I am finding it hard to know what to make of youtube. Leave aside for the moment the squabbles about copyright and just consider videos which have been made from scratch for youtube. There is a considerable variety. Here is an example of vlogging from an Australian student of Vietnamese extraction, Nathalie Tran, who vlogs regularly:
Note in passing that Google is still struggling to figure out how to make money from its expensive acquisition, the “voluntary” ad at the bottom of the screen (click the x at its top right to get rid of it) is one such experiment.
Nathalie typically gets 0.1M – 1M views. The videos are well made. They usually feature a scene of play-acting with two people both played by Nathalie (the camera switching from one to the other, so never both in the same shot). The example above has her mother playing the other role, which is unusual. Of course, Nathalie is young and attractive, which no doubt helps the number of views and is reflected in the comments. There are typically thousands, a significant proportion commenting on her physical appearance, eg:
nice boobs
wow ur really hot
or slightly more charming variants like
asian girl with aussie accent=I love you……hi from boston
You’re hot! (personlity, soul wise
or, just occasionally, less charming variants like
i make a point to? never listen to women even more so when they are dirty half breed slags like this
But most comments are about the content. So this is high quality, low key video which is mainly watched for the content. Now consider:
Again this is one of a fairly large set. This time the videos are also shown on the website. The one above currently has about 1.9M views. It is complete nonsense. The question is why people are watching it (and all the other similar videos). There are currently about 10,000 comments on youtube about the one above. Flip to all comments, display only comments (earliest first). Most of the comments are of this type:
I was very very skeptical but tried it anyway to try and prove a few friends wrong. I don’t know how but it worked. Insane!
This is old, people have been? doing this with AA batteries forever.
I use this trick to power? my triple A battery charger for endless energy!!
With the occasional bemused person not seeing the joke:
Are you all on drugs?
After a while the comments get a little more elaborate, like this advice to someone having difficulty getting the hack to work:
you probably used the video side (yellow), try the audio, also the radio (like the TV has to be warmed up, you can’t just cold start it let it play for a few hours for all the circuitry to warm up first then retry and report back
After a while people started playing it straighter, like these three comments:
FAKE You need 110/240AC to run a tube television as shown because the transformer boost that up to 30,000 volts DC to power the tube, if you insert less volts you get less increase from the transformer and the tube wont work. You can buy TV’s that run on 12 or 24 volts DC they have bigger transformers and still need more Amps than a big pile of AAA batteries. Your power lead clearly? comes from behind the cupboard not the TV and if this worked you would of shown it running in a field.
How the hell is this hacking? Any person with a basic understanding of elektricity could figure this out…
Four faults:
1: Only the + pole of? the battery is (possibly) connected to the pole of the wire connected to the plug.
2: The – pole of the battery is not connected to the other pole, because somebody forgot to strip of the plastic.
3: No common household TV would work with DC, the transformer for the 16kV CRT would not work (google DC transformer).
4: A mere 1,5V from the battery would not even be enough to turn on the relay (switch) powering the rest of the TV.
The most recent comments seem to have a greater proportion of believers, or at least of those who do not instantly reject it as nonsense.
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