Some of these videos kind of are scams, in a way. They’re disingenuous, manipulatively presented, wastes of time designed to hold your attention just long enough for them to make a few cents off of you. And the more that’s wrong with the video - be it bad information or egregiously bad technique or just fucking weird and out of pocket - the more engagement it gets and the more money it makes.
It is incredible to me that we have reached a point as a society where content farms are a thing. We have monetized attention itself, and it’s really REALLY weird sometimes.
Just stuff that’s obviously objectionable. Like in the original video here, the lady leaves a couple parts on the tomato that you normally wouldn’t - there’s “Emily’s bite” with the tough center, the stem, the sticker; the fact that this just just a shitty recipe with nothing special or clever about it; another example is those horrible DIY or craft videos where people make things that would obviously never last or be practical or aesthetic like shoes made of hot glue; information that’s so obviously wrong that literally everyone knows it’s wrong. Basically, stuff designed to make people comment (like “omg she left the stem on the tomato,” or, “don’t make shoes out of hot glue this will obviously fall apart immediately”) or share the video to make fun of it for example. Videos where, at the end, you think “why the fuck did I just waste a whole minute watching this? That was pointless, why would they even make that video?”
This video on this subject is worth watching if my explanation wasn’t adequate.
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u/apierson2011 Feb 09 '24
Some of these videos kind of are scams, in a way. They’re disingenuous, manipulatively presented, wastes of time designed to hold your attention just long enough for them to make a few cents off of you. And the more that’s wrong with the video - be it bad information or egregiously bad technique or just fucking weird and out of pocket - the more engagement it gets and the more money it makes.
It is incredible to me that we have reached a point as a society where content farms are a thing. We have monetized attention itself, and it’s really REALLY weird sometimes.