take and a progress bar to go with it, but this was actually more irritating to the users than no progress display as it would sometime jump from a few % directly to done or sit at 99% for ages (in the end the overly complicated guessing method was replaced by a simple spinner). [2] It would creep up, getting as far as 80%, before the first byte of response is received. This also confused users who thought that something was actually happening when the action was in fact stalled and just going to time-out.
kube-system 10mo ago
> Whoever came up with that type of progress bar must hate people in general. My first thought is that the person has a strong grasp of their profession and they love money. A hack like that has to have a really high value/effort ratio.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- ghostbrainalpha 10mo ago
  I was forced to do this as a developer of Flash websites in the early 00's. I loved making custom progress bars really fun so people didn't mind watching the huge sites download. I HATED when they had me mess with the time so that it got to 90% really fast and then spent AGES finishing the last 10%.
  - consp 10mo ago
    We all know the Microsoft progress bars reached 99% easily and had an infinite last % in the '90s. I'm still not convinced that was by accident.
    - xeonmc 10mo ago
      Zeno’s progress bar.
transcriptase 10mo ago
If you watch him on Joe Rogan’s podcast he gives a full overview of how every single tiny detail down to colors, length of scene cuts, facial expressions, language, total length of videos, time of day for release, thumbnails, sound effects, music is extensively A/B tested to not only optimize for the algorithm but for hijacking people’s attention as well. That weird creepy face with the outline and uncanny smoothing aren’t by accident. Everything is intentional because he obsessively tests anything that might give him even the slightest edge in a sea of videos. The content itself barely matters.
- Tanoc 10mo ago
  This seems like innately hostile behaviour. Not to other video creators, but to his audience. Stripping as much as he can using data and mathematics is the kind of thing engineers do to pull more out of a machine, not something you do when you're creating informal communications to other humans.
  - aembleton 10mo ago
    With enough humans, it starts to look like a machine
  - orbital-decay 10mo ago
    Attention engineering is how the charts are topped. Media producers knew this decades before the social media, and perfected it by the late 90's. Avoiding extremely popular stuff is just common sense if you want any real authenticity.
    - DrewADesign 10mo ago
      Oh, but then you’re the much-maligned hipster.
      - djtango 10mo ago
        I introduced myself to my now wife as an accidental hipster: - I brewed my own kombucha (I have GI issues and I am so lactose intolerant that even kefir and yoghurt would give me a reaction) - I ride a bicycle everywhere (I exercise daily and like to stay active, bicycle is often the fastest way around London) - I buy expensive locally farmed produce (the quality is usually night and day vs other sources) There were plenty of other signals by which I superficially seem like a hipster but my wife would attest I'm the opposite of an actual one. In the words of my ever wise mother "keep the good bits, leave the rest"

by xoxxala 10mo ago

drcongo 10mo ago

Not the only thing he's guilty of.

red-iron-pine 10mo ago
explain
- drcongo 10mo ago
  It's all a scam.

x187463 10mo ago

A fantastic video from Matt, as usual. Yet another data point on why nobody should be wasting a second watching Mr Beast content. Complete algorithmically optimized garbage. I recall Mr Beast showing up in a Colin Furze video for a few minutes and Mr Beast was very clearly incapable of being a normal person. He was obviously out of place, being in full makeup and styled, and couldn't seem to be bothered to actually engage or express real interest in the subject. I think the guy has replaced his real persona with some manifestation of the YouTube algorithm. If he's not actively making money, he's just a shell.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
m4tthumphrey 10mo ago
That Colin Furze cameo was so weird.
- x187463 10mo ago
  From what I can tell, based on an excerpt of an interview with Colin, Mr Beast had a bunker-related video and visited Colin's bunker. As a viewer of Colin's channel and not Mr Beast, it seemed very strange, but makes more sense if there was a more substantial collaboration taking place in a different video stream.
duped 10mo ago
They somehow got him doing a cameo on this upcoming Survivor season and it's going to be terrible.
climb_stealth 10mo ago
Luckily the recommendation system does work to some extent. I'm glad I don't get to see any of that stuff on my youtube. Opening the front page in a private view is a scary place of hyper-optimised drama and attention seeking. It's scary imagining people getting sucked into that :/
- physicles 10mo ago
  If you turn off you watch history in account settings, then youtube.com is just a passive-aggressive black screen telling you to turn it back on. It’s beautiful. When you click over to subscriptions, you see only the stuff that you subscribed to, and nothing else. Recommendations on a video are based on you subscriptions and the current video, and nothing else. I could never go back.
  - mc3301 10mo ago
    Fully agreed. The day youtube disables the "turn watch history off," is the day I'll stop using youtube. I, too, could never go back.
  - andrepd 10mo ago
    This is basically what I do in NewPipe! Just a good ol' chronological list of my subscriptions, nothing else. Ahh if only everything could be this 2006...
- thaumasiotes 10mo ago
  > Opening the front page in a private view is a scary place of hyper-optimised drama and attention seeking. Huh? Opening the front page of youtube in a private view (with no existing youtube history) shows you a completely blank page.
  - jasonfarnon 10mo ago
    The blank page where it asks you to enter a search? This is a recent change I think. I want to say the last year or 2.
  - 10mo ago
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
Hendrikto 10mo ago
Mr Beast not looking like a normal person next to Colin Furze is impressive. That guy is so over the top that I cannot bear watching his videos, despite them theoretically being exactly up my alley. I like tinkering videos, I like his ideas, and the high-quality results, but I hate his mannerisms.
hermitdev 10mo ago
Every time see Mr Beast (I don't watch any of his stuff, just accidentally see promos on Prime sometimes), he reminds me of Homer Simpson's forced smile in the Simpsons' espiode "Re-Nedufication" [0]. [0]: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c8/84/8e/c8848e81afa88a42bd4dcdacc966289e.png https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c8/84/8e/c8848e81afa88a42bd4d...

cons0le 10mo ago

MrBeast is a hack, but its worth pointing out that all "progress bars" are bad design. You could make the same complaint against most of the progress bars in MsDOS. There was never a consistency in timing so you can never really use them to gauge how much time is left.

Vegenoid 10mo ago
We’re not talking about a measure of computational progress here. We’re talking about visually representing how much time has elapsed out of a fixed duration. This is exactly where progress indicators shine, the total time for the thing to happen is perfectly specified in advance.
dspillett 10mo ago
The difference between a lot of OS/app progress bars for IO (and sometimes CPU) operations and these timers, is that the total length of time for a lot of IO operations is often unknown with any accuracy so you have to use a heuristic to guess the current % done. For instance: when reading/writing/both many files of differing sizes on traditional drives there is an amount of latency per file which is significant and not always predictable. Whether you base progress on total size or number of files or some more complicated calc based on both, it will be inaccurate in most cases, sometimes badly so. Even when copying a single large file on a shared drive, or just on a dedicated system with multiple tasks running, the progress is inherently a bit random, the same for any network transfer. Worse are many database requests: you don't get any progress often because there is no progress output until the query processing is complete, and the last byte of the result might arrive in the same fraction of a second the first does¹. The same for network requests, though IE (at least as early as v3) and early versions of Edge did outright lie² there to try make themselves look faster than the competition. The progress bars in videos are a different beast (ahem): the total time is absolutely known, any inaccuracy is either a deliberate lie or gross incompetence. -------- [1] I once worked on a system that kept logs of certain types of query so it could display a guess of how long things were going to take and a progress bar to go with it, but this was actually more irritating to the users than no progress display as it would sometime jump from a few % directly to done or sit at 99% for ages (in the end the overly complicated guessing method was replaced by a simple spinner). [2] It would creep up, getting as far as 80%, before the first byte of response is received. This also confused users who thought that something was actually happening when the action was in fact stalled and just going to time-out.

kube-system 10mo ago

> Whoever came up with that type of progress bar must hate people in general. My first thought is that the person has a strong grasp of their profession and they love money. A hack like that has to have a really high value/effort ratio.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
ghostbrainalpha 10mo ago
I was forced to do this as a developer of Flash websites in the early 00's. I loved making custom progress bars really fun so people didn't mind watching the huge sites download. I HATED when they had me mess with the time so that it got to 90% really fast and then spent AGES finishing the last 10%.
- consp 10mo ago
  We all know the Microsoft progress bars reached 99% easily and had an infinite last % in the '90s. I'm still not convinced that was by accident.
  - xeonmc 10mo ago
    Zeno’s progress bar.

transcriptase 10mo ago

If you watch him on Joe Rogan’s podcast he gives a full overview of how every single tiny detail down to colors, length of scene cuts, facial expressions, language, total length of videos, time of day for release, thumbnails, sound effects, music is extensively A/B tested to not only optimize for the algorithm but for hijacking people’s attention as well. That weird creepy face with the outline and uncanny smoothing aren’t by accident. Everything is intentional because he obsessively tests anything that might give him even the slightest edge in a sea of videos. The content itself barely matters.

Tanoc 10mo ago
This seems like innately hostile behaviour. Not to other video creators, but to his audience. Stripping as much as he can using data and mathematics is the kind of thing engineers do to pull more out of a machine, not something you do when you're creating informal communications to other humans.
- aembleton 10mo ago
  With enough humans, it starts to look like a machine
- orbital-decay 10mo ago
  Attention engineering is how the charts are topped. Media producers knew this decades before the social media, and perfected it by the late 90's. Avoiding extremely popular stuff is just common sense if you want any real authenticity.
  - DrewADesign 10mo ago
    Oh, but then you’re the much-maligned hipster.
    - djtango 10mo ago
      I introduced myself to my now wife as an accidental hipster: - I brewed my own kombucha (I have GI issues and I am so lactose intolerant that even kefir and yoghurt would give me a reaction) - I ride a bicycle everywhere (I exercise daily and like to stay active, bicycle is often the fastest way around London) - I buy expensive locally farmed produce (the quality is usually night and day vs other sources) There were plenty of other signals by which I superficially seem like a hipster but my wife would attest I'm the opposite of an actual one. In the words of my ever wise mother "keep the good bits, leave the rest"