> How an animal lover’s hobby of recording himself feeding stray cats exemplifies the glory of the anonymous web.
When I saw this subhed, I thought immediately of Robin Seplut, a Youtuber I had never heard about until a month or so ago when Youtube put a 5-year-old video of him into my recs for some reason [0] (I like cat videos, and have clicked on them for years, but this was the first time I've seen one in my recs).
In any case, Seplut has 900K subscribers and dozens of videos of him feeding the 5,000 feral cats in his city. And the videos are a hoot – his most popular video has 46 million views [1].
The guy at the subject of this article seems to have videos with the same kind of appeal. I wonder how much of his obscurity has to do with his videos just not being labeled well?
Some of this guy's lack of popularity is down to his videos not being labelled well, but I think most of it is really due to the fact no one's promoting his work at all.
Because nowadays, that's pretty much the only way to succeed in any form of content creation. * Getting people/companies/sites with thousands or millions of viewers to share your work, and using their audience to bootstrap your own.
This guy obviously doesn't have that. So no one's finding his content, even if they'd enjoy watching it.
Or at least he didn't. Since thisa rticle was posted, his channel's gone from about 2000 subscribers to 12,000 subscribers, just like how it'd gone from 100 to 2000 once it was posted on those deep into YouTube style subreddits.
So he's finally getting a following, because people now know he exists and makes videos.
* For 99% of creators anyway. There's always the 1% of people who strike it big from pure luck/timing alone, usually because they managed to catch an upcoming trend before it hit the mainstream.
> but I think most of it is really due to the fact no one's promoting his work at all
Anecdotal evidence time. I write and self-publish my own poetry chapbooks, distributing them (via Smashwords) to places like Apple Books.
Most of the chapbooks will get downloaded from various venues once or twice a month. Except for one chapbook which averages around 10 downloads a day (7ish from Apple Books, the rest from Google Play). Given that the average print run for a traditionally published chapbook of poems is around 400 total, that is a phenomenal rate - especially as I do nothing whatsoever to promote my books.
How did this state of affairs come about? As far as I can work out, soon after I uploaded the chapbook in question Apple decided to "recommend" it for a week or so, which put it on the front page when searching their site for "poetry". And after it made the front page, it just stayed there, bobbing up and down in the top 100.
Why did this happen? I assume they chose to promote it because the chapbook's title is (unintentionally) a bit clickbait-y. Either that, or pure luck.
Thumbnails have gotten mad too. To get CTR, they have to be obvious and alluring to a 3 year old with 0.1 seconds of attention. Having a detailed thumbnail appropriate to your content is throwing away revenue. Some content creators cycle through 5-10 thumbnails based upon metrics during the first 12 hours.
If working life is about being paid for your time by providing valuable skills, paying, or learning for yourself, to get useful clickbait seems like every other skill to me. Ultimately it's a bit like all other interpersonal communications so if you enjoy making headlines or captions or brand spiels you can probably learn to love clickbait titles.
Though if all of that is wooly to you then yeah it's probably not your cup of tea, but I can assure you for people who have invested in that skill they probably quite enjoy the thrill of trying to craft the perfect clickbait title and now in the age of data the success of it is measurable, creating a tighter feedback loop...
> they probably quite enjoy the thrill of trying to craft the perfect clickbait title and now in the age of data the success of it is measurable, creating a tighter feedback loop...
They probably do, but they get that thrill at the emotional expense of the consumers. It's a fundamentally selfish act.
"Clickbait" really means that the title sets an expectation in the viewer that is more engaging than the content itself actually is. The viewer clicks and then ends up disappointed because the actual content is less rewarding than the title suggested. But at that point, the author's already claimed their precious ounce of attention and got what they wanted.
The name stuck for a reason. Fish don't end up happy that they ate the bait. Only the fisher does.
So I don't think we should be happy that people find this skill thrilling or rewarding any more than we should laud the thrill of a skilled pick-pocket or con artist.
Headline writing has been a skill since long before there were clicks.
Sure, headlines can veer into the misleading and there are certain particularly annoying online patters. But the whole purpose of a headline is to entice you to read.
> Some of this guy's lack of popularity is down to his videos not being labelled well, but I think most of it is really due to the fact no one's promoting his work at all.
Because nowadays, that's pretty much the only way to succeed in any form of content creation. * Getting people/companies/sites with thousands or millions of viewers to share your work, and using their audience to bootstrap your own.
Isn't this one of the reasons for recommendation engines--to surface content that users might like, as opposed to the traditional way where he who spends the most on promotion wins? Why are all these tech companies investing $billions into AI and recommendations if simple payola is still what drives popularity? Whenever an article points out the negative effects of recommendation engines (filter bubbles, etc.), someone always says "Well, AI is better at surfacing long-tail content that would never get promoted." Yet, here we are in 2019 and content creators are still relying on promotion to get views.
Ditto. His videos are great, I've been watching them for a long time. He never says anything other than the now infamous "ksksksksks." But he does at least label his videos so if someone searches for cat, they will find it.
> Cat Man is actually named Mr. Niiyama. He’s 52 years old, and he’s based in the Chiba Prefecture, about an hour east of Tokyo. Niiyama feeds the cats on the quay near his home, almost every day. “I will distribute breakfast at seven a.m. every morning,” he said. “We distribute over 360 days a year.” He started filming the videos because, as he explains, “I wanted to see the life of a cat.”
> Currently, he tends to seven cats, but he estimates over the years he has taken care of 50. Why does he do it? “Because taking care of cats leads to your own happiness.”
There is something very beautiful and serene about this. He found a way of interacting positively with his environment, and has simply stuck with it.
Not the entire premise. There's an additional desire or hope for attention and money now. That's the piece that was absent and relatively impossible back then, that is obviously being eschewed by "Cat Man" to the delight of the author.
Edit: and those platforms actively work to "optimize" the former into the latter wherever possible.
> There's an additional desire or hope for attention and money now
Maybe not "money" because there weren't ways to easily monetize content, but Web 1.0 certainly was about hoping people would see what you posted. Let's not re-write Web 1.0's history with an aura of innocence, as if human motivation for attention somehow changed in the last 10 years.
Yeah I probably should've refined it. Actually now I'm thinking about it and there's probably even a qualitative difference between "attention" 1.0 and "attention" 2.0. To use a metaphor, it's kind of like artisanal attention vs. mass-produced attention.
1.0: One or two people find your site organically and engage with it on a deep level (because maybe there's nothing else out there for that particular interest).
2.0: You're hoping thousands of people see it and click "like."
So I'm using the mass-production analogy to capture the fact that there's more of it, an abundance of it, yet each one individually is less special or lower quality (but good enough), and mediated by a machine.
You can buy 20 sweaters at the store, all identical, all knitted in minutes by a machine, vs. having your grandma slave away over one sweater for two weeks of evenings. The machine-made sweaters are more precise and excellent in the technical sense, and there are more of them, while the grandma one is more special and one-of-a-kind, and has flaws, and has "flaws."
(The part that didn't change is that people still need sweaters.)
No, now people post things for Internet Points - likes and follows, rather than for the joy of sharing - and it shows in the kind of content that is popular. Some folks have optimised the hell out of their Skinner box solutions.
There is a joy in sharing, but is it really sharing if we're shouting into the void? People want to be part of a community, even if it's just a tiny one. We need that part of the web back.
Most of my personal websites shout into the void. Their content is so niche (poems, conlangs, web coding experiments, etc) that I would be genuinely surprised if any of them suddenly got popular.
I keep on doing my personal sites because I love creating stuff, and I love coding up quirky sites to display my mad work to those rare whoevers out there who share my niche interests and/or stumble across them by accident.
Building quirky websites is also a good way for me to relax because the sort of sites I get to work on professionally - almost always driven by this or that CMS or framework ... they don't inspire me anymore: samey samey samey stuff with just a tiny odd fun effect here'n'there.
According to the article, the translation of his twitter bio reads, "I live in harmony with the cats who have arrived in the tetra pot of Kashiwahama, Chiba Prefecture."
The cats didn’t arrive in a tetra pot, they live among the tetrapods, which are artificial concrete objects that are ubiquitously placed along the Japanese coastline, ostensibly to prevent coastal erosion, although some have said they are basically government pork projects for the all-powerful construction industry.
The translation is wrong. "棲み着く" means "live (in a place) for a long time", so "テトラポットに棲み着いた猫たち" is simply "the cats that have been living in the テトラポット since a long time ago". There is no "arrived" about it.
A monetized viral video can earn thousands of dollars in advertising revenue. It could even be tens of thousands of dollars if the video receives millions of views.
Quickly googled for some data, and this is from 2018:
"YouTube shares 55% of its ad revenue with video creators and books an average of $7.60 per 1,000 ad views. That means you get about $4.18 for every 1,000 views of ads shown on your videos."
So you really need a lot to make it worth the extra work
That is the utility value. It’s the primary utility value desired in human experience, even though most don’t grasp it directly, and instead think they want money, or to be a pop star, or to be a footballer, or to own x, y, z - but these are all manifestations of the fear of being forgotten. In fact, many, many people are miserable because they’ve chosen a means that they didn’t actually want, and the ends of fame are never quite what they expected.
Most of what humans do is to be noticed, to be remembered, for posterity.
I find the notion of being forgotten far more liberating.
Edit: this was meant as an honest query, so thanks for the downvote. I love how just shooting my point down with no thought or counterpoint gets upvoted, but asking a question in earnest gets downvoted.
As I’ve had nothing but “no you’re wrong”, I can only assume you don’t have a counter argument, and are just being contrary.
I didn't downvote you. FYI you are not even able to downvote a post that that is a response to one that yourself wrote.
You didn't put forward any compelling arguments for your point of view so I didn't bother to refute them.
It is a big question, but being remembered doesn't even register. Could not care the slightest. Now there are things that I do care about and they sort of implies that I will be remembered (by friends and family) if I get my way (wouldn't be a good friend if that wasn't the case).
But that is not why I do anything, and most certainly is not what motivates me.
Sometimes I create things; If people enjoy what I make I'm glad to have slightly improved their life. If not then I hope my existing didn't make it much worse.
I imagine that soon after I am dead, no one will remember my name. This brings me peace.
Defensively upvoted you, with the caveat that I would maybe redirect the concept of being "remembered" to a simpler one of just wanting a connection with other humans.
That “connection” is more the sexual fitness aspect, which I’ll grant is a pretty primal drive - but what are children if not a legacy, someone to remember you?
There is certainly that (basically sexual selection) but there's also the more generalized natural selection where, for example, foraging and hunting solo are both much more difficult to do successfully, so you inherit a social drive along the lines of "I feel anxious or depressed when I'm totally alone," and/or "I care how these other people around me feel and what they think of me."
Don't know if it is the HN effect or what, but the article says that the channel has 100 subscribers whereas at the moment of writing this comment, the number is around 12.2K.
What is up with the website? I felt like a <blink> tag was just a JS scroll away. Can we also drop the gosh-damned animations for text articles and just make it load quickly? What a mess. Some designer out there actually thinks they are clever when instead I didn’t even read the first paragraph.
When I saw this subhed, I thought immediately of Robin Seplut, a Youtuber I had never heard about until a month or so ago when Youtube put a 5-year-old video of him into my recs for some reason [0] (I like cat videos, and have clicked on them for years, but this was the first time I've seen one in my recs).
In any case, Seplut has 900K subscribers and dozens of videos of him feeding the 5,000 feral cats in his city. And the videos are a hoot – his most popular video has 46 million views [1].
The guy at the subject of this article seems to have videos with the same kind of appeal. I wonder how much of his obscurity has to do with his videos just not being labeled well?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTZUTvv_1Onm-f-533Hyurw
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfIqLAyNLY8