If you're like me, you lack the self control to not occasionally click on a Youtube short despite them always being just lowest denominator junk. Or if it's twitter sometimes they'll be TikToks. One thing I noticed is all or almost all of them have text saying what the person said, but also that they will have a blatant error of the text not matching what the person said. Not just a minor spelling error, but a completely different word.
For instance this one https://www.youtube.com/shorts/g4tVsh1auDY
where the guy says "they should be under the jail" and the text says "out of the jail". I noticed they all do this. I first chocked it up to an illiterate and uneducated generation, but then I realized the tactic.
If the Youtube short has 2000 comments, I bet you like 300 of those comments are correcting that word "mistake". So that's 300 free comments to boost engagement.
These are the types of tactics that I don't know how these "content creators" sleep at night. It's so dishonest. Dishonest money can't be satisfying. I'm far on the personality type where doing anything dishonest or snake-oily is like a thing that makes me feel sick. I have plenty of faults, but lack of integrity or dishonesty isn't really one of them. I'm probably more rigid than even the average person in this area, so it's something that especially gets under my skin.
Look at you, assuming that other people have standards.
There's been people satisfied with dishonest money since there has been money.
I know some of them censor "no no words" like kill and suicide, because the internet is for literal infants according to our overlords....
Yeah, I hate that crap.
Anyone who says unalive, I stop watching their video. If you care about monetization that badly then you might as well just make toy reviews for children like Irate gamer did with Puppet steve.
Clearly talking about current day events is not your calling if you're self-censoring and saying "unalive" or "deletion" or whatever else.
Look, there's one thing with FCC rules that keep things from getting too profane. Most radio jocks abide by that. But the thing is you don't really notice the censorship because it just keeps the most extreme things in check. If you listen to old Opie and Anthony clips, you can't believe that this was on public radio for anyone to hear with advertisers. Totally different type of guidelines. They had censorship they had to abide by, but it was such a politically incorrect time that you didn't even notice the censorship.
If like on Youtube you can actually notice in real time the kindergarten replacement words that they're abiding by that get stricter each and every month, you know you're in Soviet territory.
You shouldn't be able to spot guidelines.
Like Futurama. The seasons before they moved to Adult Swim and could be more TV-MA were the best and funniest seasons. You never got the sense that the creators were ham-strung on Fox.
That's how limits should work. Enough to limit degeneracy, but not so overbearing that it's noticeable and limits creativity, freedom, expression art and creates an environment of fear.
They're even censoring names of illegal drugs because it might imply those drugs are bad, and that the people using them aren't victims.
The example from the OP left in "badass" which surprised me while paying attention for the misquote.
Nope.
Also nope.
tl;dr they're using Cunningham's law to generate engagement.
Because they get paid.
Money is money to some. Probably most.
Interesting observation.
I always assumed the word swaps in those captions were simply bad AI speech-to-text.
You’re 100% correct. I have worked in digital marketing and that is an old tactic.
Youtube is all about exploiting retards these days.
You can invest time and money to make quality content and get a few views, or you can churn out manipulative clickbait shit and rake in millions of views.
Unhook can block various elements. I have mine set up to block the sidebar, homepage, recommendations, and such entirely.
And Youtube-shorts block redirects any short you do click on, into the normal format.
Oooh, clever. Never thought of that.
I'm mixed. I wouldn't do it - I'm too much of a perfectionist, I'd want my content to be to best of my ability - but I also think I could sleep at night if I were to utilize such tactics. Almost everyone understands what was said, so it's not really harming that much. And everything is so gamified it's hard to blame people for playing the system. Hate the game, not the player, as they say.
If anything, YouTube/TikTok/social media is to blame for incentivizing such weirdness. If you're a "content creator" and it's your job, it would be kind of silly to leave money on the table. You want, you need that engagement.
So, yeah, I don't like this - especially intentionally making your content less good - but I understand it. "The Algorithm" is an evil beast, and harming society in many different ways.
There are browser extensions and hacked mobile apps like YouTube ReVanced for hiding shorts. No need to waste brain cells on them.
As well as something like Youtube-shorts block that turns shorts into the normal format, so you can rewind, block autoplay, etc.
If dishonest money wasn't satisfying, the world wouldn't have thousands of MLM/pyramid schemes thriving, salesmen would have all killed themselves, and every job title involving producer/executive would have given up after just a few checks.
And "content creator" is one of those jobs that requires it. They all dress it up with the world "algorithm" but its the same thing every time. They are forced to play a game of deceit and manipulation to minimize "click through" ratios and "force engagement."
If they don't, there are 900000 more ready to do it happily and Youtube/Tiktok/Whatever is litered with dead accounts with 300+ videos with a combined total of 14 views who didn't participate in it. And channels with 1m+ subs getting 10k views who stopped playing the game sufficiently enough.
I can resist clicking on shorts until I see a cute doggo. I will always click on the doggo.
You're on the internet. We're all gay here, even if we're straight.
It happens a lot. Some Let's Players do it as well, they'll do something blatantly stupid like ignore a giant flashing button that would help them with whatever they're doing and they 100% do it to farm engagement from people commenting "PRESS THE FUCKING BUTTON JESUS CHRIST DUDE".
Relax and enjoy some covfefe.
I don't think I've noticed. I watch Astartes Anonymous, Mdiya, and others.
I also noticed that Posts on reddit always seem to do better if they have a typo in them.
i never assumed it was skeevy, but the result of some cheap plugin that does automatic captions.