Some Videos That Get Fed Me
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One thing I think is weird about modernity is that we each live in our own algorithmic bubbles and I have no idea what anyone else is watching. So I thought it would be fun to just... share the shortform video channels that get fed me the most.
2BigLugs
I can only describe this as borscht belt humour, but in Irish: a young guy does a series of comedy skits with his parents, with the sequence usually being 1) son asks a question, 2) dad gives a stupid answer, 3) son makes a stupid pun, 4) dad's response insults mum, 5) mum exasperatedly shouts the dad's name (CATHAL KELLY!!) from offscreen. I don't know what to tell you, there's a system and it works.
In the early videos the mum never appeared on camera, but recently she's relented to being onscreen, and I find that oddly sweet and touching.
I Am Yoshi 2.0
A young Japanese guy sings and dances to his anthem about The Pain Of Discipline Or The Pain Of Regret, encouraging you to choose the former.
He's not technically "good" at any of one of the sing/dance/write components, but somehow the package is extremely charming.
The algorithm feeds me ~infinite variations of the above, just him singing and dancing to these little motivational snippets against different backgrounds. Why? Who knows, I'll still watch it.
Tigran Gertz
A bunch of landscapers doing various cute / kind / stupid video-jokes about 1) life on the worksite and/or 2) how much they love each other.
I'm a little sad to realise now that the channel is owned by their boss and they might be doing it under duress, which makes it much less cute.
Kevin Langue
This channel is pretty successful now, and they're definitely investing a ton of time and effort to develop short clips and get chosen by the algorithm, so there's a weird three-way relationship now between the algorithm and the algorithm-gamers and me. But hey, they're good at what they do.
I think the trick to this show is that the guys genuinely seem to like each other, and are comfortable making fun of each other & being made fun of – actual chemistry is so hard to fake, and so most corporate-run shows where the hosts didn't choose each other don't work. Of all the shortform clips I've been fed, this is the only one that has led me to wasting hours of this brief and precious life watching longform videos, so... well done Kevin & co I suppose?
Looking at this list, what strikes me is how inexplicable the algorithm still feels to me, and how hard it is for me to believe that THIS is the material that is truly optimized to keep me watching.
If you ask my conscious brain (non-subconscious brain? Base-conscious brain?) I would say I like each of these channels but don't love them. I also would have thought that more variety would be more interesting, and yet The Algorithm seems convinced that most of the time the next thing to feed me is one of a small handful of repetitive channels. And incredibly well-paid people are spending their lives building addictive algorithms, and presumably they (the algorithms, if not the people) know me better than I know myself?
That said, one of the weird parts of algoland is that they're not trying to make you happy, exactly, they're just trying to keep you watching. Maybe the things that keep me watching are more mediocre than the things I'd be excited about? Who knows, who knows.