There are literally weeks of footage put together into this video. As I worked on the project I would record the individual segments about the challenge of wiring it up. Then when it came time to tell the story I recorded the video around it. Then I pulled in my son for the final build.
In form, this is the sort of video I have a vision of making in the future. A project introduced, a little education, a little topic, a hardware review, and then the project completion with young guests helping out. This isn’t exactly the format I had in mind, but it’s the form. And because I wanted to try out this form I decided to just go with the whole thing in this video. No breaking up the review and the topic discussion into their own video like in the past. It makes for a longer video, but so far longer videos have been doing well for me. I don’t know if the YouTube algorithm is back to favoring long form content, or if the length is irrelevant, as long as people watch the whole thing.
The point, that I don’t necessarily want buried in what follows, is that I hope this video does well because I want to turn this idea of longer form, based around a project, into something more in the future.
So about that YouTube algorithm.
You know, I was around when YouTube started. Before algorithms. Before we called it “the cloud”. Before ad revenue, even. Back when it was just a repository for videos. Back then, we had file repositories. FTP sites and usenet groups and the like. We’d share all kinds of files. Music, videos, text files, whatever, it didn’t matter. And generally you didn’t go back to those repositories. You kept a directory on your computer for all the cool stuff you found online that you wanted to share with people. So having a repository for only videos seemed odd and restrictive. But YouTube quickly proved itself as a good idea, with more videos being uploaded each minute than a person could watch in a day. And eventually those of us with storage folders of random videos we might want to watch one day, found ourselves no longer needing that storage space for videos. It was… honestly, it was a tough transition for me. But eventually I got used to the convenience of online streaming. My consumption of videos went up, and my local storage went to other things. And with that shift came a problem for YouTube.
See, YouTube, while free to us, isn’t free to YouTube. They need money to keep the lights on, and the best way for the to get money is to monetize the eyes watching their videos. So that’s what they did. And since they already had more content than a human could moderate, they had to turn to the machine to moderate it. Their goal was views, so videos that got views were rewarded with… more views. And this is the crux of the problem, as I see it. A system that uses it’s metric as it’s reward is an easy thing to end up being a problem. I’m reminded, a little, of the Slylandro from Star Control 2, changing one little setting on their probes and turning what should have been peaceful exploration into genocidal violence.
Whenever I hear someone blaming a video or a channel’s performance, or lack thereof, on “the algorithm”, I feel like it should be mentioned that whatever the algorithm is doing, it’s basing it’s decisions on us. Probably. We’re not really sure about that, but that seems the most likely scenario. Maybe it’s basing it’s decision on the number of amber pixels in the video, who knows. But most likely what it’s doing is taking a sample audience, showing them the video, and then using the results of that sample audience to determine what it does with that video. It’s like the Nielsen ratings, but more immediate, and involuntary, and anyone could be in the sample population. And I hope it’s a truly random sampling and not just the same test audience every time, because it seems like figuring out who that test audience is could make gaming the system eaisier.
The point is, if we don’t like what the algorithm is choosing, it (probably) points back to us. Also it’s not an algorithm, it’s a heuristic, but that’s semantic. The point is, it’s not making decisions based on random choices. It’s making decisions based on us. And we don’t know exactly how it’s doing it, so it feels like the decision is being taken out of our hands. But it’s not. It’s just exposing us for who we really are. And we are a people who prefer superficial entertainment with high production values over… whatever it is that I’ve got going on on my channel.
And that’s okay. Personally, I’m gonna keep doing what I’m doing, and if it never takes off, well, I’ll be grateful for all of you who have found me. You who support this channel and make possible what I do. My videos aren’t for an algorithm. It’s for you. So, thank you.
On another topic, there’s nothing like uploading a video, starting the process of adding cards, only to realize the audio is crap and you have to go back and use the alternate audio. I think my lav mic is going out. Time for a new mic. Maybe it’s time to try a different audio setup entirely.
