“The id is the animal part of the personality, an unconscious drive to have lots of sex, survive, and thrive. It urges you to push in and eat your weight in cake. The ego is where the conscious mind lives. It’s lumbered with the tricky job of satisfying the id’s wild desires in a realistic and socially acceptable way.”
A thumbnail of a creator touching their face in any manner of ways to indicate their reaction to how they feel about the content their video’s title teases is unsavory but at least it makes sense, you are tagging your content so people can easily find it.
However ( no offense to 18 year olds ) watching 18 year olds reacting to their first time hearing a 90’s rap song, watching 30 year olds reacting to their first time watching a new anime sequel, watching 40+ year olds reacting to a 17 year old girl in a third world country playing the bass guitar, all of this “watch me react business” is pure ego.
Maybe their fanbase is stoking the flame and swelling them up to believe that their reactions are so valuable to humanity that people can not live without seeing their face move as they’ve practiced it in the mirror, but to me? This is society hitting a new low.
Is there so little creativity in the world that we need hour long blocks of people’s “id fueling” to pop up in-between more relevant content to our searches? I will pray for a day when the era of the youtube reaction video is over, I am vexed and think this mind-numbing trend needs to go.
Trouble is, the social media ecosystem (likes, views, shares and how they are processed by algorithms) create feedback loops we have little control over. The trend will do whatever it’s going to do.
Until something motivates the mega-corporations to identify reaction videos and then change the algorithms in some way other than maximising profit.
None of which is a direct comment on the point you raise … sorry.
it trickles down to the same place, it identifies a cause and effect of why these videos show up in searches but it does nothing to justify the reaction video genre.
To be honest I get surprisingly little of the reaction videos fed to me. Just tell your recommendation robot that you’re not interested, it will personalize itself (?) for you.
I don’t even have a youtube account. is that the problem with why there are so many in my results? I feel like the problem is probably fundamentally that they exist rather than just that I am forced to be reminded that they exist.
I wouldn’t go so far as to compare it to something like human trafficking but even if I ignore that, it’s still a problem, right?
Meh if people didn’t watch it, it would not be a thing, but I guess that for many people clickbait titles and gawping face thumbnails still have some irresistible allure, so it persists.
Personally I avoid watching videos with some melt pulling a weird face, because if the video needs such gimmicks the content is probably shite low hanging fruit. But overall my youtube usage is way down over the past couple of years, because all the crap that gets recommended and the difficulty in finding actual decent stuff worth watching. I tend to get tons of reaction videos, sports videos, and lots of other kinds of content - that I never watch, and never have watched, sprinkled in my feed along with some of the stuff I do watch, so it is certain that the youtube algorithm pushes certain stuff. I just click on “Not Interested” but then the next day some other inane twaddle in is it’s place.
But taking a wider view, it isn’t just YouTube, ebay, Amazon, Google and tons of other web based platforms now rely too heavily on generic algorithms rather than making it easy for users to find what they are actually looking for IMHO. I remember that it wasn’t always this way, and I also know that because of this my usage of these platforms is way down, I don’t rage quit but just give up and go elsewhere or do something else.
Haha yeah well you got a point, in a sense I was just telling you “if you don’t like it, don’t watch it”. The problem definitely does exist! Maybe if enough people stick their head in the sand about the reaction videos, maybe they will get recommended less on a macroscopic level
I don’t know, I guess from a creator’s perspective, such a video is also somewhat easy to produce and since we all apparently really enjoy parasocial relationships, I watch it just to see what that cool person on the screen thinks about some thing that is relevant to me.
(I don’t watch it, just a figure of speech)
Here’s a screenshot of my youtube recommendations:
all of this, in that order. but it’s frustrating because I’m usually using youtube to try and learn something. now it’s great that youtube knows I need to learn to use my digitone better and I don’t mind if I get a digitone tutorial recommendation mixed in with my searches for “how did dj premier make (X) gangstarr beat on the s950 tutorial” search. But 35 “watch me react to hearing (X) gangstarr song for the first time” interspersed makes me want to give up and go elsewhere or do something else - then my learning is fucked and I feel less of person for my inability to grow using the tools available to me. I won’t let it ruin my day, but I’d like to use these tools, for free, without being encumbered by said fruit of easily attainable height so now I will cry about it on this here l’il forum. OH THIS WORLD OF IMPERFECT THINGS, WHY MUST I CONTROL F IN A MANUAL? WHY MUST I P LOCK A SAMPLE? WHY WHY
If link does a reaction video watching his first trek through gannon’s dungeon, I’ll watch.
Yes that’s the problem. The algorithm is really good at showing you stuff you’re interested in. It will never show you anything like that if you never watch such things.
I only use YouTube in incognito mode and the home page is full of cheap content like that. Mr beast and ridiculous stuff.
I have no issues with react content as a concept. I myself watch a channel that does a lot of content reacting to news and documentaries in the field of politics and I quite like it is not the same as the childish, brainrot stuff you mention, but it belongs to the same category.
I like your honesty. I’m sure there are also good flavors of foods that I don’t prefer, but I find I’m less willing to try all of them in an effort to find the one I’m willing to eat.
I have seen on non native computers that the youtube main page is full of content completely foreign to me, it’s certainly unsettling to know how much info youtube (among other info-mongers) are collecting on us, let alone selling to others.
I commented once that I visited a blender site one time on accident and saw blender commercials for like 5 months until I cleared all cookies and reset my browser settings which then left me with no more stored passwords. traumatic.
I’m not so sure that is true, I’m one of those weirdos who doesn’t like football (soccer) or any ball sports, I’d rather watch paint dry, yet youtube constantly puts football videos in my feed, at least a couple a day, despite me clicking not interested, don’t recommend channel. That is just one example of many. Also though the algorithm isn’t that great at suggesting content I would be interested in, for example if I watch a video about a certain piece of gear, I often then get videos showing other gear, rather than more videos about the gear I just watched.
That limits how much the algorithms customise stuff for you. Do you either clear cookies regularly or browse incognito ? Then, even more so, youtube will treat you as a generic human being, who on average is interested in football … etc, etc.
I also could give fuck all about most sports but instead of sports youtube shows me things like people building model kits and other odd algorithmic biases that don’t make sense. Building guitars or mindnumbing ambient dawless jams I vaguely understand but I don’t see the connection… I think youtube has stereotyped you based on your ip address. maybe you should be offended.
You can wait for it to end or you can just change the way you deal with it in your life. If you realize that it feels bad for you then find a solution without waiting for other people to change that. You could stop using youtube for example. Or just don’t click on these videos that you don’t like and ignore the sidebar.
And this is an advice i often give myself. There are a lot of sides that i really hate about the internet in general and also youtube and these freaking stupid reaction videos. But if i use it i have to take care of myself and can’t wait for people to make it better for me.
It’s a bit like going to a book store. Most books don’t interest me and i just pick up those that i like. It doesn’t bother me too much that a lot of books on display are crap (for my taste).
There’s no shame. Despite what is implied from the genre, I got to it through a lot of academic video essays on economics, philosophy and culture. I liked the personality of the dude, and kept watching. It helps that there’s a lot of new content from him every day, opposed to the video essay channels which post very seldomly due to the time it takes to produce such videos opposed to somebody who streams on twitch everyday and posts it on YouTube.
YouTube can’t track me on incognito whilst not signed in, and whenever the browser is closed all cookies get deleted automatically. So i don’t get any targeted ads, ever. Plus i use adblockers on the computer, and brave browser on the phone (where i use YouTube the most) and that keeps me from being targeted for ads. I just ignore the YouTube home page and search for what I’m looking for.
it’s fine to feel the way you do but I don’t think what you’re saying is applicable to this. I’m not talking about the sidebar. this is my search result.
3 of the first 7 hits on my main search are reaction videos. However, in general you are correct, it’s all about doing what you want as a free human being I don’t have to expose myself to such things.
I can read a book about how to make gangstarr beats.
But it does make sense. It make perfect, crystal clear, 100% correct sense.
I believe there are some important things to remember when judging other people for their tastes in what they watch. To you these things like ball sports, model building, watching a personality react to Pokémon videos and the like seem worthless, meaningless, ego driven wastes of time.
To others on this planet, when they see some video showing an adult man playing with his silly little music keyboard or funny looking music box with coloured pads, tapping away and making stupid sounds they think ‘What an idiot, who would waste their time making such awful sounding music - get a life already!’
These disparate viewpoints are what makes humanity so rich. I’d don’t want to watch crochet videos, but I’m glad crochet videos exist for those that do. I would caution against thinking that your own likes and dislikes must be somehow more valid than others.
Edit - to you they are, but that is where the ‘correctness’ of it all starts and ends.
