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DarkViperAU-Essays

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While I would personally argue that anyone who actually lives by this creed is a massive dick, this is still a philosophy that reactors embody wholeheartedly.

Surprisingly, I've directly heard people say of Asmongold that his embodiment of this philosophy is a positive trait and not merely evidence of his disregard for others. I could imagine why Necrit does not care about such things though, because it seems in his world we should all exist for the pleasure of those already successful and just be happy for the notice.

'''Necrit:'''

But the question now is, is it worth it? Is it even beneficial to have people reacting to your videos? Or will it harm your channel?

After I released my first Riot MMO video, it decently quickly hit 1 million views, after which it stopped and then it slowly crept up close to 2 millions. And during that initial burst of views, as other people reacted to it, the viewer ratios stayed consistent.

For example, Soda Popin's reaction got about 50% of the original video. This became true for both the first video and the second video.

Asfan stayed consistently around 17% and Asmongold stayed slightly below 3 times the original views, because that's just the kind of content he does.

But these ratios also stayed the same when I was talking about Ghostcrawler leaving. No matter the success of the original video, the reactions always stayed consistent with the ratios relating to their own audiences.

This taught me that, at least in my case, there was no way the reactions could be taking views from me. Because if this was the case, if the reactions were taking views from me, then after the new audience learned about my videos, and if you mirrored it after my audience learned about the reactions, then over time, as I released more videos, people would have to avoid my videos and wait for the reactions to come out.

Or in other words, my views would have to go down and the other views would have to go up.

But that didn't happen, there was no funneling of viewers and everything stayed the same.

'''(Back to Matt)'''

So there are surprisingly 5 levels at which Necrit is wrong in this general section. The first is, as has been made apparent before, he assumes the only thing in existence that a reaction video can negatively impact is the original video that it was made from.

The second, he disregards the other ways that a reaction can potentially negatively impact the original video other than the singular way that he listed.

The third, the phenomenon that he seeks to test for, that being people expecting a reaction and so skipping over the original video in this particular context makes no sense.

The fourth level, how he is testing for this phenomenon doesn't make any sense.

Lastly, the conclusions that he draws from his nonsensical analysis are not supported by the data available.

So firstly, Necrit is hard locked into the idea that what reaction videos extract from is purely the original video, but obviously an Asmongold reaction can take from any of Necrit's videos. Maybe a viewer who would have ended up watching something from Necrit's back catalogue is instead now watching one of the 10 videos that Asmongold ripped off today.

Reactions have an impact on the entire market for content, because we are each putting out videos on the market, competing with each other for the finite amount of advertising space and eyeballs that exist each day. We are seeking to inspire interest and maintain it, necessarily keeping viewers away from wherever else they would have spent their time. The platform cannot support infinite success for creators, let alone infinite Asmongold-sized creators.

Asmongold spams out the reaction videos that he does to take as much of the market away from others for himself. I think an example might help, so let's take a look at Asmongold's first reaction to Necrit, which currently has 4 million views.

Obviously 4 million people didn't come into existence to watch this reaction video, nor were 4 million people sitting in a back room somewhere hoping that one day that Asmongold might release this reaction video so they could animate themselves, watch it, and then go back into storage.

In reality, all these people are just going about their lives, attempting to satiate the needs that led to them to seek out content in the first place. So for Asmongold to get 4 million views in this video, around 80 million impressions were given to people, 76 million of which were ignored, and 4 million that were clicked.

So we can then ask, what would have happened if this reaction video did not exist? Furthermore, is a world with this reaction better or worse for the people who actually create the content that is reacted to?

In answering these questions, it is important to note that people do not traditionally come to YouTube for a specific video. Views come from the recommendation algorithm or our extensions of it.

Like you get recommended a video that calls you to subscribe to a creator and so you eventually watch their videos in your sub feed, but ultimately that all stems from the recommendation at the beginning.

It seems clear that YouTube's algorithm seeks to give people videos that they will want to click on and that will keep them on the platform now and have them return later on. The algorithm's ability to achieve this goal is not made significantly better or worse because of the existence of this reaction. In the same way that Asmongold's existence in general does not make the machine learning at the heart of this algorithm better or worse either. We can therefore conclude that in a world without this reaction, roughly 80 million impressions would have gone to other videos. Videos that the algorithm believes that the people seeing those impressions would want to watch would keep them on the platform and even better have them return. It would have a roughly 5% success rate getting 4 million people to click and so 4 million views and all the subsequent benefits, additional exposure, money, recommendations and so on will be spread out amongst a bunch of different content creators.

So which reality is better? Asmongold getting all the native views and exposure for doing nothing at all except watching YouTube video and re-uploading it or those who actually do the work to create things actually gain the rewards for doing so. Their video is further being specifically targeted towards those who want to watch them rather than through Asmongold which is entirely untargeted. It's a no-brainer for me and this is the comparison that can be made for every single reaction video that is on this platform.

To reiterate, while Necrit falsely believes that his original videos cannot lose views to the reactions to them, it is more problematic that he is not considering the impact of all reaction videos on his entire catalogue of content. Every single day there is a spot where his face and videos would have been shown but he just gets edged out by a reaction video, spammed out by one of the many Asmongold-like content farms.

Every single day there is a person who would have found and ended up watching his videos but instead ends up watching one of the dozen that Asmongold released today. Every day the algorithm thinks, "Why give Necrit exposure? He can get out what like 3 videos a week at best? I can get that exposure to Asmongold instead. He can release 50 high-quality videos in the exact same amount of time."

The harm is consistent day to day but will slowly increase over time as more and more of the market is taken up by reaction content.

The algorithm seems to favour already successful channels that release more content at a consistent frequency. Therefore those who actually create content will never be collectively as algorithmically favoured as reactors who are not burdened with the costs of actual creation.

Necrit is supporting a system that specifically works and desires to out-compete him in generating interest in viewers and captivating them long-term. Worse, he is supporting this system knowing that he can never compete with its output unless he too finds a bunch of grunts who want to be paid in exposure to make him videos.

At the end of the day, creating one-stop shops for all the best content on YouTube but if it's no one but those who own those channels. As an aside, in many ways it is even worse for new creators. In ages past, successful content creators would burn out and quit, giving the chance for new creators to rise up and replace them.

But now old fossils like Asmongold who would have been out-competed or buckled under strain years ago can instead use reaction content to avoid all the work that normally inspires this drop-off. They can continually feast on the output of new rising star creators to maintain their current status.

So that was level one, we've got four more to go, so let's continue with level two.