There’s a lot of waiting around in what I do. Pour some wax into a mold? Wait. Fire up the furnace? Wait. Kick off a 3D print? Wait.
Most of the time, I’ve got plenty of other things to do, but “all work and no play” and all that. So sometimes I make YouTube “Shorts”: Sub 60 second videos, in YouTube’s answer to TikTok. (BTW, TikTok is the Devil and run by Communists out of China and don’t use it, ever.) Making them is fun and I particularly enjoy mocking other peoples’ dumb videos. When it comes to that, it’s a target-rich environment.
Its interesting to watch to see how the YouTube algorithm treats the videos when you put them up. Sometimes, they “catch fire” and get tons of views almost instantly, other times they are all but ignored.
For example, I thought this one was pretty good:
Good or not, as of today, it only has 59 views in over a month.
Then consider this one:
As of this moment, it has been live for 36 minutes and has 5,300 views, gained six new subscribers for my YouTube channel and generated a total of 32.9 hours of total watch time.
Holy crap. Somehow my stupid little 24 second video managed to suck 32.9 hours of productivity out of the universe. Feels like I should go to confession or something.
The whole process is endlessly arbitrary. YouTube shows you the number of views over the past 60 minutes in graph form:
You can watch the algorithm do its thing in real time. Apparently, it gives you a handful of views, then sees what happens. If people watch it long enough, and a few “like” it, then you get more. But eventually it burns itself out and new views effectively shut off. Over the past few minutes (as I wrote the previous paragraphs), total views have only gone up by a few hundred. Looks like this one is played out.
Honestly, not sure how I feel about all this. Something about it feels off. Like we are being manipulated. Which is no big deal to a grown man like me, but I worry about how this sort of algorithmic mind game plays on the kids.
I’m going to go make some derby covers, and wash my hands from this little side trip into the social media cesspool.
