#imagine being able to keep the YouTube algorithm when it worked. or just having a little stupid fun one that's interesting | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bohba13-writing-den · 1 year ago

Text

To clear things up, this isn't about the spyware. (Though I would LOVE regulation on that) This is about who is using it, how they can use it, and the fact this has been a known vector in the past. (there used to be a blanket ban on media companies operating in the US being foreign owned, the FCC now assesses such purchases on a case-by-case basis)

Several things you need to know first. China is ABSOLUTELY hostile to the US and its allies. There are a myriad of reasons for this that are too numerous to explain in detail, both good and bad. HOWEVER know that China is hostile to the US.

Now, one might think that this isn't an issue. Bytedance is a private company, that China can't force them to do anything.

And to that I say "bless your heart."

Because if you think the US is bad, and it is, China is WORSE!

By law, any "privately" owned business must have 80% of its shares owned by the local "union."

Oh, that's great, the workers have control of the company right?

nope. Unions in the PRC are in fact extensions of the local government, which are in turn beholden to the provincial government, who are then beholden to the national government, who are again, may I remind you, actively hostile to the US and its allies.

Next, there is a law in place in China which basically means the CCP can walk up and demand the info they have on their users, and they must comply. No warrant, no probable cause, nothing. Just, hey we want your data, hand it over.

Now, honestly, this isn't what I'm scared of. It once again goes back to their highly invasive algorithm.

So there are several factors to this. First and foremost is the fact that this algorithm can peg you down very quickly, which is honestly kind of scary. Then, once it finds out what will keep you on the app, instead of feeding that to you constantly, which would result in you eventually putting the app down, which they don't want for many reasons. Instead what they do is they put that at random intervals so that it works like gambling, resulting in you being hooked on the app.

Again, while ethically dubious and should be highly illegal, this is not why the ban has bipartisan support.

This has bipartisan support because all of this put together, results in a social cyberweapon.

Remember how much damage Russian bots were able to do? Now imagine if they had TOTAL CONTROL over a platform that had the popularity and reach as TikTok.

They could use the invasive info gathering to create categories of users with very high specificity, feed them information to do X Y or Z, and have a high likelyhood of those people doing that thing.

They could selectively radicalize users and have them act within their rights that are otherwise potentially damaging to national security.

Now yes. This does sound crazy, especially to someone not familiar with how exactly the CCP oppresses their people. (And no, it's not with social credit, that died in the proposition phase)

China uses the app on their side of the "Great Firewall" to control the flow of information. They use it to push their propaganda and suppress dissenting opinions, factually and/or morally right or wrong.

TikTok goes well beyond any platform in information gathering and invasiveness. Knowing the bodies involved, this is a tool meant for Chinese intelligence to compromise millions of Americans to act in hindrance of US interests, whether those interests be good or bad.

Why do you think it has become such a strong platform for pro-Palestinian information to disseminate? because that information actively undermines the current US position (Which I also do not support because Israel needs to back the fuck off and actually care about civcas.) Why do you think we have heard exactly jack and shit about the ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs on TikTok?

It's because at the end of the day, they are completely beholden to the CCP.

A very qualified YouTuber (Even if I disagree with some of his takes when it comes to Gaza and Bushnell) has a video on how easy it is to astroturf political movements and protests merely using the app's advertiser services, and you know that Chinese intelligence has beyond premium service in that reguard.

youtube

This shit is fucking bonkers, but as someone who has been paying attention to that side of geopolitics for a long time, this is completely on brand for the CCP.

I hate that a lot of people are going to lose their jobs, but Chinese companies are generally not allowed to operate in the US for exactly this reason. Huawei has installed hardware backdoors in the past for example.

Chinese companies are merely extensions of the state, and are used as such whenever it suits them.

so the house of representatives just passed a bill that will now move to the senate to BAN tik tok completely in the united states and they are expected to argue that “national security risks” outweigh the freedom of speech and first amendment rights. biden has already said that if it gets to him, he will sign it. whether or not you use the app…….this is something to be worried about

#tiktok critical #psa #espionage #this shit is fucking bonkers #and I hate that it's entirely correct #espionage is often this crazy #psyops #I understand if you don't like what I have to say #It does seem outlandish at first pass #but remember who you're dealing with #one of the most extreme survalance states ever #fuck the CCP #Youtube

55K notes · View notes

sonoda-oomers · 2 years ago

Text

i think it was shanspear on youtube that raised this point that really stuck with me. it might be impossible to have productive conversations about AI when there's still so much profit incentive behind it.

like people are not that naive. they can acknowledge how exciting it could be to make an image from their imagination with the help of a machine. they can see the interesting and thought provoking potentials of machine generated art. i doubt i'm the only one who thinks the AI art = evil mindset has a bit too far especially when it's led to more kneejerk reactions against machine calculated tech that has existed since forever like video game npc behaviors. all of the conversations online feel so jarring when real world consequences actually happen like adobe kneeing in on the topic to tighten the noose on copyright laws to profit corporations even more. when it comes to the everyday person arguing on the internet, both sides are being played

and then somebody who heard about the adobe bullshit sees the writers and actors strike demanding against AI and opposes that bc now suddenly anti-AI is bad

and the thing is i can't really blame that person nor the anti-AI artists who probably supported the adobe bullshit before they knew the outcome. bc like. AI rapidly taking over really came out of nowhere to the average person and i think it's really unfair to expect people to immediately know the ins and outs of it. it's like when nfts were popping and artists were suddenly expected to navigate ideas from fields they have no knowledge of to legit culty mentalities, they're expected to know so much just to argue with some guy who doesn't know the first thing about what makes a drawing nice to look at. can you really blame every artists for not being able to write dissertations on how AI works and why they think it's illegitimate and should be regulated? they're busy actually making art and managing 14 social media accounts at once to keep themselves relevant and in the eyes of potential client so they can affording fucking rent. if they're presented copyright laws as a crutch to get this problem out of their mind of course they're going to take that as an argument, and may even support it.

like hell back in the nft days japanese artists got sold the system as a way to really combat disrespectful usage of their art by other people when in truth it did none of that, the market in fact encouraged theft.

ignorance is objectively bad, but at the same time can you really blame them when these techs keep seemingly pop out of nowhere and spawn societal issues and artists feel like now they have to have a stem degree and become a fucking humanitarian to tell people to Stop. when the simple fact is it really fucking sucks to work on your craft for so many years, to actually put in effort and spirit to do a good job, and then find out your potential clients would be fine with what a machine took 5 seconds to spit out. while artists are arguing with little twitter gremlins gloating to them about how artists are nothing compared to AI, some publications are already using AI instead of commissioning illustrators, and in every industry people are legit getting replaced by AI bc it costs less and it saves the suits at the top from having to treat people like people. and then you realize you can't really argue against the fact that human CAN be replaced. but you know just because it's true doesn't mean that it's good and should be allowed to continue. and no matter what opinion you hold there's corporations and agents and pr people left and right waiting to weaponize your feelings because there's money to be made money money money. the money that artists already weren't making before fucking algorithms could do their job for much less in return.

like i just wanna fucking draw man. and i think i'm allowed to hope to make a living from the skills i have. a few months ago posts kept coming out about how to watermark your art and use services to make sure really sure 100% sure this time that their art won't be added to a dataset. people delete their art after hearing about the theft, not knowing it's already been included in the dataset and there it will remain. do you know how fucking exhausting that is? there's a reason not everybody became a scientist or a programmer, we can never not live in a reality where we're not depending on other people to excel in what we can't and trusting that they're doing their job well. and then one day some guy in tech decides we're actually done depending on artists for being artists now, we want to make the money that they could make. every AI user can't help but think people with anti-AI criticism are attacking them personally. and it's not even those AI users that directly caused hollywood to want to screen actors' likeness to make a robot do their job forever and make execs so much fucking money.

#spud.txt

0 notes

thefanficmonster · 4 years ago

Text

Filterless

Corpse Husband x Plus-sized Reader (Female)

Warnings: Body Image Insecurities, Low self-esteem, Swearing

Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, RPF (Real Person Fic)

Summary: Feeling comfortable in her skin has hardly ever been the case for Y/N who’s been struggling with body image issues all her life. However, they only get worse when she sees the ‘type’ of girls her crush is into.

Requested by Anon. Hi darling! Thank you so much for your request (hits close to home 😅) I’m so sorry it has taken me so long to fulfill it and post it but here it finally is and if you’ve stuck around long enough to read it, I hope you enjoy! ALSO! - Never forget how beautiful and amazing you are. Never compare your beauty to someone else’s. We’re all beautiful people and we all shine so brightly and uniquely. No one deserves to be compared to anyone when we’re all so different yet so incredible. Love you and appreciate you with all my heart, Vy ❤

If I ever need my ego taken down a few notches - it never does, it’s barely even present, to be honest - all I have to do is go on Instagram. To be honest, regardless of how I’m feeling, opening that app is bound to make my mood plummet and come crashing into the ground so hard it drives a hole in it - probably in the form of a broken heart.

Being a content creator myself, I often get asked questions about my absence on that social platform specifically. I mean, the questions are based and rational I guess, considering I’m not a faceless YouTuber and yet my Instagram account is void of any photos. It’s not like I don’t post at all - I do! I post on my story often but it’s more often than not scenery I find pretty or a poster I’ve made for a movie/video game. Bottom line is: I barely ever allow a picture of me to make it online. The most my fans are ever gonna get of me is a selfie which is also a super rare occurrence because of how long it takes me to take and choose one I don’t hate.

Ok, but how am I supposed to find the motivation to post any sort of picture of myself when on my timeline I’m always faced with people worthy of posting pictures of themselves. People with such perfect bodies and beautiful faces. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not jealous or envious of those people - good for them! They know what they’re working with and they’re working it well. I have nothing against them, in fact, I love seeing people proud of their bodies no matter their size, shape or weight. Those are my role-models: people who are proud of themselves, their bodies, their attributes and capabilities and don’t hesitate to show them off. Those are the people I look up to but, deep down inside I know I’ll never be like.

Insecure about my body, having been referred to as ‘chubby’ and ‘squishy’ all my life. Inappreciative of the stuff I do: starting from my job as a graphic designer leading towards my job on YouTube - nothing I do, professionally or otherwise, satisfies me. Nothing I do is enough in my eyes because I feel incapable of ever being able to do enough. I’ve been called lazy and a half-asser a few too many times to be able to brush it off as a meaningless insult.

With these problems I’ve had with myself and my own perception of who I am and the work I do, I’ve never had the time for romance or romantic relationships. I second-guess the intentions of everyone who ever shows any interest in me because in my mind I’m nothing special and I have nothing to offer - nothing attractive or likable at least. That being said, I haven’t even been one to make heart eyes at others either. I busy myself with my job and some side-gigs, brushing off any relationship questions with the excuse that I’m ‘just too busy to be in a relationship’ which is technically true.

Having spent twenty plus years with that mindset, one can imagine how surprised I was when I found myself catching feelings for someone. And that someone just couldn’t be any other than the biggest YouTube sensation at the moment - Corpse Husband.

I’m close friends with Poki - her and I were roommates at one point too - so her inviting me to play Among Us with them wasn’t so strange. One or two games, I thought, nothing unusual there, just friendly curtesy. I wasn’t expecting to warm up to the group of famous streamers nor did I expect them to welcome me among them so easily, mostly because my channel is so small and practically invisible to the YouTube algorithm. But soon enough, I became a permanent member of the team, making friends with every single one of those YouTubers I practically thought of a celebrities.

This journey of branching out to other content creators has proven itself to be surprisingly pleasant and has packed my book of friendships to the brim. All of that came unexpectedly, along with a wave of new subs and a higher view count. However, as I mentioned, it hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows. I came to finally understand what my high school friends were talking about when they were head over heels for a boy - the butterflies in the stomach whenever he speaks your name; the importance of the laugh you share with him, how special and different it is; how cool it is to be impostors with him - ok they never said that, obviously, but it’s what I have as a substitute to the ‘when the two of you make eye-contact’ bullshit since Corpse and I have never seen each other in person. That is, of course, because of him being a faceless YouTuber and me being a self-conscious and insecure girl.

We do talk all the time though - texting, calling, chilling on Discord, you name it. Our conversations range from deeply philosophical to ones that might mislead someone into thinking we’re high. There’s no topic we haven’t touched upon and yet we still manage to find something new to talk about. We have plenty of similarities but we also never seem to run out of differences we slowly come across as we keep getting to know each other better and better.

And somewhere along that journey I ended up catching feelings.

Human nature of wanting to connect with other people, I curse you for what you’ve done to me.

You might think I’m being overdramatic about the whole ordeal and that this is just a normal, natural occurrence many people experience in their life - some even daily. Well, not only am I far from used to it, but it’s also taking a toll of a different kind on me.

It’s like a constant slap to the face.

That slap turned into a punch when Corpse and I started following each other on Instagram and I started getting daily reminders of how out of my depth I am with this crush on him. In over my head, especially when you look at all those girls whose pics and videos he reposts on his story. Imagine how that makes me feel, what that does to me - puts me back into the ‘Constantly not good enough‘ basket, the one I’ve been fighting to get out of all my life. In the past and in different contexts I could easily say that it was all just my mind hating me intensely but now - now that I know for a fact I’m not good enough and don’t fit Corpse’s criteria - it hurts ten times as much. I’m not one to do shit for someone’s attention or to attract someone’s eyes, but it really hurts my feelings. Often times, it also leads me to doing dumb things and making rash decisions.

Like the one I made two days ago.

Imagine me cringing and shaking my head at my own stupidity as I admit this: I, in a frenzy, ordered a whole e-girl getup with overnight delivery.

Wait, hold up, it gets worse.

I received it yesterday and spent the whole day regretting that decision, but then, in my most insecure hours - which was somewhere around midnight - I equipped the get-up, took a picture and posted it on my Instagram page. First full body pic I’ve ever posted on there. First pic I’ve posted there of any kind. There to stay, not to be gone in twenty four hours. First pic, and it’s not even of me. It’s of who I want to be in order to fit someone’s criteria. And that fucking stings.

As you might imagine, I’ve spent today’s day regretting that decision as well. Recently my mood’s been nothing but regretting rash decisions that have surfaced under the influence of my ridiculous, constantly-present insecurities. And I would’ve probably gotten over it rather quickly had I not received a message from Corpse that read:

“Didn’t think of you with an e-girl aesthetic“

I didn’t open the message, I peeped at it as it was a notification on my lock screen. It’s still there, an unread notification. It’s been two hours since I received it and I cannot think of a single thing to say in response to that.

Truth is, I’m afraid. I’m afraid of so many things right now.

I’m afraid of becoming that girl in the photo, cause I’m most definitely not her.

I’m afraid of letting Corpse down by admitting I’m not her.

I’m afraid of what my own mind has made me do because it hates me so much and I’m terrified of what it might do in the future.

I’m afraid and stranded on things to do.

You can’t be her forever, you know. Being her won’t make your insecurities go away, it’ll only make them worse. Haven’t you learned that by now?

I sigh, frustrated and irritated with myself as I grab my phone and tap on the notification, finally deciding to face the music and allow my instincts to carry me through the interaction. Improvisation, that’s one of the few things I’m good at. Let’s hope it doesn’t fail me.

I’m just about to type out my response - not sure what it’s gonna say - when I give the message Corpse has sent me a second glance. I furrow my brows, finding there’s more to it than that peep through the notification let me see.

“Didn’t think of you with an e-girl aesthetic. You’re personality is so bright and colorful, I could’ve never imagined you were into the darks and blacks“

Because I’m not

I fail to realize until the message has been sent that my thoughts are exactly what I typed out and sent.

And honestly, I’m glad. It feels like I’ve spoken my truth, like I’ve lifted a huge boulder off my chest.

With that rare confidence in mind I go on and delete the picture.

In its spot, I post a picture I just now took - a mirror selfie in my homey get-up consisting of hot pink sweatpants and an oversized blue tee, my hair in a messy bun, my face free of make-up.

I caption it: ‘Oops, had the e-girl filter on for the last one. This is filterless me tho so...Hi 🥴’

A lot better, I’m surprised to hear my inner voice say. I hope I don’t get used to all this kindness on my brain’s part, probably won’t last, but damn if I don’t milk every second of it.

Just then, I receive a new message from non other than Corpse.

“Now that’s the girl I see when I think of you. She’s super cute 😉“

My, oh my, who would’ve guessed Corpse has a game like that - and by that I mean the ability to make me blush so intensely with only a text message.

Now ain’t that better than being someone else, Y/N?

It sure is, it sure is.

@maat-the-prescriptive @simonsbluee @save-the-sky @itsminniekat @hacker-ghost @bi-andready-tocry @imtiredaffff @jazzkaurtheglorious @hereforbeebo @fandomgirl17 @chrysanthykios @maehemscorpyus @loraleiix @letsloveimagines @annshit @i-cant-choose-a-username-help @enigmaticmaze @divine-artemis @waterlilypat @idontknowwhatthisisfam @evi-ka @classyandfabulous00 @redperson58 @lilysdaydreams @solowheein @mythicalamphitrite @axen-gers @luckygirl144 @nj01 @buddyemily @the-albino-lioness @stardream14 @gdhdkfnn @nomadicgypsyy @preciousskye @fluffysuicideunicornsworld @o-kaelin @manacharlotte @awkward-youtube-trash @lolalee24 @bonky-beerns @meme-lord-and-savior-sebastian @strawbrinkofdeath @teenloves @tams0527 @browneyespinkhair @starstruckllamapuppy @daisychains012 @y0ulooked @tinytacosuitcaseflap @supernatural-is-my-only-life @jula-pauline @melodykitty @just-that-bi-girl @crazybutconfidentaf @lowellshade @alphakees @bellero @weallneednamjesus @starryhanji @boiled-onionrings @husherstan @fockingwhore @melaningoddessthings @prettypastelpetals @haleypearce @godwhyamiawkward @y-napotat @daisychainyoonmin @little-miss-rebel3 @free-wheelin-bi-sexual @redmoon261 @darkacademic2 @wiseflamingoqueen @into-the-end @namikhai-i @nastiablr @thelittleplantlover @mirktuan @dont-hyuck @jjk-bunny @vintagegothlover @easygoingtheatre @itsrandombooklover @miiaivi @emmybaybee @befourgolden @jjk-is-my-shit @eternalteaaars @spacebadgerx @princesslunalight @acequinn14 @samm48 @misselsbells06 @simp-lykawa @fo-love @marishimomura-blog @therealglenncoco @cinnamonbun332 @killtherandomness @sanshinexxxsan @fee-btheweeb @press-lay @cathleenpotgieter16 @jazzydoesstuff @moonlxghtbay @forestrain2000 @hyunjinhugs @blood-of-fandoms @lovellylies @ukiyolixx @simpforhpcharacters @chrisdylan17 @parkerjisung @pedernille @theodonyous @wineandionysus @malfoystilinskii05 @morbid-x @coryisagee @jessewa26 @scoobydooluver97 @mindintheskies365 @raeanneinwonderland @indecisive-empanada @gluttonypalace @loriane2503 @btsiguess-kpop @khaoticbunny @lucidlycactus @smiithys @rottenroyalebooks @kpopgirlbtssvt @fangirl-tc27 @fr0z3n-1 @notmesimpingfortechno @shotarosleftpinky @kunoi-chan @idk-whats-wrong-with-me @yikeroonie @goldenstarofthunderclan @poetry-and-tea @ama-do-writing-stuff @wishbonewolf @emeraldxhope @t0xick1tty @kusuinko @speakyourselfloveyourself @sophia902103 @lo-manburg @classsykittykat @dmgama @depressedpuppythatneedscoffee @btsiguess-kpop @akaashi-baby @gun-jong-simp @geschichtenfee @yerapotato-wp @browneyedgirl365 @thysagclub @sparklycloudnight @helloatomicshadow @queentorresstuff @vtte @val-gal @lucy-bunny17 @aaliyahh0 @katluckybear @boyleanti @straybids @franchesca-791 @cosmicstorm19 @averyisbackinthetrashcan @aomi-nabi @xlanawriter @allensimpsforcorpse

275 notes · View notes

wreckedhoney · 4 years ago

Video

youtube

June 2019 – Highlights of Tristan Harris (Computer Scientist, Design Ethicist, ft. on documentary The Social Dilemma) and others before Senate Commerce Committee regarding large tech companies using algorithms and machine learning to influence the public in the context of radicalization from false information and accountability.

The video is sixteen minutes and transcribed, and I’ll paste the dialogue under a cut for this post with some highlights in bold, but I want to share first just one of the many important insights of this meeting:

“…the business model is to keep people engaged…There's a tendency to think here that this is just human nature – that people are polarized and this is just playing out; it's a mirror it's holding up, a mirror to society. But what it's really doing is it's an amplifier for the worst parts of us.…It's calculating what is the thing that I can show you that will get the most engagement, and it turns out that outrage, moral outrage, gets the most engagement.…the polarization of our society is actually part of the business model.”

“…shorter, briefer things work better in Attention Economy than long, complex, nuanced ideas that take a long time to talk about…But reality and the most important topics to us are increasingly complex, while we can say increasingly simple things about them that automatically creates polarization – because you can't say something simple about something complicated and have everybody agree with you; people will, by definition, misinterpret and hate you for it, and then it's never been easier to retweet that and generate a mob that will come after you… subsequent effects in polarization are amplified by the fact that these platforms are rewarded to give you the most sensational stuff.”

Harris: Everything you said – it's sad to me because it's happening not by accident but by design, because the business model is to keep people engaged – which, in other words, this hearing is about persuasive technology, and persuasion is about an invisible asymmetry of power.

When I was a kid, I was a magician, and magic teaches you that you can have asymmetric power without the other person realizing it. You can masquerade to have asymmetric power while looking like you have an equal relationship. You say pick a card, any card, while meanwhile, you know exactly how to get that person to pick the card that you want – and essentially, what we're experiencing with technology is an increasing asymmetry of power that's been masquerading itself as an equal or contractual relationship where the responsibility is on us.

So, let's walk through why that's happening in the race for attention, because there's only so much attention companies have. They get more of it by being more and more aggressive. I call it “the race to the bottom of the brainstem.”

So, it starts with techniques like pull-to-refresh; so, you pull to refresh your newsfeed that operates like a slot machine. It has the same kind of addictive qualities that keep people in Las Vegas hooked to the slot machine. Other examples are: removing stopping cues. So, if I take the bottom out of this glass and I keep refilling the water or the wine, you won't know when to stop drinking. So, that's what happens with infinitely scrolling feeds; we naturally remove the stopping cues, and this is what keeps people scrolling. But the race for attention has to get more and more aggressive, and so it's not enough just to get your behavior and predict what will take your behavior; we have to predict how to keep you hooked in a different way.

It crawled deeper down the brainstem into our social validation – so, that was the introduction of likes and followers and how many followers do I have. It was much cheaper to – instead of getting your attention – to get you addicted to getting attention from other people, and this has created the kind of mass narcissism and mass cultural thing that's happening with young people, especially today. After two decades in decline of the mental health of ten-to-fourteen year old girls, it has actually shot up in the last eight years, and this has been very characteristically the cause of social media and the race for attention.

It's not enough just to get people addicted to attention, and the race has to migrate to AI, who can build a better predictive model of your behavior. And so, if you give an example of YouTube: You're about to hit play in a YouTube video, and you hit play, and then you think you're gonna watch this one video, and then you wake up two hours later and say, “What just happened?” The answer is, because you had a supercomputer pointed at your brain, the moment you hit play, it wakes up an avatar voodoo doll like version of you inside of a Google server, and that avatar based on all the clicks and likes and everything you've ever made – those are like your hair clippings and toenail clippings and nail filings that make the avatar look and act more and more like you.

So, that inside of a Google server – they can simulate more and more possibilities. If I pick you for this video, if I pick you for this video, how long would you stay? The business model is simply, “what maximizes watch time?” This leads to the kind of algorithmic extremism that you've pointed out, and this is what's caused 70% of YouTube's traffic down be driven by recommendations; not by human choice, but by the machines. And it's a race between Facebook's voodoo doll, where you flick your finger – can they predict what to show you next? – and Google's voodoo doll. And these are abstract metaphors that apply to the whole tech industry, where it's a race between who can better predict your behavior.

Facebook has something called loyalty prediction, where they can actually predict to an advertiser when you're about to become disloyal to a brand. So, if you're a mother, and you take Pampers diapers, they can tell Pampers, “Hey, this user is about to become disloyal to this brand.” So, in other words, they can predict things about us that we don't know about our own selves, and that's a new level of asymmetric power.

And we have a name for this asymmetric relationship, which is a fiduciary relationship, or a duty of care – relationships the same standard we apply to doctors, to priests, to lawyers. Imagine a world in which priests only make their money by selling access to the confession booth to someone else. Except, in this case, Facebook listens to two billion people's confessions, has a supercomputer next to them, and is calculating and predicting confessions you're gonna make before you know you're gonna make them – and that's what's causing all this havoc.

So, I'd love to talk about more of these things later. I just want to finish up by saying this affects everyone even if you don't use these products. You still send your kids to school where other people believing the anti-vaccine conspiracy theories impact your life, or other people voting in your elections. And when Marc Andreessen said into 2011, that the quote was, “Software is going to eat the world,” and what he meant by that – Marc Andreessen was the founder of Netscape – what he meant by that was that software can do every part of society more efficiently, because it's just adding efficiencies. And so, we're going to allow software to eat up our elections, we're gonna allow it to eat up our media, our taxi, our transportation – and the problem was that software was eating the world without taking responsibility for it.

We used to have rules and standards around Saturday morning cartoons, and when YouTube gobbles up that part of society, it just takes away all of those protections. And I just want to finish up by saying that I know Mister Rogers, Fred Rogers, testified before this committee fifty years ago, concerned about the animated bombardment that we were showing children. I think he would be horrified today about what we're doing now, and at that same time, he was able to talk to the committee. And that committee made a choice differently, so I'm hoping we can talk more about that today. Thank you.

Senator Thune (R-South Dakota): We know that internet platforms like Google and Facebook have vast quantities of data about each user. What can these companies predict about users based on that data?

Harris: Thank you for the question. So, I think there's an important connection to make between privacy and persuasion that I think often isn't linked, so maybe it's helpful to link that.

With Cambridge analytic – that was an event in which, based on your Facebook Likes, based on a hundred and fifty of your Facebook Likes, I could predict your political personality, and then I could do things with that. The reason I described in my opening statement that this is about an increasing asymmetry of power is that without any of your data, I can predict increasing features about you using AI.

There's a paper recently that, with 80% accuracy, I can predict your same Big Five personality traits that Cambridge analytic got from you without any of your data. All I have to do is look at your mouse movements and click patterns. So, in other words, it's the end of the poker face. Your behavior is your signature – and we can know your political personality based on tweet text alone. We can actually know your political affiliation with about 80% accuracy. Computers can calculate probably that you're homosexual before you might know that you're homosexual. They can predict with 95% accuracy that you're gonna quit your job according to an IBM study. They can predict that you're pregnant. They can predict your micro expressions on your face better than a human being can. Micro expressions are your soft reactions to things that are not very visible, but are invisibly visible. Computers can predict that. As you keep going and you realize that you can start to deep fake things. You can actually generate a new synthetic piece of media, a new synthetic face, or synthetic message that is perfectly tuned to these characteristics.

The reason why I open the statement by saying we have to recognize: That what this is all about is a growing asymmetry of power between technology and the limits of the human mind. My favorite socio-biologist, E.O. Wilson, said, “The fundamental problem of humanity is that we have Paleolithic ancient emotions, we have medieval institutions, and we have godlike technology.” So, we're chimpanzees with nukes, and our Paleolithic brains are limited. Again, the increasing exponential power of technology at predicting things about us, the reason why it's so important to migrate this relationship from being extractive to get things out of you, to being a fiduciary, is you can't have asymmetric power that is specifically designed to extract things from you – just like you can't have, again, lawyers or doctors whose entire business model is to take everything they learn and sell it to someone else.

Except, in this case, the level of things that we can predict about you is far greater than actually each of those fields combined when you actually add up all the data that assembles a more and more accurate voodoo doll of each of us. And there's two billion voodoo dolls by the way; there's one for one out of every four people on Earth with YouTube and Facebook are more than two billion people.

Senator Peters (D-Michigan): Thank you, Mister Chairman, and thank you to our witnesses. This is a fascinating discussion. I like to address an issue I think is of profound importance to our democratic republic – and that's the fact that, in order to have a vibrant democracy, you need to have an exchange of ideas and an open platform. And certainly, part of the promise of the Internet, as it was first conceived, is we'd have this incredible Universal Commons, where a variety of ideas would be discussed and debated, and it would be robust. And yet, it seems as if we're not getting that. We're actually getting more and more siloed. Doctor Wolfram, you mentioned how people could make choices, and they could live in a bubble, but at least it would be their bubble that they get to live in. But that's what we're seeing throughout our society as polarization increases, more and more folks are reverting to tribal type behavior. Mister Harris, you talked about our medieval institutions and Stone Age Minds. Tribalism was alive and well and in the past, and we're seeing advances in technology, in a lot of ways, bring us back into that kind of tribal behavior. So, my question is to what extent is this technology actually accelerating that, and is there a way out?

Harris: Thank you. I love this question. There's a tendency to think here that this is just human nature – that people are polarized and this is just playing out; it's a mirror it's holding up, a mirror to society. But what it's really doing is it's an amplifier for the worst parts of us.

So, in the race to the bottom of the brainstem to get attention, let's take an example like Twitter. It's calculating what is the thing that I can show you that will get the most engagement, and it turns out that outrage, moral outrage, gets the most engagement. So, it was found in a study that for every world word of moral outrage that you add to a tweet, it increases your retweet rate by 17%. So, in other words, you know the polarization of our society is actually part of the business model.

Another example of this is that shorter, briefer things work better in Attention Economy than long, complex, nuanced ideas that take a long time to talk about, and so that's why you get a hundred and forty characters dominating our social discourse. But reality and the most important topics to us are increasingly complex, while we can say increasingly simple things about them that automatically creates polarization – because you can't say something simple about something complicated and have everybody agree with you; people will, by definition, misinterpret and hate you for it, and then it's never been easier to retweet that and generate a mob that will come after you. And this has created a callout culture and chilling effects, and a whole bunch of other subsequent effects in polarization that are amplified by the fact that these platforms are rewarded to give you the most sensational stuff.

One last example of this is on YouTube. Let's say we actually equalize; I know there's people here concerned about equal representation on the Left and the Right in media. Let's say we get that perfectly right. As recently as just a month ago on YouTube, if you did a map of the top 15 most frequently mentioned verbs or keywords in the recommended videos, they were: “hates,” “debunks,” “obliterates,” “destroys” – in other words, you know, “Jordan Peterson destroys social justice warrior in video.” So, that kind of thing is the background radiation that we're dosing two billion people with, and you can hire content moderators in English and start to handle the problem, but the problem is that two billion people in hundreds of languages are using these products. How many engineers at YouTube speak the twenty-two languages of India where there's an election coming up? So, that's some context on that.

Sen. Peters: Well, there's a lot of context. Fascinating. I'm running out of time, but I took particular note in your testimony when you talked about how technology will eat up elections, and you were referencing, I think, another writer on that issue. In the remaining brief time I have, what's your biggest concern about the 2020 elections and how technology may eat up this election coming up?

Harris: Another example of how we used to have protections that technology took away – we used to have equal price campaign ads, so that it cost the same amount on Tuesday night at 7:00 p.m. for any candidate to run an election. When Facebook gobbles up that part of media, it just takes away those protections – so, there's now no equal pricing. What I'm mostly worried about is the fact that none of these problems have been solved. The business model hasn't changed. And the reason why you see a Christchurch event happen in the video just show up everywhere, or, you know, any of these examples – fundamentally, there's no easy way for these platforms to address this problem, because the problem is their business model.

Harris: This is one of the issues that most concerns me. As I think Senator Schatz (D-Hawaii) mentioned at the beginning, there's evidence that in the last month – even as recently as that, keeping in mind that these issues have been reported on for years now – there was a pattern identified by YouTube that young girls who had taken videos of themselves dancing in front of cameras were linked in usage patterns to other videos like that, which went further and further into that realm, and that was just identified by YouTube, as a supercomputer, as a pattern. It's a pattern of “this is a kind of pathway that tends to be highly engaging.”

The way that we tend to describe this is: If you imagine a spectrum on YouTube on my left side, there's the calm Walter Cronkite section of YouTube. On the right hand side, there's crazytown, UFOs, conspiracy theories, Bigfoot – you know, whatever. If you take a human being and you could drop them anywhere, you could drop them in the calm section, or you could drop them in Crazy Town. But If I'm YouTube and I want you to watch more, which direction from there am I going to send you? I'm never gonna send you to the calm section. I'm always gonna send you towards Crazy Town. So, now you imagine two billion people, like an ant colony of humanity, and it's tilting the playing field towards the crazy stuff.

The specific examples of this: A year ago, a teen girl who looked at a dieting video on YouTube would be recommended anorexia videos, because that was the more extreme thing to show. The voodoo doll that looked like a teen girl – there's all these voodoo girls that look like that – and the next thing to show is anorexia.

If you looked at a NASA moon landing, it would show Flat Earth conspiracy theories, which were recommended hundreds of millions of times before being taken down recently. I wrote down another example. Fifty percent of white nationalist in a study had said that it was YouTube that had “red pilled” them; “red pilling” is the term for the opening of the mind. The best predictor of whether you'll believe in a conspiracy theory is whether I can get you to believe in one conspiracy theory, because one conspiracy sort of opens up the mind and makes you doubt and question things and, say, get really paranoid. And the problem is that YouTube is doing this en mass, and it's created sort of two billion personalized Truman Shows. Each channel has that radicalizing direction, and if you think about it from an accountability perspective – back when we had Janet Jackson on one side of the TV screen at the Super Bowl, and we had 60 million Americans on the other, we had a five-second TV delay and a bunch of humans in the loop it for a reason. But what happens when you have two billion Truman shows, two billion possible Janet Jackson's and two billion people on the other end? It's a digital Frankenstein that's really hard to control, and so that's the way that we need to see it.

From there, we can talk about how to regulate it.

Senator Sullivan (R-Alaska): Anyone else have a thought on a pretty important threshold question?

Harris: Is it okay if I check in? Thank you, Senator. The issue here is that Section 230 of the Communications Decency section – 230 has obviously made it so that the platforms are not responsible for any content that is on them, which freed them up to do what we've created today. The problem is if, you know, is YouTube a publisher? Well, they're not generating the content, they're not paying journalists, they're not doing that, but they are recommending things, and I think that we need a new class between, you know…

The New York Times is responsible if they say something that defames someone else that reaches a certain hundred million or so people. When YouTube recommends flat earth conspiracy theories hundreds of millions of times, and if you consider that 70% of YouTube's traffic is driven by recommendations, meaning driven by what they are recommending, what algorithm is choosing to put in front of the eyeballs of a person, it's if you were to backwards derive a motto, it would be, “With great power comes no responsibility.”

#social media #u.s. politics #the social dilemma #facebook #politics

6 notes · View notes

foxtex798 · 4 years ago

Text

Can Someone Find Your Ip Address From Youtube

Can Someone Find Your Ip Address From Youtube Video

How Do I Find Someone Ip

How To Find Someone Else's Ip Address

Your IP address gives websites, and people that you have connected with online, more than just a number—more than your IP address. It also gives them the ability to trace that IP address back towards you if they wanted to.

Can Someone Find Your Ip Address From Youtube Video

I am also getting a different ip address than the regular 192.168 etc, I'm getting this ip address that says 10.22.248.1. They have ran a coax cable from the pole all the way into my house and into the modem, and that didn't fix anything.

So, when you use a static IP address like many other cases at home, you left a trace about the IP in your emails or whatever you do online, in this case, yes, your cell phone IP can be traced and even, located exactly or approximately on the map if someone has advanced technologies and network algorithms.

27 Dec 2010

Many people on the internet ask this question, so today; I am going to answer it for once and for all.

So… Can people find out who you are through your IP Address? The simple answer is yes. But first, let’s understand what an IP Address is, the different types of IP Addresses, and then how people can find out your home address through your IP.

What Is An IP Address?

Under IPv4, an IP Address is a bunch of numbers that is in the format of XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX. For example: 124.136.56.164. However, since the world is running short of IP Addresses (we’ll probably run out by the end of 2011), IPv6 has been created in which IP Addresses are displayed as group of four hexadecimal digits separated by colons. For example: 2001:db8:1f70::999:de8:7648:6e8. For more information about IPv6, visit Wikipedia.

What are IP Addresses Used For?

How Do I Find Someone Ip

IP Addresses are used to connect computers to each other. For example, your ISP will assign you either a static or dynamic IP Address which you will use to connect your computer or home network to the internet. If your home network has more than one computer in it, your ISP will not assign each of your computers an IP Address. Your router will assign each computer in your network a LAN IP. This IP Address is a little different as it will usually start with a 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x.

Static IP? Dynamic IP? What’s the Difference?

Basically a Static IP Address never changes, whereas a Dynamic IP Address does change. Businesses usually require a static IP Address so they can host servers such as web servers, so when you visit a domain name, the DNS server (Domain Name Server) finds out what the IP Address is and directs you to that server. Imagine if you had a dynamic IP Address that always changes, you wouldn’t be able to locate that server or website.

Most residential customers will be assigned dynamic IP Addresses by their ISP. The reason being is that they don’t need to run servers and it’s easier to manage.

What’s better – Dynamic or Static?

It’s really depends on what you require as each have their pro’s and con’s. For example, if you want to host a web server, a static IP Address will be better suited, but a dynamic IP will be better if you constantly get blocked by a firewall as you can reset your modem and get a new IP Address and re-access the site. But you can’t do that with a static IP Address as your IP Address remains the same.

So can people find out my home address through my IP Address?

How To Find Someone Else's Ip Address

If someone wants to find out where you live, first, they will need to know your IP Address and the date and time when you accessed something (it’s easy to get, read below). Every time you visit a website, the website would probably record your IP Address. That being said, to identify you from the other 10000 visitors can be a bit tricky, so if you log into an account, they will most probably have your username or address recorded so they can associate your account details to your IP Address.

But by someone just having your IP Address, it is possible to track down who you are from your IP Address, but for privacy issues, not many people can do it. If someone wants to find your address, they will need a court order or a warrant to access the information from your ISP. With this, your the ISP can lookup who used what particularly ISP at a given time and date. They will then look up your billing and account details to find out what address you have.

Also, each ISP and countries are assigned with a particular IP range, thus you can use services like Trasir to find out who your ISP is and what country and region you are from.

So that is how people can find your address from your IP Address. Please keep in mind, to find legally get your personal details from your IP Address, they will need to go through some form of court order to receive permission to get these details.

Please be aware, that there maybe people who work with these agencies (ISP, Police etc) that may be able to attain these details through inside information.

So Where Do I Find My IP Address? What is my IP?

It is very easy to find your IP Address, and if I go to a services like CanYouSeeMe.org it will get my IP Address for me and display it. When you visit it on another computer on another network, it will show you your IP Address you are using to connect to the internet. Other services like You Get Signal will show a geophysical map of your location in which your IP Address is assigned, which can be used as an extremely useful tool to track IP Addresses and to trace IP locations.

IP Addresses Can Be Disguised

It is important to note, that IP addresses can be spoofed. Someone in one country, can mask their IP address to show that they are in another country. When someone does this, it makes it much more difficult to track where that person is actually located. I suggest you read “How To Use a Fake IP Address & Mask Yourself Online” and “6 Tips On How To Unblock A Web Page From Behind A Firewall“.

1 note · View note

adventures-in-a-world-of-fiction · 5 years ago

Text

Practicalities of Censorship

Every so often I see a thread cross my dashboard arguing about censorship with relation to AO3 - in particular people claiming that AO3 is bad because it allows basically any story regardless of content, that people are bad for supporting it, or that AO3 should implement some method by which problematic fics get taken down. These complaints are usually met with explanations around the history or AO3, why it was implemented the way it was, and why thinking that AO3 is fine the way it is does not equal being a pedophile. I want to tackle this from another angle - practicality.

Let's assume for the sake of this post that the people making these arguments are correct and that there are some things which shouldn't be allowed on AO3 (or an an alternative fic platform set up to be a better version of AO3 without all the bad stuff - I'll mostly be taking about "fixing" AO3 in this post but the same problems would apply to setting up a new and "safer" fic site). There are a lot of arguments against censorship to do with quality of works produced and whether this results is less good art when people are scared to produce things that might get banned, or whether there is artistic merit to works that display despicable actions. Let's just imagine for the moment that the whole argument is settled and the "let's purify AO3 for the sake of the children" crowd are correct. What would need to happen next? This isn't something I've seen addressed in these posts.

There are a lot of problems with censorship. Skipping over the ethical discussion of whether censorship is good or bad and in what circumstances it should be accepted, let's focus on two practical aspects: deciding what should and shouldn't be banned, and how you would implement such a ban. Let's start with problem one: where do you draw the line?

Let's assume we have some scale of rating from absolutely sickeningly awful deserving of destruction to perfectly clean and innocent with not the slightest thing wrong with it. Somewhere between these two endpoints is a line and everything to one side of it is bad and should be banned/blocked/deleted from AO3, etc. Everything on the other side of the line is fine and should be left available for people to read. Some things may seem easy to define. Fic A is incest porn, where a child is graphically raped in a way that's cleanly meant to titillate rather than horrify and the abuse is glorified and justified in text, and it's full of poor writing, spelling and grammar mistakes, and has no artistic merit as a work (how you judge artistic merit would need a few thousand words to explore as a subject on its own right). Let's stick that on the bad side of the line since that's the sort of thing that people on Tumblr are crying out to be banned. Fic B is a fluff fic where a character makes another character soup because they're feeling ill and they watch movies together. Nothing remotely sexual, just two adult characters being sweet to each other. So we'll put that on the good side of the line, right?

But the problem comes in deciding where that dividing line should be and what should be done about the things that sit close to the line. You could come up with some simple rules. Let's say, "Everything involving underage incest is on the bad side of the line." Seems straight-forward. But what if you have a story dealing with someone's recovery from incest and CSA? The story has a character who was abused in the past and the narrative deals with them getting therapy and overcoming their trauma. None of the abuse is shown in the text of the story, it all happens off-screen as it were, and the story sends a message that incest and CSA are bad but offers hope to former victims. Surely that story would belong on the good side of the line? So maybe we amend the rule to, "Everything involving graphic incest is on the bad side of the line." That would let us keep the story about overcoming the trauma on the good side but block anything that uses incest as porn. But is consenting incest between grown adults treated the same as abusive incest?

And what if you get a story that's more about the trauma but that has a handful of flashbacks about the rape that would count as graphic. These flashbacks are meant to be horrifying not sexually exciting. Would that be okay? Is it the intent of the scene that matters? But in that case, what happens if the author writes a scene that's intended to be horrifying but a reader interprets it as arousing? Would it be okay if the author includes a disclaimer in the notes saying that this is a terrible thing and shouldn't be done in real life? Is it the intensity of the scenes shown directly in the story? In which case, where do you draw the line between something described explicitly and something merely eluded to? Is it the precise terms used? Which terms? Or how many times those terms are use? Is a subtle allusion to an event okay? In which case, what happens with a slightly less subtle allusion?

The stories that are far away from the line are easy to place, but the ones close to it become a challenge. Any attempt to define straight-forward rules starts to fall apart quickly and you get to the point where you have to argue on a case-by-case basis for each story, which would involve a massive amount of time invested to check each of these stories and decide whether or not they're allowed. Once again the practicalities of "how would you enforce something like this?" rear their ugly head but that's a question we'll address later.

We also have the problem that where I might draw the line between the bad and the good might be different from where you would draw the line, and would be different from where someone else would draw the line. Let's go back to Fic B as described above, our perfectly innocent fluff story. I might think that's perfectly acceptable, but if those two characters are both the same gender, there will be some homophobic people who will say that it's wrong and corrupting innocents because it sends the message that homosexual relationships are good. Or even if the characters are different genders, some highly religious people might think it sends a bad message if those characters are unmarried and living together in a relationship, even if nothing explicit happens within the story. Or what if the characters are married but it's an interracial marriage? A KKK member might say that sends a bad message. Different people have a different idea of what counts as bad content.

In the real world, there have been cases of books that address racism being banned because they use the n word. Harry Potter has been banned by religious groups. According to the website www.banned-books.org.uk a sweet children's book about two penguins hatching an egg was banned by a lot of schools and libraries in the US because the two penguins are both male - even though this story was actually based on a true story. The book Black Beauty, about the experiences of a horse, was banned during the Apartheid in South Africa simply for including the word "black" in the title. If you look at that site, a lot of books have been banned for a lot of different reasons and a lot of good literature has ended up caught up in the censorship usually because religious groups objected to in on moral grounds.

You could say "don't let the bigots and racists be in charge of the censorship," but historically, when censorship has come into play in the past, the people who tend to end up the worst for it are minorities. LGBTQ+ groups and people of colour tend to get censored more than straight, white men. Stories about their experiences often deal with problematic issues and therefore they get banned. The groups that generally end up making decisions about what is and isn't okay tend to be the groups that have the most power to begin with, and the end result is silencing of minority voices. This is one reason I'm very wary of anything to do with censorship, because the people who usually end up the worse for it are those who most need their voices heard.

But let's imagine all of these problems are magically overcome and we come up with a perfectly clear set of rules about what counts as good and bad fic and the dividing line is agreed by good, rational people who aren't remotely bigoted and who are able to define the criteria for what should be banned in a way that will only ever block the harmful stuff.

We still have to deal with the practicalities of enforcement we set aside earlier. We've built our perfect set of rules to define good and bad fics and now we want to put them into practice to ban any of the awful stuff. How would you go about doing it?

We could try and get machine filters to do censorship by looking for keywords and particular tags or using more complex algorithms to judge what a piece of content is about, but this ends up with chaos like Tumblr auto-flagging a lot of perfectly clean content, or YouTube blocking videos that just happened to be by/about LGBTQ+ people. Any software based implementation would struggle because someone talking about a thing as a problem contains the same words as someone glorifying that thing, and machines tend not to be great at picking up tone. You would get a massive amount of errors with things being falsely flagged as bad and things being falsely let through despite breaking the rules.

And people would be sneaky. Someone wanting to include their graphic story wouldn't tag it as for over 18s because tagging something as for over 18s would get it banned, so they would tag it as something else. The terms "lemon" and "lime" used to describe fics by older members of fandoms started from exactly this sort of thing. Websites decided to not allow adult content so people continued to post adult content but they used the citrus scale for tagging it so people would still be able to find it. Which works when people know the terms to look for or avoid, but which doesn't work for people not in the know. Is a "lemon" or a "lime" fic more explicit? Do you know what a fic being tagged as "grapefruit" would mean? By their nature, these tags are coded, which is not great for clarity.

Any sort of system that just blanket bans key words or tags would result in people just not using those keywords and tags but posting the stuff anyway. It would actually make the situation worse because there would still be incest porn and the like, only now it wouldn't be tagged. As it stands on AO3, people use the tagging system very well and people who don't want to see the incest porn can do things like exclude that tag from searches, or just not open fics they see that have the tag. If there were rules in place to not allow anything with that tag, then people would stop using the tag, which would actually mean more people would see incest porn they didn't want to because it would no longer be tagged properly, or it would be tagged using code words which only mean something to the inside group. It would be much harder to avoid the things you don't like.

So let's say we don't let a computer decide what's breaking the rules. Let's say there is a system by which readers can flag a fic as being inappropriate to get it banned. Human beings get to decide, but what's the threshold? Does a thing get banned as soon as someone reports it? Or does it need to be flagged by multiple people to be banned? In which case fics written in tiny fandoms might slip through the cracks because not enough people are reading it to them flag it. This is also open for exploitation. Someone who takes a dislike to a particular person might encourage others to flag their fics as inappropriate, regardless of whether or not they are. Someone might create fake accounts or log in anonymously over proxies to spam a fic with flags.

And even if no one acts maliciously to abuse the system, not everyone will be careful about checking the precise and perfect rules defined to mark the difference between acceptable and unacceptable work. People will flag things incorrectly, based on their own viewpoints of what should or shouldn't be allowed, which we've already said is a problem because everyone will draw the line in different places based on their own beliefs.

So what's the alternative to a community-driven method for managing content? You could have specific people whose job it is to go through content and decide whether it adheres to the rules. Maybe a computer system or community flagging could funnel fics into a review channel where human beings check every one carefully. These people would understand the rules and be certain to always judge fics accurately according to the magically perfect rules defined earlier, which are guaranteed to only ever block bad fics but never block a good fic.

So problem solved, right? We have our perfect rules perfectly implemented.

Except where humans are employed to check whether content is acceptable or not, it involves a large number of people checking through basically the worst content out there. Some social networking sites do this sort of thing now and it can be hugely traumatising for people who do that work. It's not good for them mentally to have to be exposed over and over to the worst content being put up online. There tends to be a high turnover in those jobs because they burn out fast, and that's where people are being paid for this stuff.

A site like AO3 relies on volunteers so it would require a large number of people to volunteer to look at the darkest most gruesome content and decide if it breaks the rules or not. Either you have people who hate those sort of fics doing this out of a sense of duty to maintain the purity of the content, in which case they will probably struggle with having to read a load of stuff they really, really don't enjoy. Or you will have people volunteer because they really like those fics and this is the way for them to read them. And that probably defeats the point of doing this, because it means that the people who would be seeking out those stories anyway would be the ones reading them to see if they break the rules.

There are a lot of problems with censorship, both ethically and practically. Even if you are fully on the side of censorship from a moral standpoint, you have to address the practical concerns if you want to propose an implementation.

As it stands, I think the current system works. There is stuff on AO3 that I would not in a million years want to read, but I don't have to. AO3 is brilliant for its tagging system and I can look at the tags and nope past fics that are full of my personal squicks or that I think endorse something terrible. Readers can exclude tags they want nothing to do with or just not click on ones that include elements you dislike. You can curate your own experience, which actually works with the whole idea of everyone drawing a line in a different place. You and I will have different stories we want to avoid, and we can both choose to avoid them based on author's tagging for them, rather than some other person decreeing what is acceptable for either of us to see.

If you still think that AO3 should be blocking or banning certain content, have a think about how this would work in reality. Because when ideas like that are implemented in the real world, all manner of problems happen.

I think the fact that this post is still a couple of thousand words long with me skipping over several parts of the debate is a sign that this is not a simple problem that can be easily fixed.

#censorship #long post

9 notes · View notes

foxwatchesanime · 5 years ago

Text

How I stopped caring about comments: A rambly post by me

This is rambly so hold onto your seats, I apologies.

I’ve been thinking a lot about comment/review culture in the last few months, particularly after returning to a brand new fandom as a writer and regular content creator. Maybe this is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, maybe not, but I wanted to share my thoughts on the way I perceive comments, how it’s changed for me since I’ve been in fandom and I’d love to hear from other people what their opinion is and how they relate to comments on their work.

I’ve been creating content in fandom spaces for about eleven years now. I started out on YouTube when I joined my first fandom, Merlin, and I made my first fanvideos in 2009. In December of 2009, I published my first fanfiction, plus one sequel which remains unfinished as well as a few other smaller projects. In October of 2010, I published my first podfic and would go on to publish two more. My focus in fandom had always been YouTube, where I regularly created fanvideos. My schedule was never consistent, as with most vidders back in the day, but I’d be comfortable in saying I posted regularly discounting three unintentional hiatuses, one in 2013 following the Merlin finale, one in 2015 probably due to a lack of inspiration and one in 2017 after what I was sure was going to be my permanent comeback to YouTube, only for my hard drive to break and delete all my footage yeeeeeey.

I’ve now made an actual, official return to my original platform, this time creating videos for my new passion and fandom: anime. Since February of 2020 I’ve also been regularly publishing fic and have no desire to stop doing so. I’m thoroughly invested in new fandom spaces again and am engaging with its fans and the content.

But the one thing I have seen change drastically in my approach to things is commenting, following and general engagement.

Let’s take a step back.

When I first started posting content, comments were not something I even had in my consciousness. I think I knew YouTube comments existed, but I didn’t really pay attention to it. I didn’t even know what subscribers were until I started hearing other people talk about them and then I suddenly felt like it’s something I should be keeping an eye on myself.

In a centuries old vlog of mine that is now private on my channel, I noticed that when I hit 100 subscribers, I made a video thanking everyone because I was so excited that with more subscribers, I was going to “make more friends.” Oh dear xD

But the truth is, I have been consistently and chronically bad at keeping up with or caring about the analytics of my various platforms. It wasn’t till writing this post today that I went to check my FF.net account to see how many comments my first two Merlin fics ever got. I still couldn’t tell you my exact number of YouTube or Ao3 subscribers, how many hits or kudos my fic have and I don’t think I’ve ever checked my bookmarks for notes, or whatever you’re able to leave on there.

Commenting culture on YouTube, for all my joking earlier, was primarily about connection, at least back then. Most of the old guard have moved on and those who have remained are now vidding in other fandoms. The social aspect of YouTube in my opinion has changed dramatically since I was at my peak output on there, but I remember how interactive the comments sections used to be. They literally were, where you made friends.

A couple of years ago, me and a friend of mine started a Merlin podcast called Merlisten. We created it for fun and without many expectations of what might come out of it. And it was this that changed my relationship with commenting for good.

Doing Merlisten felt, for the first time in a long time, like pure creativity and passion without anyone’s permission. We always encouraged people to leave feedback as one does, but I don’t think either of us expected to get much, if any. Even considering the incredible support we’ve received with feedback coming in almost every single episode now, there is still a clear and overwhelming gap between the amount of comments given to an episode of Merlisten, to one of my old fanvids or fics. It’s even more interesting when one considers how much more effort and time went into creating Merlisten compared to say, editing or writing, at least for me personally. The amount of man hours spent on creating one 2.5 hour episode from pre-production to final posting often outweighs any other video or chapter I’ve created. Not always, but often.

What struck me as interesting, however, was that even though comments weren’t always consistent and I always love and continue to love reading them, it’s not what was fuelling me to work hard on this project. I was doing it because I adored it and I knew it was something I was proud to put into the world.

And that literally changed everything.

I think for a long time, I was always trying to cater my art to what might get the most attention or please the widest demographic of people. It’s how you think when you’re young and you don’t know any better. But for the first time, I was creating something on my own terms that I had no idea if anyone would even listen to and the actual creative process of making said art was ten times more rewarding than any single comment I could ever read. Which really, what I realised, is what art is supposed to be. I can safely say that if Merlisten didn’t get a single comment from here on in, I would still want to see it to its conclusion for one very simple reason: Because I had something to share.

This brings me to my recent return to writing fic in fandom and it’s not a decision I’ve regretted for a second. More than anything, I’ve realised how personal art can really be, especially when it’s in writing. I’ve found it revealing and cathartic and fascinating in a way that I didn’t ever imagine.

But more importantly, I’ve realised that the real beauty for me in engaging in art is the ability to get an emotional response from it or to relate to it. And that goes for both other people’s work and my own. I can feel just as invested in my own work as someone else’s and that’s not because I think my work is amazing, it’s because I know it’s come from something that was living in me. When I put something out there that I made with my own two hands, that feeling now trumps any sort of feedback I could possibly get and that’s the endorphin I live off.

Don’t mistake this for me not liking comments, that’s obviously not true. My brain gets the same dopamine hit as anyone’s when I get a notification for something or other, but I’ve realised that I have a very specific relationship with comments that I definitely didn’t have before, if my requests for review on FF.net is anything to go by.

Now, what I find exciting and thrilling is the thought that, if writing this fic got this sort of emotional response out of me, the writer, I wonder if there are other people out there who think the same way I do? Who have a similar way of experiencing joy or suffering or humour or who like the same things as me? That, is an insanely invigorating feeling. And then when someone chooses to take time out of their day to tell you that what came from your head is the same sort of way they feel about life? That’s not a comment, that’s not feedback, that’s a connection you have with another person. And that’s where I start to get excited. And it’s taken me this fucking long to realise it.

Honestly, I was really worried upon returning to writing and vidding this year that my experience working in digital marketing, where everything is about numbers and social media is all about engagement and nothing else, that I would be overwhelmed and not be able to switch off the part of my brain that’s been trained to think like that. I’m so relieved that that’s not the case.

As previously mentioned, I suck at giving a shit about analytics and looking at my own stats. I couldn’t give a flying fuck. But I did just go and check my YouTube videos since returning back to vidding. Not a single one of them has views over 200 at this point. Most have less than 100. My most viewed video on YouTube has 57,000 views. And the thing is, there might have been a time when I looked at that and thought, well, this means I suck. This means I can’t make art. This means there’s no point to it.

But no, that's not true.

The point is not how many people see it, how many people like it, how many people comment on it. The point is that I made it. I’m going to continue making YouTube videos despite the fact that the algorithm will destroy any chances they have at getting engagement or views. Even if not one single person comments on them. Because when I’ve finally rendered a new video, or finished proof reading a new chapter, I feel so fucking happy that everything else is just window dressing to me now.

Because not only is online engagement and following such a stab in the dark these days anyway with algorithms changing and trends moving constantly, but this is the real truth about comments, following and feedback:

The truth is, I don’t need a stranger on the internet to praise me so that I can feel good about my art. The day that I start doing that, I’ve already lost. I used to think that way on a regular basis. Guess what, it didn’t make me produce better art. It didn’t make my life better. Because being validated by others never does. It doesn’t matter how many keysmashes I might get or how many sonnets or kind words, because If I don’t like what I create, there isn’t a single human being on the planet who will make me like it, no matter what they say or how they say it. For others, this might not be the case. But this is my reality.

I know this, because I recently speed-wrote and published a fic for a fanweek. I wrote 13k in about 8hrs. So far, it’s received nothing but positive words. But it doesn’t matter. After I published it, I had a crisis about how it wasn’t good enough, that there should have been an extra arc, that it ended too quickly, that there wasn’t a climax. Even as the comments came in, it didn’t change my mind. Because other people’s comments will never really lead to fulfilment.

I want you all to know that I get emotional over every single comment that is sent to me. Every personal story, ever keysmash and heartfelt thoughtful message that took the time to analyse my work. Connecting with you guys has been one of the biggest joys of entering this fandom. But it’s not going to be what fuels me to create and to carry on doing the best work I can. All I can do is treat it as the wonderful privilege that it is, and not any part of the reason I do it.

In conclusion:

Finally, at age 27 and in the midst of enjoying fandom after a very long period of being either meh about it or lurking, I finally feel content with the fact that I want to create in order to put things out into the world that I worked hard on, that I’m passionate about and that hopefully, in whatever way it might be, it might have touched someone who feels the same things too. It makes me feel accomplished, it makes me feel like I might be contributing something small to the world and it makes me feel like maybe one other person was made happy by it. And even if they never tell me that and if no one else ever comments on what I create, or even if they comment on it in spaces that I never see; private servers, chats between friends or blogs that I don’t follow, that’s also fine. Because there’s always at least one person who is going to feel happy that she made something. And that’s me.

The short version: I never used to care about comments, then I did, and now I no longer do.

Sorry for the ramble, but I wanted this here for myself to look back upon in case my opinion ever changes on this or I ever start to lose my way again and feel overwhelmed. I’d love to hear your guys’ experiences with this sort of thing and whether you’ve ever felt bogged down by the need for feedback.

#writing #fandom #vidding #essay #personal

1 note · View note

tenchiforum · 6 years ago

Photo

For the first time ever, the Toonami versions of OVA1/2, Universe, and Tokyo are available online! On their respective archive.org pages you can access each episode easily.

Watch now: OVA1/2, Tenchi Universe, Tenchi in Tokyo.

For users who keep up with contemporary anime communities, we also have an upload for the entire run available on Nyaa.

It’s been quite a journey in getting these episodes from analog to digital. If you’re interested in reading about the process of how these almost lost-to-time edits came into our hands and how we’ve gone about preserving them before the tapes rot, then sit back and enjoy the story below!

Part 1: Toonami – A Love Story.

Tenchi Muyo! and Toonami are tied together like the red thread of fate often times referenced in many East Asian myths. For those who aren’t aware, Toonami was a programming block on the Cartoon Network channel. Starting in 1997, it did one thing for anime that no other channel in the English-speaking world had ever done: showcased anime during “PrimeTime” (In North America at least, this was 4pm to 7pm Eastern Standard time). Before the internet, having this block of time meant having the most eyes on your product, meaning exposure was huge. Oftentimes whoever got on this block, regardless of the channel, was “made.”

However, it wouldn’t be until mid 1999, with a soft-rebranding, a new host, and an almost entirely anime-focused block, that Toonami would take over the world.

And on July 3rd, 2000, an entire generation was introduced to Tenchi Muyo! for the first time.

youtube

- The now legendary two minute Toonami promo.

Thanks to the efforts of Jason DeMarco, Sean Akins, Gill Austin, Sean Polinski, and the rest of the Toonami crew, the “Toonami generation,” still to this day, is the largest block of Tenchi Muyo! fans. Whether it was Toonami US, UK, or Australia. Tenchiforum is a testament to this fact. I personally would not be here were it not for Toonami, so to say that fans of Tenchi Muyo! hold Toonami in a high regard is an understatement.

I had always wanted to somehow, some way, get the Toonami version of Tenchi up for everyone to see again, but my old Toonami VHS recordings were long gone, and I figured trying to piece together the Toonami version from other people’s tapes would just be too hard with how many episodes were broadcast, that was until… 2012

In mid-to-late 2012, I found out that Pioneer actually released a home video version of what was shown on Toonami. It was simply released as “Tenchi Muyo!” in those big, white, clam shell VHS cases (that most people probably remember for old Disney movies). I felt as though I had struck gold! I was able to get a hold of the first two OVA, and was able to rip them to my computer.

- Vol. 1 & Vol. 5 of “Tenchi Muyo!” – No distinction was made that they were separate series.

Though I was high on my endorphin-induced nostalgia, I ran into a couple of unforeseen problems.

First and foremost, the equipment I was using was not great. I used an old StarTech composite to USB dongle and the software that came with it. While this isn’t necessarily bad at first glance (it doesn’t support Windows 10), I had no experience whatsoever in the field of digital transfer. While I think my rips were okay for the time, I knew even then that they were too low of bit-rate and the quality of the rips suffered for it.

Because I also had no VCR at the time that had S-Video output, I was only able to output from composite, which meant the whopping 240p equivalent VHS tapes look fuzzier than they probably should. (I realize that VHS is technically an analog format, meaning that a 1:1 equivalent digital representation is hard to pin down or that someone might argue that it did technically output 480i over composite, but basically it was 240p.)

Another problem was the software itself, I had no idea about Virtualdub, AmaRecTV, or other helpful capture software, so I only recorded at a lower bit-rate, again producing an inferior quality rip.

I also ran into the problem of showcasing the videos. Funimation (who now owns the vast majority of the Tenchi Muyo! franchise in North America) had finally started really cracking down on people uploading videos to Youtube. Even though my videos were not completely the same, the algorithm immediately flagged and blocked them. This led me to uploading the videos to Facebook. I had to cut them in half because of Facebook’s restriction to roughly only 12 minutes of video. Somehow in the process, some of the videos had audio drop out for a minute or two, and for some the audio dropped out completely.

Arguably the biggest blow though, was when I learned that this set of Toonami tapes was incomplete. Pioneer stopped producing the Toonami version for home video after they finished releasing Universe. Meaning, the only way to get the Toonami version of Tenchi in Tokyo, was hope that someone, somewhere, had taped it 11 years earlier.

While Tenchi in Tokyo has been getting more appreciation from fans as of late – thanks in part to most newer entries in the Tenchi OVA sucking harder than a vacuum – in the year 2000, it was the black sheep of the Tenchi Muyo! franchise. So expecting fans to have recorded any of it, let alone the entire series, was the long shot of all long shots. But even still, I made a post on the forum in 2013 asking if anyone knew anyone that might have anything.

Naturally, no one had any leads, and all of these previous problems meant that this project would, frustratingly, have to be shelved indefinitely.

Or at least, that’s what I thought.

Part 2: Deferred Dreams Don’t Die.

On April 5th, 2019, a person by the name of Talos dropped into our Discord server, and posted an introduction. Like so many, they had gotten into Tenchi through Toonami, but what would change everything, was this.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading, someone actually had it!

Instinctively, I reached out to Talos via PM to ascertain how to go about acquiring these tapes, and admittedly, to see how legit this claim actually was. Because the fact of the matter is, when you’ve been around Tenchi fandom as long as I have, you’ll quickly realize the best bullshitters in the world come from this fandom.

But Talos was more than the genuine article! They sent over pictures and an incredibly detailed analysis of the quality of their tapes, watching through them all again to prove to me that their claim was valid.

It can’t be said enough that this all would not be possible without Talos, their willingness to work with me and send me their own personal tapes that they’ve kept for almost two decades just goes to show how awesome they are and how much they care about the fandom.

So the deal was struck, and the dream that laid deferred for almost six years lived again.

- A time capsule from another era.

But with dreams from the past, come the demons that plagued them way back when. I still only had the setup I once had, and at this time I was really trying to be tight with my finances for a number of different reasons, but this opportunity was too good to pass up, I wasn’t going to let this dream go, even if it wasn’t perfect.

Talos’ tapes showed up, and I rolled up my sleeves.

So I put in the first tape, the first seven episodes of Tokyo, into the old VCR I used to originally rip the Pioneer tapes, a JVC HR-VP650U….

And static…

Or rather, a tape that would play for 3 seconds, then immediately drop to static.

This wouldn’t work.

I then tried my other VCR, a Sony SLV-N50 from the mid-to-late 90’s that I was able to “fix” by removing the old Android Kikaider tape that got stuck in there many years prior.

It worked!…..but…..not all that well.

While it did actually play the tape relatively smoothly, the colors were completely washed out in comparison to the JVC, and it had this weird color flickering that was particularly noticeable when black backgrounds were on screen. (This was not unique to this tape, it did it with everything I put in there.)

As much as it pained me, there was no way I was going to rip it with this setup.

So the hunt began for not just a replacement VCR, but one that was high quality and recommended among enthusiasts for digital transfer. Which meant research and long winding rabbit holes of non-answers and vagueness, and unfortunately, money.

Without a doubt, the de facto list of best VCRs for transferring comes from digitalFAQ.com. This list is not only informative but gives you a broad range of ones to look for in the event you can’t find an “elite” one. However, this list has also become the de facto list used by people who are hawking their sets on eBay to try and get every penny from enthusiasts and new-comers as possible.

After three frustrating weeks of losing bid wars on eBay, someone finally put up one of the good sets, the JVC SR-V10U. I quickly sent them what I thought was a reasonable but not bank-breaking offer….

And they accepted! The beast was finally mine.

Immediately upon unwrapping and testing it, the quality difference between what I had then and what I was looking at now was staggering. The SR-V10U had beautiful color, while having the incredible ability to stabilize the old tapes with its TBC (Time Base Corrector), as well as onboard Video Stabilization option. Combined with the ability to output video via the superior S-Video cable, I now had something that, despite its age and typical old VHS wear, was way better than I could have imagined.

Part 3: No Need for Nostalgia.

You’re probably thinking to yourself “Dagon, why go through the trouble? The OVA has a beautiful Blu-ray release, and Universe and Tokyo have pretty decent DVD releases. Why would you ever want to rip old VHS tapes of an inferior quality release that was in some cases censored?”

- The now famous Toonami “bikinis”.

Because this version of Tenchi Muyo! is a piece of history. Not only is it a piece of Tenchi history, but a piece of Toonami history as well. Being able to preserve this in the best quality possible is being able to point to future generations and say “This is why I’m here.”

For a lot of us it’s about taking us back to a simpler time, grade school, high school, university. Taking us back to a time before the internet was what it is today.

So now we can, after almost 20 years, re-watch the version of Tenchi Muyo! that brought so many of us joy and wonder.

#tenchiforum #tenchi muyo #toonami #toonami promo #cartoon network #tenchi universe #tenchi in tokyo #toonami tenchi muyo #anime nostalgia #90's anime #vhs #vhs anime

64 notes · View notes

21secondsofchristoph · 6 years ago

Text

Here is a full translation of the interview with the FAZ:

Mr Waltz, statistically you're a rarity. Only five percent of all actors in Los Angeles manage to get enough jobs to get accepted into the SAG. And out of that group, only about five percent earn enough to make a living out of their art.

Becoming an actor is like becoming a father: really easy. Being and staying an actor is much harder.

We're meeting today, because you're not playing the villain for once, but some kind of action-hero in James Cameron's Manga movie "Alita: Battle Angel"

As a futuristic doctor you revive a cyborg from Mars, so you're basically working on the interface of human and machine

Haha, you could put it like that! I like that!

When the story was published as a comic in 1990 it was considered Science-fiction. Today, people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos actually work on brain implants and dream of colonies on Mars. Have you dealt with such things as preperation?

I don't take Elon Musk seriously. His behavior strikes me as ridiculous and you can't forget that he has a commercial interest in the topic's sensation. I've already watched moon landing's and flights into space as a child. Is it really necessary to introduce billionaires into space tourism? Well, we will see what happens. I am interested in new technologies but it's difficult to seperate them from journalism of sensation, even if it's dressed seriously.

In time, a lot of things might be possible that I can't even imagine right now. But there is another question: the question of necessity.

The market economy drives our world into an orgy of uselessness. It damages our planet and our lives on it. Who wants to live on Mars? That we will all be unemployed and the environment destroyed is in no relation to any use.

Can one stop the progress if it's useless?

Not as long as someone benefits from it.

What about the desire for disruption?

Disrupting something is an easy action, replacing it with something useful is not.

I'm always ready to disrupt something if there is a useful counterproposal. Not necessarily until then.

A lot of things are turned upside down in film industry. Netflix not only revolutionized the concept of television, it also produces exciting movies. And Youtube even has its own celebrities among the new generation.

Over the past few months I've watched some movies which hadn't been produced without Netlflix. For example the winner of the Venice Film Festival "Roma". Movies like that wouldn't run longer than 3 weeks in theaters. Through the premiers and prices it now receives the attention it deserves. And after that it's on Netflix. As superficial as I can see that, it's not the worst thing.

In contrast to that, I don't have a hard time with not watching Youtube. It's probably a cultural matter and depends on how we want to shape our lives. Of course it's also a generational matter. But why is that? Just because someone is younger, it doesn't mean they are predestined for entertainment through videoclips.

You have 4 children. You have to be familiar with this world. Where do you see the difference to your generation?

In school we were always confronted with things we didn't like, but which we couldn't dispose of.

That's where the wonderful word "Bildung" comes from, which doesn't exist in English. Education refers to an information value. "Bildung" goes further than education through its cultural formation. When I was in school I also didn't understand why I had to study Latin. But not wanting to learn Latin would have never occured to me. Just because no one speaks it anymore and learning it seemed uncomfortable.

And did you like it?

It created connections within a language, trained precise phrasing, as well as logic and discipline. It's certainly more challenging to learn an abstract language than watching a funny Youtube video.

About for or five years ago you warned Facebook might be a breeding ground for the fast growth of terror organisations. Are you surprised that it also seems to threaten western democracies now?

Not at all. History has taught us that medium and structure can be more dangerous than the message, because it's easier to handle the problematic movement than the well oiled machine that keeps it going. Especially when algorithms control the dynamics in the networks, those networks can become independent.

Some hope that societies might improve through a "Wutbürger"-culture and a crazy government.

At best, all of that just has entertainment value.

So maybe not anyone should always add their opinions?

If you don't have anything clever to say you should shut your mouth. But actually it's the other way around. Apart from this choir of stupidity being really annoying, people who haven't developed the resistance and sensors might fall for the noise. Whoever shouts the loudest ends up being heard.

You are known for keeping your private life private. How does that match marketing's and fan's expectations?

Fame is an unsolved problem, not only for me.

You either remain an anonymous observer without a bigger platform to present your realizations. That is an unfortunate paradox because the people who get the chance to move in public have to deal with growing fame while they also distance themselves from the influences and experiences of real life.

Studies have shown that introverts would handle most jobs better. But they tend to get cast out by the loudmouths.

I can imagine that. Self- and foreign perception are a tricky thing. I can remember the first Loveparades in Berlin which I saw on TV. I always avoided the event myself. In the interviews, people were saying things like: "We celebrate our individuality!" And there were one million people that all looked the same. The music was a monotonous bum-bum-bum and I always tried to spot a moment of individuality.

You've been living in the centre of individuality for a while now. Do you still consider the United States of America governable?

Maybe not as a federation. The question I'm interested in is whether the USA as a federation are still worthy of governance. California alone is the fifth largest economy in the world.

In an interview from 2003 you talked about posing, about film makers who eroticise themselves and about how to stand yourself

Oh God, I remember.

Are you currently able to stand yourself?

Sometimes. But it's not easy.

At that time you weren't a Hollywood star and you made yourself very clear in interviews.

"Schindler's list" is mendacious because Spielberg might have thought "that type of movie still lacks from my collection of movies about dinosaurs and UFOs

Or that Roberto Benigni's "Life is Beautiful" is "crap" because it communicates that it's alright to laugh about concentration camps. "when it's a tender laugh"

Do you still dare to say such things now that you constantly meet other Hollywood stars?

In Germany, yes. In America, no.

Do you believe it's better to become famous later in life? And does aging feel better when you're at least famous while you're aging?

Hopefully both, right? As a young man you often experience the world through tunnel vision, because you impatiently want to experience everything, even though you can't sort a lot of things right. If the attention hits you at that point in life, you get in danger of stirring towards a dead end where you don't develop well.

Do you believe you became more careful and more lenient over the years and success?

You're becoming more careful and more lenient. I never thought of that before. I thought: Now I suddenly step back a little. You become more lenient when you connect yourself to it. In a strict German way you could call it cowardice, because you gain another point of view, the insight. And apart from the experience and the success it might be due to the abrasion of the testosterone-related edges.

#christoph waltz #alitabattleangel

42 notes · View notes

relatablepicturesofpatrickgill · 7 years ago

Note

I’m sorry if this is cynical, but I’d really like your input on it (as an experience polygon vid/pat stream viewer): Do you think Pat is pushing the after hours streaming stuff because Polygon is ending? Or, at least, to try and maintain the ‘funny video/personality’ fans? I’ve noticed a lot of other polygon vid personalities are doing similar things, and main polygon video content keeps slowing down and changing, presumably in compliance w/ vox media strategy? Have you noticed too?

First of all real bold of you sending this to a Pat fanblog where all I do is make dumbass shitposts and post cat clips, as if I know a single goddamn thing about anything, but since you asked I’ll try to answer as many of your questions as possible. (I’m not mad about being asked btw I just really find it funny you’d send it here of all places lmao). Disclaimer time: I am not in any way affiliated with Polygon or Vox Media nor do I know how they operate behind the scenes.

Do I personally think Polygon is ending and that Pat streams because of that? Short answer, no. However, I believe Polygon’s necessary (yes, I said necessary) and inevitable (yes, INEVITABLE) change in content is due to a lot of deeper issues people might not know about, which I’ve gathered from research and being an idiot whomst has watched Youtube for 10+ years. Let me just say, the last year or so has pretty much been the “Everybody Knows Shits Fucked” song on repeat until we die so this is going to be a long ass post. Buckle up kiddos we’re warp speeding into this fuckfest together.

Youtube Advertiser Boycott And The Algorithms

Every social media website employs the use of algorithms to decide how content gets sorted, and Youtube isn’t any different. That’s why Youtubers constantly ask you to “like, comment and subscribe” because it helps their content get noticed through Youtube’s internal system – such as search priority, the trending section, your homepage and your recommended tab, as well as the recommended sidebar on individual videos. As for content, one of the more effective models was to find a niche and cater to it, something Polygon did by creating Monster Factory and similar humored series alongside their serious content.

And for a while, it worked. Except things change.

Before we get any further I highly suggest you read this article written by Julia Alexander about the complicated history of Youtube’s monetization system, but I’ll try to give a quick summary. Something controversial will happen on Youtube, causing brands to pull their business from the platform until they can get more security on what types of videos their ads play on, then Youtube refines the system to give brands more control. Rinse and repeat. The new system results in a massive amount of videos being demonetized, causing creators to lose revenue and viewer engagement and then request appeals to have their content reviewed by humans, which in turn improves the algorithm. Those most negatively affected by the system must diversify their payments either through Patreon, Twitch, merch, etc, or in worst case scenarios, give up on their dreams of being a Youtuber.

youtube

Youtube has a lot of incentive to keep creators updated on changes, so when users ask, “hey, can we know what’s going on with the website?” Youtube responds with an informative, “absolutely not. Die.” The userbase, as a result, is forced to run their own investigations. Nerd City published a video revealing another algorithm (one just as prone to mistakes) assigns all videos with an MPAA-style rating to make it easier for businesses to decide what sort of content they’re comfortable advertising on. This rating – hidden from both the uploader and their audience – Cannot. Be. Appealed. Good fucking system am I right!!! (Also, please watch the video if you get the chance, it brings up some points about machine learning and how the system negatively affects marginalized creators).

One more thing, do you remember what I said earlier about how a video gets popular on Youtube’s internal system? Well, creators have reason to believe a higher rating attributes to view suppression – meaning their videos might end up exempt from the things I listed. This makes it so much harder for a channel to grow their userbase outside of an already established audience. If you’re following along you might be able to tell where I’m going with this, but if not…

What Does This Have To Do With Video Games Polygon?

Once again, I do not know any of the behind the scenes Polygon lore and a lot of this is guesswork on my part. I’d imagine as a branch of Vox Media, Polygon would have a higher priority getting any potentially demonetized videos appealed than smaller, independent channels do. However, when your own website is reporting the system responsible for sorting and rating videos goes deeper than just demonetization, with a full MPAA-style ranking that’s been shown to suppress the growth of certain content not deemed advertiser friendly, such as excessive profanity and sexually suggestive content, which turns out is a subset of the niche your channel has developed – that’s a problem.

This isn’t me being critical of their content or saying what they make is bad (considering I’m a fan of it as well), this is an objective look at the reality of a rapidly changing platform. Unfortunately, the biggest flags in my head for Polygon happen to be the Jackbox series and… Monster Factory. There’s absolutely no way some of those videos are getting a kid-friendly rating, and it’s possible the bot is slapping some of them with a mature rating – the worst one where enough of those could potentially affect the rating of the entire channel. Griffin, in one of the Spore MF videos, emphatically yells, “come fuck this” to the heavens; lo and behold, a few years later Youtube finally does.

Of course, this is just one of a few different problems Polygon is facing. The Mcelroys left to focus on their own businesses, taking some of their fans with them. Other fans who mainly want the video game news might end up unsubscribing if too many videos irrelevant to their interests are posted. Some series, while perfectly funny in their own right, have trouble breaking out and appealing to a wider audience.

Polygone But Not Forgotten?

I’ll try to put it as softly as I can: almost all creators on Youtube have to reevaluate the content they put out and how it fits into Youtube’s ad-friendly guidelines if they want to continue receiving ad revenue and viewer engagement from the site. This is not just a Polygon specific problem, and as a news channel they benefit a lot more by working within the new parameters. Polygon’s primary priority should be their video game website, where I go to read all the articles that aren’t about video games, as ad revenue is probably more stable and allows them more room for sillier content. As for their channel, the “horny niche” appeal doesn’t have as much of a place anymore. Well, on Youtube at least.

Twitch, however, seems like a better home for Polygon’s familiar borderline type of humor. On a stream Pat said, as the live video producer, he’s responsible for getting their channel partnered which will come with some very important benefits, such as the ability to subscribe. I’d assume creating content for Youtube takes priority over this, and there’s also the fact that Pat is just one person and needs to balance this with other things like “having a life” and “eating??? Perhaps???” (maybe even A Vegetable). By the way, to answer one of your other questions, it’s normal for creators to have projects outside of their work and build their own personal brand, like Pat’s Twitch channel, Brian’s Youtube channel, Simone’s author account and everyone’s countless podcasts. It’s not recommended to rely solely on Youtube for your income, even before the ad boycotts, so if you can diversify your content then do so.

Listen, I know this is disappointing and I know it’s not the answer people want. Youtube’s new system isn’t going away and the video team needs to accommodate for these changes or otherwise Perish. I believe in Polygon’s ability to deliver informative, humorous and accessible content, they just need the time to do it. As an audience, a way to offer support during this difficult time is to just be as understanding and patient as possible, and give the content they put out a chance if you can.

Now I am not an expert on any of this, but if you have any questions or comments you can send them to my main @malarcana and I’ll try to answer them. Thanks for reading!

#polygon #nerd city #julia alexander #gillbox #long post #i cant stop thinking about being referred to as 'an experienced pat stream viewer'#i should have a button with that on it #My Legacy #also julia is leaving polygon now where do i get my youtube news from #i cant look stuff up myself im too lazy #x

205 notes · View notes

rkseungjoon · 6 years ago

Photo

“ ♔ ┊ TRC PRIVATE AUDITION

now playing › SIGNAL (REMIXED) by TOOICE › 0:00-0:46 + 1:51-2:37

he took his picks very seriously. the first example: scheduling the audition to a day that wouldn’t conflict with his erratic sleep schedule. then, came phase two. hyunjoon was his knowledgable young neighbor. not only that, but he had just won the trc triple threat challenge, so he ought to be good at something. “which idols are famous right now?” seungjoon asks without actually thinking what a dangerous question that was. the boy went on about how much he adored luxe for a very long time but eventually offered him a few more suggestions. there weren’t many questions asked and the man was glad. he already felt terrible hiding this information from him, and if hyunjoon actually confronted him about it seungjoon would probably pass out right on the spot.

instead, he made his way back to his computer, trying to find out what would be the best choice for him. even for someone who wasn’t that knowledgable on idols, nothing was really a surprise. they played everywhere you went. and it wasn’t like seungjoon hated them; it was only a preference. and it still is. the man struggles to find something he’d actually feel comfortable standing in front of a jury and singing. his salvation comes a few pages deeper into youtube after the algorithms had finally completed doing their job to find his perfect match.

a remix was exactly what he needed. it kept the freshness of the song, and probably what would have been expected in an audition. yet it still has a breath of fresh air by changing things up a little. that was exactly his style, and if he had to be put to the test then at least seungjoon wanted to do it in a way he would have enjoyed watching, in case he was the jury.

the days leading up to it are the weirdest. he doesn’t have many left, admittedly, and it’s a bit troublesome for him to nail the entire song in one single go. the first time he listened to it was a week before, and now he not only had to know the lyrics but also had to perform it well.

he wishes nayeon was there. she’d know what to tell him, he’s sure of it. as much of a mess as they were, they always did a good job of complimenting each other. last time something like this happened (and it was something exactly like this), they went out together to make the girl feel better but, at the end of their karaoke experience, seungjoon was happy. some people imagined the audience naked, he had heard, but maybe if they were all nayeon things could be a little easier.

it takes him a few minutes while staring at a wall before noticing the girl beside him. she was filled with energy; with dreams. it should automatically make him feel bad. how many children were out there with actual dreams and yet the person they gave a card to was him? except, there is this energy inside of her that actually makes him smile. it feels like sitting beside hyunjoon except for a bit brighter if he dares to think it. the boy had managed to read his mind before and he wouldn’t dare to think he wouldn’t be able to it again, even if from afar. on second thought, the boy was probably right inside that very same building.

when they call his name he stands up. this was it! shit!

suddenly, he’s already standing in the middle of the room. he remembers making his way there, but while it happened it didn’t feel as quick. why did they all look like men? this isn’t how it was supposed to go. seungjoon tries to clean the sweat from his palms, anything to distract himself. one of them asks him something and the noise he thought was in the room completely vanishes. it was all in his head. “what?” he needs to ask, and the man repeats himself. “will you introduce yourself?”

seungjoon nods for a few moments. this is probably standard procedure to whoever knew how auditions worked. “my name is… lee seungjoon.” he swallows his own spit. now his mouth feels dry. this isn’t going to go along well with this performance. he was a nurse; he should take better care of himself.

he is a nurse.

“well, okay.” the man motions towards the staff member standing by the audio equipment what was probably the sign to start the song. he wants to tell that he isn’t ready, but he doesn’t. his eyes simply watch as he slowly presses play. the first few beats start playing and seungjoon comes to the realization that he isn’t holding a microphone. his eyes grow a bit wider. he stares at each member of the jury with his palms completely open but their signs of concern were probably towards his own condition and not about a missing microphone. so… he wasn’t supposed to have a microphone. good. this was good.

he was thankful for the long introduction at the start of the song. if his way inside the room had been quick, seungjoon was glad at least this took a bit longer. he clenches his jaw; squeezes his hands tightly into fists. this was it. all he had to do was to not completely suck.

눈짓도 손짓도 어떤 표정도 소용이 없네 하나도 안 통해 눈치도 코치도 전혀 없나 봐 더 이상 어떻게 내 맘을 표현해

for a song about being expressive seungjoon feared a bit for himself. while his jaw had relaxed, his hands still felt tense. he waited for the movie miracle to come. there was always this sudden flash of confidence that hit the lead character and gave them the singing abilities they never knew they had. now he knows movies are all fake. as a lover of romantic comedies, he feels a bit betrayed.

without the actual strength to fight his own body, seungjoon slowly sways his fists to try and pass the idea that he had actually planned this from the start. at least his voice is stable, he thinks. at the very least it was stable enough. as long as he remembers all the lyrics he’d feel good about himself. he isn’t there to actually get signed as a trainee, right? this is only to prove something to himself. that was solely it, and all he had to do was not mess up.

the fact the words felt so silly is probably that kick on the back that he needed. singing ‘jjirit jjirit’ feels ten times better than it probably would attempt an extremely emotional ballad. during his time, seungjoon always identified himself as more of the jjirit side; the type to enjoy the music video with superpowers and aliens. it’s what he’s trying to keep in mind now. while singing, he wants to imagine the colorful world tooice lives in with all their happy superpowers and failed confession attempts. it didn’t feel that far from home.

Trying to let you know Sign을 보내 signal 보내 I must let you know Sign을 보내 signal 보내

he had forgotten the fact the song was actually about less than a minute and a half long. not knowing the entire song probably came to his advantage for once. the silence returns now and he stares at the people in front of him, yet a little less scared. they’re expecting something from him and this time he manages to think things through. “thank you.” seungjoon bows once toward the jury, and then again towards the staff member dealing with the audio. when he reaches for the doorknob his hand grabs it without much trouble.

the man opens the door slowly; with a smile. he hadn’t noticed it happen while he sang. the entire time, he wondered why movies would lie to him so badly. his shoulders felt like they had just carried the weight of the sky for about less than a minute and a half. except, when he reached for that doorknob, his hands grabbed onto it. sometime during the song, they weren’t fists anymore.

the outside is much noisier than inside. seungjoon stands for a minute right by the doors of the trc building before finally starting to walk away. he wished there was someone to tell.

#rkttc2audition #rkhyunjoon #rkiny #rkyeji #( bc mentioned )#( wc: 1389 )#&* solo #( rkseungjoon says jjirit jjirit rights )

8 notes · View notes

frederator-studios · 7 years ago

Text

Meet Joel Veitch and David P. Shute, Creators of “Kid Arthur”

From the dawning of 2000 AD - when Adobe Systems first pulled Flash from the Software Stone - British animators Joel Veitch and David Shute have crafted absurd and iconic web comedy for their site, Rather Good. They are bricklayers of our Modern Age of Memes; but beyond builders, they are Wizards of the Web, gracing our desktops with such magic as the Spongmonkeys and Punk Kittens Play ‘Fell in Love With a Girl’ by the White Stripes, memes that thrived even in the dark ether of the pre-YouTube web. Frederator is honored to have aided in their maturity into long-form content, heralded by the release of their GO! Cartoon, “Kid Arthur,” which comes in at a whopping 5 minutes and 40 seconds long. Joel, David and I sat about a round table to discuss out-of-control saxophonists, dial-up modems, and wizard cats of great Magick.

So how did you each find your way into animation?

JV: We were both already in animation when we met, weren’t we David? DS: I was fairly newly graduated at the time. I studied animation at Uni - Southampton University - and was doing adverts for a while before I met Joel. JV: I started off more on the web comedy side, and drifted into animation when I began learning Flash in the early 2000s. I soon realized that my heart lay with that more than anything else. I made a couple of things that did alright and it became possible to do it for a living… so yeah, I kind of fell into animation by accident, but loved it once I’d discovered it.

How did you guys meet?

JV: I had an office, which I was sharing with some people, who were making a video which was never released. It was... all copies were ordered destroyed.(they start laughin’) They were doing it for a client! Which turned out to be just so... completely insane. DS: It was a stop motion cartoon, and the idea was to parody something, but it was…. they gave… no I won’t say it, I won’t - (Joel is cracking up) They gave us the brief to be as offensive as possible with it. So me and another animator, we just went to town, made it. It was monstrous. It never got released, and that’s a very good thing. JV: I saw it through production and it blew my mind. Of course it never saw the light of day. But I was so completely overwhelmed by what I had witnessed being made that I asked David to come team up with me, and we’ve been a brothership ever since.

What did you guys first work on together?

JV: I still do a bit, but at the time I was doing a lot of comedy music. So we made a load of animated videos for the songs. For our own projects, that was kind of the bread and butter of what we collaborated on.

youtube

What did the comedy music entail?

JV: Well the not-full-band stuff we did as Rather Good; often just guitar and singing. But I'm also the singer of a 7 piece ska band called 7 Seconds Of Love, and we did live gigs, which was a lot of fun. We still gig, if the events are big enough—but it’s tougher now that some bandmates have moved from London.

Any legendary comedy music gig stories?

JV: If I had to choose one… it’d be the time Chaynsaw climbed the lighting rig.

We all have band names: I’m Stallion Explosion, The Bearslayer is bassist, Chaynsaw is the saxophonist, and so on. One night we were playing at quite a big venue in London; large stage, gallery seating, and there was a huge lighting rig that went all the way to the ceiling. During the song “Ninja”, Chaynsaw flipped out. He took a running jump and flew over the barriers and into the crowd, disappearing in a pile of flailing bodies. He ran through the crowd to the back and began climbing up the scaffolding of the lighting rig like some kind of crazed sax-wielding gibbon. Up and up all the way to the gods, as the crowd went crazy and we wondered whether we were about to witness his death. When he reached the gods, he climbed over onto the balcony and sprinted out of sight. The crowd was going wild. They thought the stunt was part of the show but we had no idea what he was playing at. The song approached Chaynsaw's solo, with no sign of him. I assumed he had run off into the night, probably bellowing "CHAYNSAAAAAW!" and wielding his saxophone. However, just at the exact moment his solo began, he came barrelling out from backstage at full speed, skidded to a halt at the front of the stage and blasted out a storming solo. The crowd went crazy: they thought it was the best bit of showmanship they’d ever seen. But it was a fluke. He'd just run headlong through random passages and stairwells backstage until he’d burst out on to the stage at the exact right moment. It was a triumph. Nobody need ever know that it was a suicidally dangerous lunatic episode. My lips are sealed.

Yes, clearly. So Rather Good’s animations pre-date YouTube?

JV: Oh, pre-YouTube, yeah. You couldn’t really do video in those days because you didn’t have the bandwidth to do it, which was why Flash was so popular. You had to keep projects down to a couple of megabytes, very small files. Everyone was on dial-up modems.

youtube

(Rather Good’s highly educational vid about the history of the world wide web)

Wild. Was your goal to just have fun, or did you have an online audience in mind while making things?

JV: Historically they’ve been a way to entertain ourselves, at least primarily. On the basis that if you’re making something fun, that you enjoy making, then it’s more likely to be interesting and enjoyable out in the world. If you over-analyze it, you end up with something that doesn’t work very well; that’s how bad comedy gets written.

So what was it like, helping to build meme culture from the ground up… rewarding?

JV: Ha, yeah... it’s a fascinating and evolving world, isn’t it? And it’s changing so much and so fast it’s just… it’s almost difficult to put into words, the sheer magnitude of it. DS: You couldn’t really imagine this ecosystem now, 20 years ago. It would sound insane. JV: I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that the big hit was a mini track with a bunch of animated gifs of hamsters. DS: A 4 second loop of a CGI baby dancing... JV: God, and do you remember the crazy frog? DS: Oh God… yeah. JV: (laughing) It’s come a long way, and that’s a good thing. And it’s not just a technological thing is it, there’s really important stuff about the way that it’s opened up… I used to say “democratization of creativity,” which is a slightly overblown way of just saying it’s much easier for people to get stuff out in the world than it used to be. There was a system of gatekeepers in place that was very difficult to get past, until a little before YouTube. That system is bypassed now, it doesn’t really have the power anymore to dictate what makes it onto TV and hence into the popular consciousness. That’s now distributed out into the world. Which is good, although there’s a new dictator now, isn’t there? The algorithms. But that’s a different sort of thing.

youtube

(“We Like the Moon,” an ancient and powerful Rather Good meme. So revered that Quiznos used it to sell subs, in a commercial that you may, like me, vaguely remember as a fever dream from your adolescence)

Our strange new reality. Have you guys done much in the traditional kids space in the UK, with CBBC or CITV or others?

JV: We haven’t done much of anything in kids—most of what we’ve done for telly has been in the adult realm. One of our motivations for “Kid Arthur” and some other projects is getting to focus on character and narrative. Because for a long, long time, we’ve done short form - proper short form, often a minute or less long - and that’s fun, but you don’t get the opportunity to really develop character and story in those. It’s just gags. DS: That’s what’s been so fun about “Kid Arthur”: being able to actually build characters with a relationship between them, and have the space to explore that and the outer world.

So how did you guys come up with “Kid Arthur”?

JV: We’ve both always loved the Arthurian legends, fantasy worlds, Tolkien’s writing. It’s been a big part of our... cultural space, if you know what I mean? It feels like it’s been more ‘everywhere’ than ever in the last couple of years, since The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and Game of Thrones and everything - everybody’s all about swords and dragons these days, which is fun. We’d talk about King Arthur and he’d pop up in conversation a lot, and we thought it’d be hilarious to put him and Mordred as kids in a modern day school.

So is the rest of Arthur and Mordred’s world totally normal, and no one notices that these kids are summoning dragons and crazy shiz?

DS: Absolutely, they’re clueless. JV: It’s too out there for people to process. DS: I think they’re aware on some dim level, but their minds are totally unable to process or comprehend it.

(Poor, sweet, unknowing ‘Miss’)

When did you guys decide to pitch to Frederator, and what stage of development was “Kid Arthur” in?

DS: It was still pretty early on when we pitched it. JV: I met Carrie Miller in London a while ago now, at an animation event. And we talked about how we ought to pitch something to you guys. So we’d been thinking about what we could do with Frederator specifically, and “Kid Arthur” felt like the right fit.

Who do you each relate to the most between Mordred or Arthur?

DS: That’s pretty obvious isn’t it? I’m definitely Arthur. (note: David voices Arthur. Meanwhile, Joel is cracking up) JV: But this is the thing though isn’t it, part of the joy of the character, is that Arthur, he’s a kind of all-conquering heroic warrior, but he’s got Dave’s personality here, you know? He’s kinda like “Sighhhh… oh God. He’s trying to destroy me again, isn’t he”. DS: Yeaaah. JV: And I very much relate to Mordred. (Joel voices Mordred)

Oh gosh, really? How so?

JV: Well, he’s an extension of my own character to a certain extent. I’m not painting a very nice picture of myself there, am I? I mean, he’s not totally evil - he’d be gutted if he ever did destroy Arthur. That’s key to it, isn’t it? DS: Oh yeah. He’d be bereft. JV: Utterly bereft.

Have you guys been developing your ideas for a full series?

DS: We’ve talked about it quite a lot. JV: There’s a whole expanded world that we couldn’t really fit into a 5 minute short, and more characters: Guinevere - DS: Merlin - JV: Merlin as a cat! He’s the most powerful wizard in the universe. But he’s also a cat, so he tends to use his awesome power to do stuff like magic up fish heads. DS: He’s not a super intelligent cat, mind you, just a standard cat. With great magic. JV: And there’s all the knights of the round table, the witches, the Lady of the Lake. There’s this pre-existing structure from legend of all of these quests, and it’s all just ripe to be transplanted into a little town, where it exists slightly below the surface, manifesting in, you know, neighborhood parks and ponds. DS: We really love this idea that Arthur and Mordred’s battle is this ageless, epic struggle between good and evil. It’s been going on in some form or another for thousands of years, and will continue until the apocalypse. So the notion that there’s all these artifacts and characters from this enormous mythology in this modern town, largely unnoticed by everyone else—that’s exciting to us.

How has reading about Arthurian legend played a role in development?

DS: The great thing about Arthurian legend is that there are several classical texts, and they all contradict each other. Even the relationship between Arthur and Mordred shifts around quite a lot. So there’s so much within range that we can play with, and select whatever fits our world best. JV: We realized early on, that with other historical characters - say Henry VIII - there’s a very firm history of who they were, a definite character that you can research. But with these guys... you know, whether or not there was a genuine historical figure who was the genesis of these tales, when you really drill into it, it’s mystic. There’s nothing definite in this history to grab hold to - or be beholden to. The variation is part of the fun of the idea.

How do you guys usually divvy up your work?

DS: We write collaboratively; we get together and bash out words. I take the lead on the art side, things like character designs and boards. Joel more on things like sound and foley, and general managing of projects, and you know, talking to people. I’m far more happy when I’m kind of locked away and not having to talk with anyone. JV: He’s happy to not deal with actual humans.

Do you guys always pitch together, or David do you prefer to sit that out?

DS: We normally get together for that kind of thing. But Joel usually says about 20 words for my 1 word, which is fine with me. JV: We’re pretty evenly split today aren’t we David? DS: Yeah, not so bad.

What are your favorite cartoons?

JV: Battle of the Planets! DS: Yeah, we like the 80s cartoons: Ulysses 31 I really loved as a kid. It was absurdly bleak. A guy and his son drifting through deep space, encountering depressing, frightening worlds… the whole thing was a bit hopeless. Which 8 year old me really enjoyed. JV: There was a show called The Trap Door which was fantastic. Claymation show - I presume that it never aired in the states, which is a shame because it’s wonderful, truly wonderful. And Danger Mouse is a favorite, always great. DS: There’s a couple more grown up things, like Venture Bros. - JV: - Adventure Time! DS: Of course, yeah. JV: And there’s some proper adult animation being made at the moment which is lovely. We both love Archer. And Rick and Morty is obviously what it is, it’s incredible.

Any last thoughts to share with the Frederator audience?

JV: I’d just like to say how grateful we are to Frederator for helping us realize our vision for “Kid Arthur,” and exactly as we envisioned it. Working with a lot of studios can feel like you’re smashing through a brick wall with your face; and you come out of it with a product that isn’t really what you wanted to create in the first place. But “Kid Arthur” has been our baby, and we were paired with an incredible team of people to help us bring it to life. Just thinking about how much we learned from Larry (Huber, the director)... it’s incredible. It has been lovely working with Frederator. DS: Throughout the whole process, it’s been really nice. That’s so rare. JV: I wouldn’t even say rare, David! It’s unique. It’s absolutely unique. So we’re thankful.

youtube

Thanks for the great chat, Joel and David! I’ll be staying abreast of your Rather Good content - especially since I think a lot of it has been swimming around my subconscious mind for years. Excited to see what you guys do next!

- Cooper

34 notes · View notes

olko71 · 4 years ago

Text

New Post has been published on All about business online

New Post has been published on http://yaroreviews.info/2021/09/facebook-efforts-to-attract-preteens-go-beyond-instagram-documents-show

Facebook Efforts to Attract Preteens Go Beyond Instagram, Documents Show

Facebook Inc. FB -3.66% has come under increasing fire in recent days for its effect on young users and its efforts to create products for them. Inside the company, teams of employees have for years been laying plans to attract preteens that go beyond what is publicly known, spurred by fear that Facebook could lose a new generation of users critical to its future.

Internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show the company formed a team to study preteens, set a three-year goal to create more products for them and commissioned strategy papers about the long-term business opportunities presented by these potential users. In one presentation, it contemplated whether there might be a way to engage children during play dates.

“Why do we care about tweens?” said one document from 2020. “They are a valuable but untapped audience.”

from the files

Facebook isn’t the only technology company to court children and face scrutiny for doing so. Virtually every major social-media platform, including ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok and YouTube, has confronted legal or regulatory problems related to how children use its products. Federal privacy law forbids data collection on children under 13, and lawmakers have criticized tech companies for not doing more to protect kids online from predators and harmful content.

The Facebook documents show that competition from rivals, in particular Snap Inc.’s SNAP -7.07% Snapchat and TikTok, is a motivating factor behind its work.

The company’s approach to young users is expected to be addressed during a Senate subcommittee hearing on Thursday, which is expected to probe the effects of Facebook’s Instagram platform on mental health. In calling for the hearing, lawmakers cited Journal reporting earlier this month that Facebook’s own research has shown that Instagram can have a negative effect on teen mental health, especially among girls.

On Monday, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said the company would pause the development of a version of the app for children, often referred to as Instagram Kids. He said the company wanted time to talk to parents, experts and lawmakers before proceeding. He also contended that underage users would simply lie about their age to access Instagram if a version for children under the age of 13 wasn’t available.

Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) and Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn) said they want to know what research Facebook has undertaken to promote and market its products to children, among other topics.

Over the past five years, Facebook has made what it called “big bets” on designing products that would appeal to preteens across its services, according to a document from earlier this year.

from the files

In more than a dozen studies over that period, the documents show, Facebook has tried to understand which products might resonate with children and “tweens” (ages 10 through 12), how these young people view competitors’ apps and what concerns their parents.

“With the ubiquity of tablets and phones, kids are getting on the internet as young as six years old. We can’t ignore this and we have a responsibility to figure it out,” said a 2018 document labeled confidential. “Imagine a Facebook experience designed for youth.”

Earlier this year, a senior researcher at Facebook presented to colleagues a new approach to how the company should think about designing products for children. It provided a blueprint for how to introduce the company’s products to younger children. Rather than offer just two types of products—those for users 13 and older, and a messenger app for kids—Facebook should tailor its features to six age brackets, said a slide titled “where we’ve been, and where we’re going.”

The age brackets included: adults, late teens ages 16 to maturity, teens ages 13 to 15, tweens ages 10 to 12, children ages 5 to 9 and young kids ages zero to four.

In a written statement, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said the chart was a taxonomy of the stages of childhood for internal discussion.

It isn’t uncommon for companies to pursue young people as customers. Yet the work is sensitive for the social-media giant: Facebook and Instagram prohibit children from using their apps before their teenage years, but the company’s future depends on ultimately recruiting them.

“If kids are under 13, they’re not allowed on Instagram and they should not be using our service,” said Mr. Mosseri in a written statement for this article. “It’s not new and it’s not a secret that social-media companies try to understand how teens and preteens use technology. Like all technology companies, of course, we want to appeal to the next generation, but that’s entirely different from the false assertion that we knowingly attempt to recruit people who aren’t old enough to use our apps.”

He said the company had removed more than 600,000 accounts in the past three months for violating its rules on age limits.

Facebook’s first foray into child-specific products was its 2017 launch of Messenger Kids, a video-and-chat app heavy on parental controls. The app says it is designed for users ages 6 through 12 and meets legal requirements on data collection. The hope was that the family-friendly product would set the stage for the children to eventually adopt other Facebook platforms, the documents show.

“Our ultimate goal is messaging primacy with U.S. tweens, which may also lead to winning with teens,” one of the documents said.

That same year, Facebook’s market researchers uncovered a weakness in the plan. Interest in Messenger Kids tapered off after age 10 and tweens viewed Facebook as a product for old people. They also weren’t yet interested in Instagram and what the document called its focus on “self-presentation.” Instagram was vulnerable to a challenge from Snapchat, which had a growing preteen following.

from the files

Is there a way to leverage playdates to drive word of hand/growth among kids?

from the files

Is there a way to leverage playdates to drive word of hand/growth among kids?

from the files

Is there a way to leverage playdates to drive word of hand/growth among kids?

“It’s fun, funny, silly and creative—seemingly made just for them,” the 2017 presentation said of Snapchat, warning that “signing up for social media is a given” for tweens. TikTok’s rise added to the pressure, with the main Facebook product no longer a serious contender among teens.

“Global teen penetration on FB is low, and acquisition appears to be slowing down,” a March 2021 document states. In the U.S., the daily number of teens using Facebook has fallen by 19% over the past two years, another document noted, and would likely fall by an additional 45% by 2023.

A Pew Research Center survey from 2020 found that among 9-to-11-year-olds, 30% said they used TikTok, 22% said they used Snapchat, 11% said they used Instagram and 6% Facebook.

Facebook is relying on Instagram to recruit young users in the hope that they’ll age into the company’s eponymous platform over time. A November 2020 presentation cited an eventual goal of pitching Facebook as the “Life Coach for Adulting.”

A March 2021 review conducted for Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox found that Instagram still saturated the teen social-media market in developed countries. But researchers noted that posting by Instagram users had dropped significantly and that teens were spending two to three times more time on TikTok, according to one document.

Keeping kids safe on social media is an industrywide issue. TikTok and YouTube have in the past few years each reached settlements for allegedly violating federal privacy laws protecting children, and have announced tighter rules since then to further protect young users. Both companies also have launched versions of their products designed especially for kids.

Snapchat’s rules state users must be at least 13 years old, and the company has said it works to identify and terminate accounts for those under that age.

There also are risks of children being exposed to adult content. A Journal investigation earlier this year showed that TikTok’s algorithm serves videos containing sex and drugs to accounts registered as minors. Facebook in 2019 said a design flaw allowed young people using Messenger Kids to enter group chats with strangers.

Social media’s uncomfortable relationship with children was on display at a Facebook event in June, when star Instagram influencer JoJo Siwa blurted out during a question-and-answer session that she had been active on the platform for almost a decade. Ms. Siwa is 18 years old.

“I don’t want to hear it,” replied Mr. Mosseri, Instagram’s head, who was conducting the online event.

In this screengrab, Adam Mosseri and Instagram influencer JoJo Siwa speak during a Facebook event in June.

Photo: Amy Sussman/Instagram and Facebook’s Creator Week/Getty Images

Ms. Siwa said she had fans and followers under age 13 and wanted to be able to make content for them. She said young kids are drawn to the bright, quick nature of content on Instagram, and that she hoped there would be a product built for them.

“The key thing is making sure you keep kids safe,” Mr. Mosseri said. “But like you said, you can lie about your age now, so our hope is to build a version that’s designed for kids.”

Part of the broader challenge for Facebook, its researchers identified, was that while parents said they were most comfortable with their children using the company’s original Facebook product, tweens don’t view it as an app made for them.

“Facebook is for old people—old as in 40,” an 11-year-old boy told Facebook’s researchers.

One Facebook team conducted interviews with children to try to gauge whether there were opportunities to encourage them to use the Messenger Kids app when they were socializing in person, according to a 2019 internal presentation titled “Exploring playdates as a growth lever.” The document noted that parents expressed wariness about the idea.

In a study about household dynamics, a Facebook user-experience researcher found that although teens often inspired their younger relatives to join Instagram, those same teens also often counseled the tweens not to share too frequently, and not to post things they would later regret.

“I don’t know how to get a perfect picture like my sister says you need to post,” a tween told the researcher.

A photo provided by Facebook demonstrates the company’s Messenger app for kids.

Photo: Facebook/Associated Press

“We need to understand if this influence over preteen sharing holds at scale,” the researcher wrote in a document posted to Facebook’s internal message board early this year. “If it is common that teens are discouraging preteens from sharing, there are obvious implications for creation and the ecosystem both in the near and longer-term as preteens are the next generation coming onto the platform.” The presentation cited concern among teenagers about oversharing as a “myth” about Instagram.

A Facebook team studying preteens set a three-year goal to figure out how to provide young people with social-media products built just for them. They noted that figuring out how to reach them would be just half the challenge. Convincing their parents that the products are safe would be the other half.

The team focused on the benefits, mostly around connecting more easily with friends and family, that they believed social media could bring to the younger generation.

“We have a historic opportunity for youth to experience the same positive benefits we have through social media, and more,” one of the members of the youth team wrote in a document. Facebook also created a $1 million research fund to study tech’s long-term impact on children. A Facebook spokesman said the company recently announced it was supporting the creation of a “digital wellness lab” at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Other teams suggested additional products that might appeal to tweens, including quizzes and games that could help tweens connect when they struggle to initiate conversations, ways to surface unexpected content and automatic signals that indicate whether friends are available to interact. They also looked for more ways to expand Messenger Kids.

The Facebook Files

—Design by Andrew Levinson. A color filter has been used on some photos.

Write to Georgia Wells at [email protected] and Jeff Horwitz at [email protected]

#PAID

0 notes