Not paywalled, you can just click “No thanks” on the popup.

  • JustinHanagan@kbin.socialOP
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    3 months ago

    First of all, thank you for the fantastic feedback.

    We live in a society that commodifies everything, and as human-made content becomes rarer, more people like Veritsaium will be presented with more and increasingly lucrative opportunities to sell bits and pieces of their authenticity for manufactured content (be it by AI or a marketing team), while new people that could be like Veritsaium will be drowned out by the heaps of bullshit clogging up the web.

    This is exactly the point I was trying to make in the last section, except I used MrBeast as an example because I felt like it was easier for readers to accept his propensity for cutting corners to make a buck. But yes, I agree, things will get worse. Before it was common knowledge that cigarettes caused cancer, a whole lot of people had to get cancer.

    I also think it’s important to remember that people don’t actually follow Veritasium directly. They follow him indirectly by means of YouTube. If people could actually follow him directly he wouldn’t need to worry about competing with AI crap for the attention of YouTube’s algorithm. But of course, YouTube would never allow that.

    • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
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      3 months ago

      I also think it’s important to remember that people don’t actually follow Veritasium directly. They follow him indirectly by means of YouTube. If people could actually follow him directly he wouldn’t need to worry about competing with AI crap for the attention of YouTube’s algorithm. But of course, YouTube would never allow that.

      People can and do follow him directly: https://www.patreon.com/veritasium

      He has 7,463 people actively giving him money each month, entirely divorced from YT.

      His continued engagement with the YT algorithms is about growing his viewership. This is true for basically all the largest YT and Twitch creators, who have to diversify their revenue streams off of just those platforms, in order to get truly large (and certainly more stable).