I mean, I am becoming pretty jaded and on top of that disconnected from what people younger than me are doing on the internet, so I am primed to believe that there is entire universes of communities that I am never going to know ever existed (hell, I spend so much time on the internet and never knew of Andrew Tate's "the most influential influencer" existence untill he got arrested), so yeah, at first glance I found believable the story of a sizeable hidden group of people that genuinely or ironically engage with these cat videos.
I meam, on the spanish speaking sphere there is a trend of content farms uploading tons of AI generated images of african kids building complicated stuff (cars, sculptures, mech suits) out of materials (sand, rocks or glass bottles) and all comments are middle aged presumably catholics going "oh, you are very talented, may God bless you so you can follow your dreams" or just "🙏amen"
I kind of want to tell you that maybe you are just a pioneer looking from the outside; yeah, maybe all of the thousands of real people among bots are not the kind of people that read nor will they ever make a video essay about the virtues of their community, but most memes are not documented by outsiders before their peak of popularity so I wouldn't be surprised of seeing a huge insular group just existing without anybody batting an eye.
Out of experience, when you, prompted by a random opinion, start to check youtube profiles to see who they are as people is because your angst is so great that your heart races and you start to gnash your teeth, so yeah, it is not a bad idea to go outside.
Apologies for not answering this sooner, and I feel awkward answering so long after the fact—but oh well.
All but one of your points are spot-on. My sister spent a lot of time on 4chan in the early 2010s, and she's told me how surreal it was when it was in the media spotlight around 2014–2016. All of these journalists were *shocked* that an online community like that existed, didn't quite know what to make of it, and were inclined to judge it without an ounce of charity or generosity after assessing it as complete outsiders who never tried to integrate themselves with or understand its culture. The vaporwave scene was the same way for a while, before journos and hipsters started taking notice.
In the past, there has been some unspecified but real size or extent/intensity of influence that an online community can't exceed if it wants to remain obscure. Professional and amateur cultural journalists, bloggers, gawkers, etc. are incentivized to shine lights onto and examine phenomena like these, and at a certain point, a large and durable online trend must catch their notice. But then again, I never saw any confused Slate or Salon columnists posting befuddled articles about the YouTube Poop scene, so...this one might just be off their radars, or too apparently trivial to rouse their interest—which is surprising for a bunch of videos that have supposedly been viewed by tens of millions of people in just a few months.
But we're not really talking about a scene with regard to these Sia Cat videos. If they and their viewers constitute a "culture," it seems to be a rather unidirectional and atomized one, and it's very hard to tell how much of it is astroturfed by bots and paid commenters, and how much of it is organic—as organic as a cynical money-making scheme can be, anyway.
The point which you're wrong about, I'm sorry to say, is that these videos made me *angry.* I felt compelled to write about them because I find them fascinating, not because they piss me off.
I mean, I don't know if I used the correct words, but I meant gnashing of teeth as in that sort of harrowing angst, almost of existential dread, of feeling like you are going to be in hell forever and it's all your fault, which to be honest I don't know exactly where I picked that interpretation from, I didn't mean to imply you were angry at someone, sorry about that. Maybe I was projecting too much, because I do check profiles when I am mad at someone.
80 million people watched itnon one month, right. If you believe that, I've got some powdered water I can sell you too.
Its beyond riduclous now. Im pretty sure these platforms themselves are hiring people to do the whole package; fake account, AI generated whatever, bot generated comments.
I mean, this has obviously been the business model since day 1. Any "content creator" (just feel the bile creep up your throat as you say that phrase, eh?) making big numbers on youtube (just for example) is obviously just an actor paid by youtube and/or the manufacturers of the products pushed in their videos. Only difference between that and television is that, because this this same thing happened on TV and people called BS, there are laws about that; laws which are largely skirted because this stuff is on the internet.
With AI youtube weve now achieved complete technological entertainment Ouroboros. The AI, makes the video, the AI watches (i.e. view counts) the video, and AI comments on the video. Want to be a youtuber? Humans need not apply.
The logical end to this is when the money runs out. The money comes from advertisers paying for eyeballs attched to bank accounts. Once the snake is a enough of a closed loop that the number of those bank acount eyes drops to an irrelevant number, that's the end unless something causes a course correction.
Yup. Dead Internet Theory. Honestly I'm kind of hoping it causes the web to implode on itself. Cyberspace stopped being fit for human consumption/occupation many years ago. I'd really like to spend a whole lot less time gawking at it, but hey, I'm addicted like everyone else :D
actually thank you for this, I'm going to go outside for a bit.
I imagine at least some of the real accounts posting this are stolen and helmed by bots. Though, my paranoia blinded me to the possibility of humans assimilating into bots.
I remember youtube channel Folding Ideas did a documentaries on trash cg baby movies that were meant to view farm from toddlers, and the fake recipes made in anthologies of short form videos years before LLMs could string together sentences.
Youtube should favor long comments over inane uwu. Or it should have before LLMs came onto the scene. I wonder if LLMs can be trained to recognize LLMs? I often have to judge by the unnaturally even tone and the half non-sequitur half thesis closing statement.
Hah! When I gave this a quick skim while I was at work, I got to the last line and thought you were talking about my writing. I was like "okay, harsh, but fair."
I've heard of those cracked-out AI-generated kids "shows," but never felt especially compelled to look at them. Since grown-ass adults have such a well-known predilection for cats and comfort-food content lately, I figure whoever's uploading these AI cat slideshows are hoping to reel in as many teens and twentysomethings as parents who shut their kids up by giving them an iPad in lieu of a pacifier. But who knows?
I'm getting to the point where I see any "illustration" that looks like it spent more than an hour in Photoshop or Illustrator and assume it was made by AI.
They could also be cloned accounts too. Like a bot has copied a defunct account and uploaded old family videos to appear "real" in the comments. Which is very twisted if so.
I mean, I am becoming pretty jaded and on top of that disconnected from what people younger than me are doing on the internet, so I am primed to believe that there is entire universes of communities that I am never going to know ever existed (hell, I spend so much time on the internet and never knew of Andrew Tate's "the most influential influencer" existence untill he got arrested), so yeah, at first glance I found believable the story of a sizeable hidden group of people that genuinely or ironically engage with these cat videos.
I meam, on the spanish speaking sphere there is a trend of content farms uploading tons of AI generated images of african kids building complicated stuff (cars, sculptures, mech suits) out of materials (sand, rocks or glass bottles) and all comments are middle aged presumably catholics going "oh, you are very talented, may God bless you so you can follow your dreams" or just "🙏amen"
I kind of want to tell you that maybe you are just a pioneer looking from the outside; yeah, maybe all of the thousands of real people among bots are not the kind of people that read nor will they ever make a video essay about the virtues of their community, but most memes are not documented by outsiders before their peak of popularity so I wouldn't be surprised of seeing a huge insular group just existing without anybody batting an eye.
Out of experience, when you, prompted by a random opinion, start to check youtube profiles to see who they are as people is because your angst is so great that your heart races and you start to gnash your teeth, so yeah, it is not a bad idea to go outside.
Apologies for not answering this sooner, and I feel awkward answering so long after the fact—but oh well.
All but one of your points are spot-on. My sister spent a lot of time on 4chan in the early 2010s, and she's told me how surreal it was when it was in the media spotlight around 2014–2016. All of these journalists were *shocked* that an online community like that existed, didn't quite know what to make of it, and were inclined to judge it without an ounce of charity or generosity after assessing it as complete outsiders who never tried to integrate themselves with or understand its culture. The vaporwave scene was the same way for a while, before journos and hipsters started taking notice.
In the past, there has been some unspecified but real size or extent/intensity of influence that an online community can't exceed if it wants to remain obscure. Professional and amateur cultural journalists, bloggers, gawkers, etc. are incentivized to shine lights onto and examine phenomena like these, and at a certain point, a large and durable online trend must catch their notice. But then again, I never saw any confused Slate or Salon columnists posting befuddled articles about the YouTube Poop scene, so...this one might just be off their radars, or too apparently trivial to rouse their interest—which is surprising for a bunch of videos that have supposedly been viewed by tens of millions of people in just a few months.
But we're not really talking about a scene with regard to these Sia Cat videos. If they and their viewers constitute a "culture," it seems to be a rather unidirectional and atomized one, and it's very hard to tell how much of it is astroturfed by bots and paid commenters, and how much of it is organic—as organic as a cynical money-making scheme can be, anyway.
The point which you're wrong about, I'm sorry to say, is that these videos made me *angry.* I felt compelled to write about them because I find them fascinating, not because they piss me off.
I mean, I don't know if I used the correct words, but I meant gnashing of teeth as in that sort of harrowing angst, almost of existential dread, of feeling like you are going to be in hell forever and it's all your fault, which to be honest I don't know exactly where I picked that interpretation from, I didn't mean to imply you were angry at someone, sorry about that. Maybe I was projecting too much, because I do check profiles when I am mad at someone.
80 million people watched itnon one month, right. If you believe that, I've got some powdered water I can sell you too.
Its beyond riduclous now. Im pretty sure these platforms themselves are hiring people to do the whole package; fake account, AI generated whatever, bot generated comments.
I mean, this has obviously been the business model since day 1. Any "content creator" (just feel the bile creep up your throat as you say that phrase, eh?) making big numbers on youtube (just for example) is obviously just an actor paid by youtube and/or the manufacturers of the products pushed in their videos. Only difference between that and television is that, because this this same thing happened on TV and people called BS, there are laws about that; laws which are largely skirted because this stuff is on the internet.
With AI youtube weve now achieved complete technological entertainment Ouroboros. The AI, makes the video, the AI watches (i.e. view counts) the video, and AI comments on the video. Want to be a youtuber? Humans need not apply.
The logical end to this is when the money runs out. The money comes from advertisers paying for eyeballs attched to bank accounts. Once the snake is a enough of a closed loop that the number of those bank acount eyes drops to an irrelevant number, that's the end unless something causes a course correction.
Yup. Dead Internet Theory. Honestly I'm kind of hoping it causes the web to implode on itself. Cyberspace stopped being fit for human consumption/occupation many years ago. I'd really like to spend a whole lot less time gawking at it, but hey, I'm addicted like everyone else :D
actually thank you for this, I'm going to go outside for a bit.
I imagine at least some of the real accounts posting this are stolen and helmed by bots. Though, my paranoia blinded me to the possibility of humans assimilating into bots.
I remember youtube channel Folding Ideas did a documentaries on trash cg baby movies that were meant to view farm from toddlers, and the fake recipes made in anthologies of short form videos years before LLMs could string together sentences.
Youtube should favor long comments over inane uwu. Or it should have before LLMs came onto the scene. I wonder if LLMs can be trained to recognize LLMs? I often have to judge by the unnaturally even tone and the half non-sequitur half thesis closing statement.
Hah! When I gave this a quick skim while I was at work, I got to the last line and thought you were talking about my writing. I was like "okay, harsh, but fair."
I've heard of those cracked-out AI-generated kids "shows," but never felt especially compelled to look at them. Since grown-ass adults have such a well-known predilection for cats and comfort-food content lately, I figure whoever's uploading these AI cat slideshows are hoping to reel in as many teens and twentysomethings as parents who shut their kids up by giving them an iPad in lieu of a pacifier. But who knows?
I'm getting to the point where I see any "illustration" that looks like it spent more than an hour in Photoshop or Illustrator and assume it was made by AI.
They could also be cloned accounts too. Like a bot has copied a defunct account and uploaded old family videos to appear "real" in the comments. Which is very twisted if so.