fredy

youtube and it's fucked up system of advertising has been a detriment to online creators as a whole imo

As much as I'd like to believe at face value that this kind of stuff is done charitably, business is business, and you're on the money. I sure hope that one Australian guy that I'm subscribed to is doing things above board, at least.

I noticed a handful of high-viewcount dog grooming 'assembly line' type videos on my feed the other day and clicked on a few out of morbid curiosity. My data pool is extremely shallow, because I only watched videos from one creator, but it was very obvious to me -- someone who used to groom dogs professionally for a very long time -- that the clients were being undercharged, or possibly even getting work done for free.
In several cases this resulted in work that I (in my professional opinion!) would call shoddy or even actively unhealthy for the dog in question. It seemed like the groomer was, basically, avoiding using any sort of methods of controlling the dog (such as certain (totally-safe, but not cute-looking) restraints) that would 'look bad on camera', thereby prioritizing viewcount and ad revenue over the dog's actual coat health. It was really transparent, weird and unnerving to witness.

One channel I watch is @/HVACRVIDEOS and so far the side hustle for him is merch + a shop referral, though this post does make me wonder how much of his extra effort is due to looking good for youtube vs. what he actually did before it.

I watch a channel put out by a guy who quit his office job and decided to start a small farm, you know, mostly because I like to see the animals. He is very open about the finances of his farm (cost of animals/feed/equipment, revenue from selling eggs/animals/meat), and, yeah, in the six or so years he's been running the farm, he's yet to make enough profit to afford his tractor, much less his fancy new barn. His business is being a youtuber. And there's nothing wrong with that, especially given how open he is with his finances, and letting other people know that if they quit their jobs to run a farmstead, their results are likely not going to look like his own.

There's a guy who goes around unclogging storm drains. It's vital work that often goes undone for too long. But then I noticed he was getting in the way of public workers trying to do the same thing sometimes. Or wading out into waist-deep water alone at night in a storm.

It got to the point where he started going out to rural highways and draining marshes that were created by beaver dams in culverts, moving tons of water. Solo, without warning anyone or taking any safety precautions. Instant flash flood, for the likes.

There's so many rug and toy car "restoration" channels where it's clear they got something new, dunked the whole thing in mud for a week, and then dragged it out to clean it up.

Youtube is the only place where this quite works, interestingly enough: the only place where algorithms can reliably deliver you an audience and ads are lucrative enough on their own to really change your life.

i loathe advertising. it creeps into your life in so many ways, trampling over all the small beautiful joys of life to try and claw a few bucks out of your wallet.

Been a while since you've done a #the decline post.

there are a handful of these types that do cause genuine harm, but the lawnmowing and piano tuning ones definitely do sound harmless.

im thinking about the people who deliberately destroy retro consoles to "clean them up" and "fix" them, who smear rusty dirty paint inside and outside the console just to trick people who don't know better into thinking they've learned something. these are genuinely unreplaceable devices now, and people are breaking them for content. it disgusts me.

this isn't really comparable, i guess, to what the post is talking about, but it's something i remembered as i was reading it. at least in the case of free lawncare and shit like that, you're not causing harm and pretending to fix it. if you detune a piano to retune it you're basically exercising a muscle. but content like what im talking about is selfish. it doesn't care about the finite number of retro consoles in existence. it doesnt care about preservation or restoration or helping people.

this reminds me very much of ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, which largely turned advertiser revenue, through the Disney machine, into building or rebuilding already-middle-class disproportionately-White people's houses in usually California or the Hamptons as long as they could make three episodes of it to split among Lockheed Martin, US Army, and weird charities for animals or religious groups

habitat for humanity's got nothing on the showbiz machine but at least they're probably less racist about it