Snuffy was finally introduced to the main human cast mainly due to a string of high profile and sometimes graphic stories of pedophilia and sexual abuse of children that had been aired on shows such as 60 Minutes and 20/20. The writers felt that by having the adults refuse to believe Big Bird despite the fact that he was telling the truth, they were scaring children into thinking that their parents would not believe them if they had been sexually abused and that they would just be better off remaining silent.
Since launching in 2005, YouTube has changed the progress/volume/tool bar on their video player several times. Here’s what it’s looked like through the years:1
I don’t remember the first two or three at all, but that 2008-2010 version is a nostalgia bomb, albeit a deceptive one. You might be fooled into remembering that it used to be very simple, but the whole progress/tool bar is cut off in the graphic above; here’s the full version.
I’d love to see versions of this for iTunes/Apple Music, Spotify, and other players.
I don’t know who made the original…the furthest back I could track it was about a month ago on Reddit and FB.↩
Lagarto Films is a film collective based in Puerto Rico that makes interactive YouTube videos and games. This is pretty clever actually…they use keyboard shortcuts to skip to different parts of the video, Choose Your Own Adventure style. So you can play a game of Uno:
“Brothers dancing in sync” (above and below) is turning out to be my favorite video genre of 2024 so far. (Thanks, Instagram algorithms.) Both these duos — the Irish Gardiner Brothers and the Delaware-based Griffin Brothers — have been around for years, so they may be old news to many readers, but they only came to my attention recently. I played a bunch of Gardiner Brothers videos (and beyond; Riverdance still rules) for my family a few weeks ago, hoping to plant seeds of Irish dance-interest in my daughters’ hearts and brains. There’s also a roller skating rink not too far away from where we live…
Speaking of forcing encouraging my family to participate in group performance, it’s probably too late for us to meaningfully emulate Natalie MacMaster and her dancing/fiddling family, but I can still watch this one particular video every few years.
I’m hesitant to write much about ASMR videos, because the experience feels so personal, but I usually watch (or, listen) for a half hour each night, usually to fall asleep. I go through phases of enjoying different ASMRtists, but lately it’s been Ecuador Live (above left) and Moonlight Cottage (above right). Doña Esperanza from Ecuador Live has maybe the most peaceful voice in the world, and Diane from Moonlight Cottage is on another level with her sets and art direction. But mostly it’s just her voice, too. (I thought this one might be too weird, but it was not.) If there’s an ASMR Review newsletter out there, I’d love to know about it.
For what it’s worth, I’m not sure I get the signature ASMR “tingles,” but these videos do put me to sleep.
TheirTube lets you see YouTube recommended videos for preppers, liberals, climate deniers, fruitarians, conservatives, etc. Here’s the climate deniers home page from a couple of days ago:
Theirtube is a Youtube filter bubble simulator that provides a look into how videos are recommended on other people’s YouTube. Users can experience how the YouTube home page would look for six different personas. Each persona simulates the viewing environment of real Youtube users who experienced being inside a recommendation bubble through recreating a Youtube account with a similar viewing history.
The simulator was developed by Tomo Kihara after he got into an argument with someone who lived in a completely different filter bubble:
This whole project started when I was in a heated discussion with a person who thought climate change was a hoax and 9/11 was a conspiracy. Through conversations with him, I was surprised to learn that he thought everyone’s YouTube feed had the same information as his own feed. When we showed each other our YouTube homepages, we were both shocked. They were radically different. And it got me thinking about the need for a tool to step outside of information bubbles.
Update: Leveraging Twitter’s lists functionality, Vicariously lets you see the timelines of other Twitter users. And not only that, but you can merge the timelines of several users, only the mutual follows of those users, and other options.
From Evan Puschak, this is an analysis of a tightly edited five-minute montage in the middle of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite in which a family of schemers removes the last obstacle in their way of a luxurious life of service.
(This next bit is way off topic…I am not even going to try and connect it to the movie or Puschak’s thoughts on editing.) In looking for an appropriate quote from the video, I went searching in YouTube’s automatically generated transcript of the video and instead discovered whatever fancy AI program they’ve employed for transcription had some problems with the Korean language spoken in the video:
well the Kogi’s held on crew could to work a contra cut under something crazy kangaroo hot lava could carry yours a tiny car would cause a huge bang engines in his element saw cars motherfuckers Christian wear boxers and couvent a easy call it to Minaj Monica City on criminals chief juniper gun and a car don’t belong back in case come on Joey tell him to cool on the cloud Coronas our tornado man hold it up on watch from Atlanta
The transformation of (a lot of) the internet into simply a larger, more diversified series of tv channels continues apace. Sharing here for the last quote below, which seems like an important insight and transformation.
In 2019, authenticity has been replaced with pageantry, and relationships with viewers have been manipulated into making the audience care about something produced blatantly to turn a profit.
As the YouTube community faces a reality where “mainstream networks are starting to dominate the platform and eclipse independent creators,” they try to join those networks or endeavour to create their own TV-show-like productions.
YouTube’s community borrowed from reality TV’s most innovative narrative tool — confessionals — to create what the entire world now understands as modern vlogging. It worked extremely well. But as the vlogging format went out of style, creators are now looking for new and creative ways to remain relevant and catch people’s attention. For creators like Paul and Mongeau, that’s meant a return to the trappings of reality TV. (Emphasis mine.)
This afternoon, my friend Casey Newton posted a thread of YouTube videos so good that I had to login on a Sunday and blog about it. There’s a simple theme connecting these videos that I’ll let Casey explain:
Recently I decided my favorite YouTube genre is “teenagers getting pulled on stage to perform with their idols and melting everyone’s faces off,” and so here are some videos in that vein that you may enjoy
Here is a 14-year-old boy who loves the musical “Waitress” and gets to perform “She Used to Be Mine” on stage and it’s so powerful that the cast behind him is visibly unsettled https://t.co/nvrwa2aEyd
Here is a 17-year-old girl who loves “Wicked” and gets to perform “For Good” with Kristin Chenoweth and manages to achieve harmonies so pure that Chenoweth looks as if she thinks she’s been pranked https://t.co/gB8DK23889
And here is a boy who convinces Bruce Springsteen to let him duet on “Growin’ Up” and you see the kid literally grow up in front of you but also Bruce briefly becomes a teen again and your heart explodes https://t.co/dCimviYOut
Joel Embiid is (probably) the most talented and (easily) the most entertaining young player in the NBA today. It’s really not even close. He’s created a persona that feels like it wasn’t created at all, an unfiltered big kid on a scale we haven’t seen since young Shaquille O’Neal. He’s full of unbridled enthusiasms and trash talk, peppered with charm and feeling, and a kind of canny naïveté. He’s also 7’2,” can jump out of the gym, is already an all-defense lock as long he’s healthy, hits three-pointers, etc. So he’s fun to watch, too.
Unsurprisingly, Joel’s first-person narrative for The Players Tribune is a perfect specimen of Pure Embiid. He writes about his childhood in Cameroon, being unable to watch basketball or sports because his mother was too strict, and piecing together the game from YouTube clips, natural talent, and sheer competitiveness.
So I’m chilling one night, and I go on YouTube, and I’m thinking I’m about to figure this shooting thing out.
I go to the search box like….
HOW TO SHOOT 3 POINTERS.
Nah.
HOW TO SHOOT GOOD FORM
Nah.
Then the light bulb went off, man. I typed in the magic words.
WHITE PEOPLE SHOOTING 3 POINTERS.
Listen, I know it’s a stereotype, but have you ever seen a normal, 30-year-old white guy shoot a three-pointer? That elbow is tucked, man. The knees are bent. The follow-through is perfect. Always. You know how in America, there’s always an older guy wearing like EVERLAST sweat-shorts at the court? That guy is always a problem. His J is always wet.
Thankfully, Embiid also watched plenty of clips of legendary big men like Hakeem Olajuwon, so he doesn’t just chuck up Js like a thirtysomething Duke grad or play nonstop hero ball like his idol Kobe Bryant. That’s the thing about piecing together your game or your personality through YouTube, hip-hop, social media, etc. Ideally, you don’t just get one flavor. You get to sample a little of everything.
In a recent interview at SXSW, YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki said the company planned to use information from Wikipedia to counter misinformation in YouTube’s videos. In the NY Times, John Herrman wrote about the potential burden of a massive company like Google leaning so heavily on a relatively small non-profit organization like Wikipedia.
Then there’s the issue of money. As important as Wikipedia may be to some of the richest companies in the world, it is, in financial terms, comparatively minuscule, with a yearly budget of less than $100 million — a rounding error for big tech. (It should be noted that Google has made one-off contributions to Wikipedia in the past and includes the Wikimedia Foundation in a program through which it matches employee donations, which netted the foundation around $1 million last year.)
I consider it a subscription fee to an indispensable and irreplaceable resource I use dozens of times weekly while producing kottke.org. It’s a business expense, just like paying for server hosting, internet access, etc. — the decision to pay became a no-brainer for me when I thought of it that way.
I also called on other companies to support Wikipedia on a recurring basis:
Do other media companies subscribe to Wikipedia in the same fashion? How about it Gawker, NY Times, Vox, Wired, ESPN, WSJ, New York Magazine, Vice, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post? Even $500/month is a drop in the bucket compared to your monthly animated GIF hosting bill and I know your writers use Wikipedia as much as I do. Come on, grab that company credit card and subscribe.
Wikipedia is a shared online resource that we all would sorely miss if it went away, people and companies alike. We should all pitch in and support it.
Writer and artist James Bridle has noticed that something is wrong on the internet. Specifically, algorithmically chosen and produced content is taking over more and more of the internet, including what your young children are watching on YouTube.
Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level.
By his own admission, there doesn’t seem to be anything egregiously wrong or upsetting about many of the examples Bridle uses. I mean, have you read Grimm’s fairy tales? Some of them are really dark and/or weird, like Black Mirror for children. But the effect in the aggregate is huge, resulting in what he asserts is a system of abuse in which Google is complicit, a technology fueled by advertising and weaponized against its users:
The architecture they have built to extract the maximum revenue from online video is being hacked by persons unknown to abuse children, perhaps not even deliberately, but at a massive scale. I believe they have an absolute responsibility to deal with this, just as they have a responsibility to deal with the radicalisation of (mostly) young (mostly) men via extremist videos — of any political persuasion. They have so far showed absolutely no inclination to do this, which is in itself despicable. However, a huge part of my troubled response to this issue is that I have no idea how they can respond without shutting down the service itself, and most systems which resemble it. We have built a world which operates at scale, where human oversight is simply impossible, and no manner of inhuman oversight will counter most of the examples I’ve used in this essay. The asides I’ve kept in parentheses throughout, if expanded upon, would allow one with minimal effort to rewrite everything I’ve said, with very little effort, to be not about child abuse, but about white nationalism, about violent religious ideologies, about fake news, about climate denialism, about 9/11 conspiracies.
Last week, after the State of the Union address, President Obama was interviewed by three prominent YouTube users. Oh, the outcry that arose! (Even though he did the same thing last year.) The President giving valuable country-running time over to mere social media stars, what has this country come to?
Well, it turns out if you get different kinds of people asking different kinds of questions, you’re going to get answers you normally wouldn’t hear. Case in point: Ingrid Nilsen was one of the three YouTubers chosen to interview the President. She asked him to talk about a meaningful item from his house and the President told a wonderful story about what he carries in his pockets every day:
Obama continues to be delightful and Nilsen might be my new favorite person after watching her YT channel for a bit this morning. I mean, just watch the first few minutes of this video where she came out to her viewers.
This video is 20 minutes of the best YouTube footage from 2015 of extreme sports, marriage proposals, cute kids, funny animals, fast cars, groovy dancing, dronies, and more slow-motion GoPro footage than you could ever want to see in one lifetime. I’ve linked to a few of these videos, but generally my list of cool videos of the year would be a bit less X-TREEM. If you want to watch all 506 videos in the compilation, check out this playlist.
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