jaywallace1

For When The Bird Drops.

Writer. Youtube: snowcapfilms. | Letterboxd: jaywallace1 | Bandcamp: snowcapmultimedia | Into Vaporwave, Poetry, Motorcycles, Movies.


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

i think a lot about certain kinds of "assembly line" type youtube content, some of which i find disgusting, some of which i admit to watching. like the whole genre of mowing / pressure washing videos

they started out 15 years ago as people advertising their businesses poorly (nobody goes to youtube and types in 'chicago pressure washing' to find a service) and then everyone got a bit savvier and started making channels where they just uploaded footage of their jobs to make some side revenue. then it slowly shifted, and it's quite obvious now that youtube is the primary source of revenue.

I say this because ~10 years ago, most of these videos were "here's a job I did for a customer in (city)" and they'd mention what the customer requested etc. but now it's 100% "free yard cleanup" "free pressure washing" "i offered a FREE yard cleanup to this ELDERLY WOMAN and she was OVERWHELMED" (this is virtually all of them now)

my guess is that one by one, all these people looked at their adsense revenue and went "holy shit. i... made five times more on ads than the customer paid me." adsense is ABSURDLY lucrative if you can hit what is considered 'normal' numbers for youtube (hundreds of thousands of views) which is very easy for this kind of Content. this isn't even counting sponsorships; all these people are hocking water flavor powders etc

one theory for how this happened is that they simply ran out of customers. if everyone in town who's willing to pay for landscaping has already done so, you can't get the rest to hire you, but they'll usually take the work for free; they don't care that you're uploading the footage and making money off it. youtube is therefore a kind of perverse "tax-funded public service:" you do labor for Customer A while getting paid by Employer B for showing the process to Advertising Sponge C; the effective result is that Coca-Cola, indirectly, reserves a tiny portion of their profits for mowing poor people's lawns

ofc the other theory is that the youtube rev so heavily eclipses their normal hourly rates that it's simply not worth it anymore to deal with customer demands and customer complaints, even for people who COULD pay. nobody can demand a refund over free work; why charge if it's going to be a pittance in comparison? adsense doesn't get mad that you overtrimmed the azaleas

youtube's advertising economy has done what it does so well and created a new resource, "unmowed yards," to join the ranks of "streetfind dressers with damaged veneer" and "rusty old wrenches." this has led to very obvious outcomes - yt landscapers are now trespassing in half their videos, cleaning up foreclosed properties, vacant lots, city sidewalks and roads, etc. that they absolutely have no legal right to touch. of course this doesn't mean they shouldn't be doing it, and boy howdy do they love including the clips of grateful locals who are thrilled that the sidewalk will finally be usable again... but it does feel a bit disingenuous that they just accept the praise for their "charity" instead of mumbling something about "well it's for youtube," thus revealing that they're being paid quite handsomely by an invisible patron.

but who can blame them? when there's no pianos left to tune, the smart piano tuner now buys them off craigslist and goodwill solely to tune up and then throw out. when that supply dries up, well, they just might start bringing home tuned pianos and detuning them. and you can't exactly say that the audience isn't getting what they "paid" for. saying it out loud however would inject that bitter note, reminding everyone exactly how the sausage was made.

the advertising economy seeps into the tiniest crack like penetrating oil, finding value that no corporation ever could have discovered. there was after all no orthodox way to learn that there are tens of millions of people out there who are so interested in watching someone mow a lawn that they'll sit through ads in order to see it.

i feel it's worth mentioning that i do not have contempt for any of these people. unlike a lot of shit like this, they are doing no harm that I can tell. in fact it's almost like a picture of what actual public services would look like. maybe in a healthy society there would be people just driving around looking for overgrown sidewalks to trim instead of the usual, "but that's two hours i could be using to justify to the rest of the world why i shouldn't starve to death." hm. well there's no way to ever find out


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

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 thing I do like to consider about that sort of phenomenon, you're very likely right, but it's also possible that we are simply watching people who are incompetent. Because like, incompetent people don't generally know they're incompetent, so it makes perfect sense that they would just blithely go ahead and share video of them fucking up at their job, and since the overwhelming majority of viewers have no idea what they're watching, they'll all say it's great, burying the few people going "uh, I don't know how to tell you this but you should quit immediately and go get training"

Content like this often serves up a unique display of invisible public incompetency that ranges from "restoration" channels not lubricating grease fittings on whatever "rare find" they just cleaned and polished because grease is icky :( all the way to hobby machinists welding shit together with zero idea how the material stresses induced by welding can influence the failure point of otherwise solid components and creating veritable death traps that otherwise look nice on camera. It's a sliding scale, and sure there are some reasonably-professional trade workers who ostensibly just film their paying job for exposure or a side hustle but once you've seen someone buy an 8000-dollar piece of equipment just to immediately void the warranty on it by turning it into something that nets you a closed-casket funeral, it gets old fast.

your comment reminded me of the time i was looking into cleaning button contacts on ds motherboards, and i watched a video where a guy whole-ass SCRAPED THE CONTACTS OFF. i was new to console repair but i was fucking appalled. those shiny bits of metal are super important, if they're damaged like that they'll make the problem worse -- it makes me so upset just thinking about (>~<)

What's worse is the video in question specifically claims to be helping fix the buttons. His advice is to use SANDPAPER to remove corrosion. SANDPAPER!!! and it's the first video that comes up when you look up "how to fix unresponsive DS buttons"....

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.

what's really intriguing and depressing about this is twofold

  1. it wasn't always like this. in 2016 there were genuine videos, shot ad hoc by hobbyists just for the sake of sharing. when the mass-produced fakes came along those people all gave up basically overnight, because they were all busy woodworking rather than shooting or editing video, so they got buried by these people whose entire focus was on the production of new footage. They couldn't keep up with the pace, uploading one video every couple of weeks at best when the fakes were uploading every couple days. And they couldn't keep up with the quote unquote quality, from people who had purchased their cameras and lighting and whatnot before they even decided what it was they were going to do. Based on many things we've learned over the last couple years, I wouldn't be surprised if most of the channels in question already had the gear and the skills because they'd pivoted from some other scam.

  2. there are still genuine hobbyists making videos like this, it is just unbelievably hard to find them, and more importantly, the damage done to our psyche by the onslaught of bullshit makes it very difficult to enjoy those videos, at least in my experience. We would like to see a well shot and edited video of a dresser restoration, yet seeing that intrinsically decreases our trust level.

Also, and I did not include this as a numbered point because it is not depressing, only intriguing: virtually all of the mass produced restoration videos are from Germany, Austria, and nearby states. I have no idea why this is.

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.

yep. the remarkable thing about YouTube is that it really isn't something we already had that's simply been automated or streamlined or etc etc, it is an entirely new kind of thing that had never been tried before and has no analog. YouTube is YouTube, there can't really be another one, and it's principles can't really apply to any other kind of thing. Television was recognized as unique, and uniquely powerful and uniquely harmful, essentially the moment that it appeared in society. YouTube is the ultimate realization of an unlimited number of television channels, exactly as they intended, and there really is nothing that compares to that. Infinite fractal cable TV with billions of special interest channels. The lawn mowing network. The lawn mowing network 2. The lawn mowing network 3. As far back as the '70s we imagined people channel surfing for their entire lives and expiring in their armchairs, boney fingers clutching a remote, but for decades there was always some limit where one would say, well, I guess there's nothing on.

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