This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
For the past 3 weeks I have been inundated with ads paid for by USAFacts, a non-profit founded by Steve Balmer. In its own words, it's a "...not-for-profit, nonpartisan civic initiative making government data easy for all Americans to access and understand. We provide a data-driven portrait of the American population, US governments’ finances, and governments’ impact on society."
Some of these videos have a considerable number of views. The videos below have 10 million views each in less than a month, indicative of a large budget and a major media push. YouTube ads targeting the US are not known for being cheap, given that it's a high-SES audience. YouTube counts a view as someone who clicks the link and watches at least 10 seconds of the video, at a cost of roughly 10 cents a view. By my estimation, he has spent $2-4 million in promoting these videos, among others, in just a month alone. This is pocket change for him, but my question is, what does he hope to accomplish with this?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=JXKLoDXmZNo
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bl1HRu18X0Y
Although it describes itself as non-partisan, this does not preclude some sort of agenda or motive by its founder.
The 2028 US presidential election is still years away. The content itself is not outwardly partisan and it's hard to shoehorn it into any specific agenda. Perhaps he hopes viewers will become better informed about trade, to dissuade them from voting for the presumptive GOP nominee, that being JD Vance, who supports tariffs? But the ads are broadcast everywhere, not just battleground states. Or he's trying to cement a legacy as a lecturer and public intellectual , similar to Milton Friedman or Ray Dalio, who also have popular economics videos. Between this and Bill Gates' philanthropy, it shows that the ultra-wealthy tend to also be workaholics. They are not content just retiring with their money. The last thing I would want to do is get all dressed up and read for hours scripts for many videos. Sounds really tedious and boring.
I don't think it will work though. The era of the 'TV public intellectual', as exemplified by Donahue and Crossfire which pioneered the format, peaked in the 80s and 90s, before the internet.
I looked into the archeology of the channel, and the findings were interesting. The channel uploaded its first video on August 31, 2017 (a 2 minute clip of an interview with Kara Swisher), and the first "Just the Facts" video appeared that October. There have been over 120 videos posted in the past 8 years, yet only 12 of them cracked the million views threshold, and the first video to do this was a video about immigration posted on August 1, 2024. This was following a nine month hiatus, prior to which the previous video, about mammograms, only got about a thousand views.
The obvious explanation is that the videos are being heavily promoted. But I don't know if this is the case. It's my understanding that YouTubers generally don't pay for promotions, for the simple reason that it doesn't work. An alternative explanation is that the video times increased from under two minutes to about fifteen. By 2017, most YouTubers were making longer videos, and the algorithm had adapted accordingly. Making videos that short in 2017 indicated a channel that hadn't done basic research into the zeitgeist, as the kind of viewer looking for World Almanac type information isn't looking for a two minute video. That may have been true in 2006, when streaming video that worked was novel, but there was enough better content out there by 2017 that few people would bother. That being said, under 1000 views suggests no action on the algorithm and no promotion, just uploading and forgetting about it. If these videos had been promoted but failed to take off, I'd expect at least a few thousand views.
Part of the reason YoutUbers don't like promotions is that it gives a few extra views but doesn't do anything to promote the channel. Basically, it will show more people the video in their feed, but only a certain percentage will actually click, and only a certain percentage of those will watch for any appreciable amount of time, and only a certain percentage of those will actually subscribe or otherwise become a regular viewer. It also does nothing to boost numbers from sponsors, since sponsors look at other metrics like average view time and percentage who watched the whole thing when making decisions, and those numbers are harder to fake using bot farms. We don't have access to Balmer's number for that, but one number we do have is comments. Bots don't leave comments, and leaving a comment means you were invested enough to engage with the creator and other viewers. I'd imagine that comments are more valuable than views.
The trade and tariffs video got 12.5 million views and 688 comments. The DOE video got 11 million views and 232 comments. These numbers are pitiful. Looking at some of the channels that play to a smarter audience and looking at the numbers for videos that got around a million views:
None of these videos are about anything that could be described as a hot-button topic that will stir engagement based on subject matter alone. So generally speaking, an established channel with an audience can expect around a thousand comments per million views. There may be some point of diminishing returns where we can't expect that to scale linearly, but I've looked at a pretty wide sampling of channels and this holds. Take a channel like Deb Armstrong's which has an incredibly limited audience that has natural constraints on its growth. Ms. Armstrong unexpectedly won gold in women's GS in the 1984 Olympics and currently works as a ski instructor and youth race coach in Steamboat, CO.
The audience for ski videos in general is small. Only around 3% of Americans skied in the past year, and most of them went skiing once. Ms. Armstrong, furthermore, does not make videos designed to entertain a wide audience, or teach tricks, or review resorts, or have bro hangouts. She makes technical videos from the perspective of a ski instructor that appeal to the kind of skier who is actually interested in improving their technique. Bode Miller, Franz Klammer, and Lindsey Vonn have made appearances on her channel. But only briefly, and not in a way that exploited her connections. Her most-watched video is titled "Use of the Inside Leg to Change Turn Radius", which got 711,000 views and 437 comments.
If you noticed, this comment ratio is below the 1,000 comments per million views average, which is interesting because most of her videos get fewer than 100,000 views but over 100 comments, in line with or a little above the average. My suspicion is that this is an artifact of a video that triggers the algorithm for no conceivable reason. I doubt there are 700,000 people worldwide with any serious interest in learning how to use their inside leg to lead turns. Hell, most skiers have zero idea what that even means. (For the layman, most carved turns are initiated with the outside leg, which comes naturally to most skiers. Pros, however, will use the inside leg as well, which takes a certain amount of practice and intentionality to get the feel for since it's not a natural movement). The video features an unusually self-aware 12-year old whom Ms. Armstrong engages in a Socratic dialogue about how use of the inside leg has improved his skiing, complete with videos of him making buttery smooth turns. I imagine that the kid caused something in the algorithm to trip, which in turn caused the video to show up in the feeds of people who wouldn't usually see it, some of whom watched a bit of it before moving on with their lives. So it got more engagement than her other videos by dint of higher viewer numbers, but not as many as one would expect if her actual audience had grown to the point where she was regularly getting those kind of numbers.
The upshot of this is that these videos aren't being viewed due to a natural audience developing for the channel. Usually when that happens it's similar to Glenn and Friends Cooking, whose 2019 video where he attempted an old Coke recipe got millions of views for a channel that hadn't broken a thousand in nearly 15 years of regular uploading. While the video certainly grew his audience, he wasn't consistently getting numbers like that video. It currently sits at 18 million views, while number two has just over a million. It should be mentioned that Glenn is very up-front about how he's not chasing sponsorships, optimizing for the algorithm, or making videos for anything other than his own personal edification, which means that his numbers are skewed by him regularly breaking all of the "rules".
So it's clear that there's something going on other than Ballmer's videos hitting the algorithm at the right time. But how does this square with promotion when most YouTubers say promotion doesn't work? I think the answer lies in the fact that most YouTubers looking to pay for promotion don't have the kind of budget Ballmer has. If the average guy looking for a boost pays $500 to get his channel going, at $0.10 per view that only buys 5,000 views, which is nothing. 20,000 views per video, which seems to be the minimum I see among people who are doing it for a living, would cost $2,000, and would be cost-prohibitive for anyone trying to jump-start a channel.
And it gets even worse. Since real channels with real audiences get a certain level of engagement, this engagement drives the algorithm as much as it drives advertisers. If you boost your video, and it's shown to people who don't like it and who don't comment, it's a black mark against your channel as far as the algorithm is concerned. So rather than jump-start a moribund channel, it can actually make things worse, since the algorithm is now less-inclined to show people the video on its own. The only way this could possibly work is to keep feeding money in until enough of your natural audience finds the channel that it can support itself (say, 100,000 average views). But you're now paying millions month in and month out to hopefully get a channel big enough to generate a middle class income.
So there you have it. Ballmer is almost certainly paying through the nose to get a synthetic YouTube audience, and I've just spent seveal paragraphs stating the obvious conclusion that OP reached in the original post. As to why he's doing this when he doesn't seem to be pushing any kind of agenda, I dunno, maybe he likes it? Maybe he wants a bigger audience and just figures that since he has the money he'll throw money at it? I don't know how billionaires think.
Do you think he wants to run for office? It worked for Trump.
On the other hand, this would be for parodies of the "Developers! Developers! Developers!" speech that was mocked online. But that was a quarter century ago, wow.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link