Attention engineering is how the charts are topped. Media producers knew this decades before the social media, and perfected it by the late 90's. Avoiding extremely popular stuff is just common sense if you want any real authenticity.

> when you're creating informal communications to other humans.

What he’s creating is fame and money for himself, the fact that it’s by doing videos is incidental. That’s why he also got into ghost kitchens, a game show full of corner cutting, and a theme park in Saudi Arabia open for under two months.

It’s basically drug dealing. Which is fine if you’re doing it for fun, but doing it to make money develops the most antisocial parts of a person

With enough humans, it starts to look like a machine

Appealing isn’t the goal. Catching someone’s attention is the goal. (Nobody thinks the balloons on the cars at the car dealership look good but statistics prove that balloons sell cars.) Then, triggering someone’s curiosity, which is more where the copy comes in. (You can increase your click count with this one weird trick!)

You’re subject to it every bit as much as me or anybody else, but for whatever reason, we have different triggers than the Mr. Beast crowd. People that think they’re immune to it after having it pointed out to them are likely just less aware than most how their emotions are being manipulated by things they don’t even consciously perceive. Sales guys love people like that.

It doesn't have to be appealing, it has to make you click.

Car crashes are not appealing, and yet it is something most people are tempted to look at. Many people think of dopamine as the pleasure hormone, not really, it is the motivation hormone, pleasure is one way to achieve that, but so is horror.

It makes evolutionary sense, if something horrible happens, you better pay attention, to get prepared so that it doesn't happen to you.

I don't know the details of the psychological response to Mr Beast thumbnails, and I think neither does My Beast himself, the analytics say it works and that the only thing that matters to him.

Novelty goes a long way, old enough YouTube video are optimized for their time period and end up looking stylized in their own ways.

Fashion swaps styles fast enough most people can’t afford full wardrobes before it changes, which by default keeps each style looking fresh.

Maybe not appealing but interesting. Distinct enough from the rest of the thumbnails on the page to trigger an impulsive tap or click.

A small number of creators have had testing tools provided by YouTube for years.

He also changes the thumbnails and titles of videos once published, sometimes up to dozen times in the first day.

He also has dozens of channels for different languages, so can test thumbnails and other tweaks with those.

Youtube lets you A/B test thumbnails as a creator and see response rates, for instance.

https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/393332200/you-can-...

We all know the Microsoft progress bars reached 99% easily and had an infinite last % in the '90s. I'm still not convinced that was by accident.

It used to be very good, but now the personalized recommendations kind of suck. Seems like they enormously regressed, and basically do the 2009 move of just shoving the last type of video you watched in your face 37 times.

If you turn off you watch history in account settings, then youtube.com is just a passive-aggressive black screen telling you to turn it back on. It’s beautiful.

When you click over to subscriptions, you see only the stuff that you subscribed to, and nothing else.

Recommendations on a video are based on you subscriptions and the current video, and nothing else.

I could never go back.

> Opening the front page in a private view is a scary place of hyper-optimised drama and attention seeking.

Huh? Opening the front page of youtube in a private view (with no existing youtube history) shows you a completely blank page.

From what I can tell, based on an excerpt of an interview with Colin, Mr Beast had a bunker-related video and visited Colin's bunker. As a viewer of Colin's channel and not Mr Beast, it seemed very strange, but makes more sense if there was a more substantial collaboration taking place in a different video stream.

It's all a scam.

> [1] I once worked on a system that kept logs of certain types of query so it could display a guess of how long things were going to take and a progress bar to go with it, but this was actually more irritating to the users than no progress display as it would sometime jump from a few % directly to done or sit at 99% for ages (in the end the overly complicated guessing method was replaced by a simple spinner).

In the Tiger era, the OS X start-up progress bar worked this way—it kept track of how long boot-ups would take, and then displayed its best guess based on that.