What is clickbait? Honesty & the philosophy of clickbait.

clickbait clickbait is not
really a problem for me as a content creator the problem i have most often is people who accuse me of making click bait and they then criticize or attack my videos not for something they actually say but for something they imagine to be my ulterior motive the point i'm actually secretly covertly driving at like full for a very abstract example there's an obsessive hater of this channel who's been sending me harassment threats defamation for for years phandar sheriff defender who is convinced if i make a video talking about nina and randa and how their comedy isn't funny or their music videos are awful or making any particular point about nina miranda it can't possibly be that that's the real meaning my real motivation in making the video that i've come on to really talk about that topic that's there in the title and thumbnail no this must be clickbait it must be something else i'm driving at and then he imagines what it is i'm i'm driving at and then criticizes me for that he ends up criticizing me for things i've never said i don't mean i don't intend at all i used to work in book publishing i really think to speak a little bit philosophically about clickbait i really think click bait is something that's been with us long before we had the internet my father once received as a gift a big hardcover respectable looking book that was titled the history of irish erotic art from the early celtic period through the renaissance so he receives this book i completely forget who gave him the book if i ever if i ever knew right he receives this book he looks at the cover he's completely baffled irish erotic art my father was an art historian and a museum curator you know he's thinking ancient celtic irish erotic art what could this possibly be about you know almost every culture in the world has some history of erotic art whether it's ancient egypt or ancient china but you know ancient greece and rome tons of irish or whatever he opens the book every single page is blank and if you turn the book over and read the back they really leaned into the joke there were you know quotations from from other from alleged academics and experts saying you know this book is really compendius it really really thoroughly researches and discusses every example uh this this sort of thing and the point is you open the book and inside there is nothing at all i remember i looked into it and uh the same publisher had done the same joke again and again by putting a different dust jacket a different cover on the same printed book so whoever was came with this idea made money out of it but just point out that is click bait without a mouse without a click without the internet and in terms of the book publishing world that's not a problem that's becoming more marginal or more rare it's actually becoming more common and more pernicious i now have the experience of buying books on amazon over the internet where i don't get to see the book i don't get to open the book or you know leaf through the book before buying it and there are many cases where the title of the book or the cover of the book will not tell you what's inside will really mislead you as there was inside i think every single time so far i've managed to get a refund maybe there are maybe there are one times i'm forgetting where i was really disappointed and i was i was stuck with the book anyway and was was stuck uh paying for it but actually the scope for the clickbait phenomenon uh it goes far beyond the internet it goes far beyond youtube and what we're talking about here in principle is where the title of the video or the cover image of the video what it is you'd click on what describes the article or the film whatever it may be is fundamentally misleading whether that's for comedic purposes or not whether that's in order to make money reach a larger audience or not this certainly happened in the golden era of newspapers a great deal uh tabloid newspapers were most infamous for this for having shocking headlines and even the first few sentences of an article seeming to promise you that some terrible crime has been committed some terrible some exciting new evidence has been revealed i still i still see this happening with the british royal family that's the only i don't know why it is but like somehow people feel they can get away with saying anything it remembers the british royal family and people will pick this up and buy the newspaper and then if they actually start reading the article they find in effect it's clickbait there's nothing of the sort there at all now my personal problem with this is that i see the way in which the culture of clickbait gives people the license to criticize me not for what my point actually is and not for what my interests actually are but for what they construe to be my interests what they construe to be my implied meaning which may not be you know what i have to say at all now i have made well over 1 000 videos on my channel have we crossed 2 000 yet or maybe getting closer to 2000 videos i have had well over 4 million views we are getting closer to five million views now okay i cannot say to you i have absolutely never made a video that by this criterion was clickbait i can remember one video where as a joke i really had an intentionally misleading title one video out of about two thousand um but it's it's very very rare way way more than 99 of my videos the title and the image you see before you click on the view it really is trying to tell you what the video is about now if you want to judge me for being an idiot or you want to judge me for having a kind of sincere interest in a lot of things you think are boring or trivial that's fair i would really encourage you know fair criticism and maybe that's part of what it is i mean i know fandaar is not the only one phandar is the craziest and most passionate critic of this kind i think some people kind of can't accept that i would really sincerely be engaged in a critique of nina miranda or someone like a natural vegan that there must be an ulterior motive that this must be clickbait there must be something else i'm driving but i am like all this stuff when i make a youtube video talking about batman and what i think is wrong with the latest batman movie that's what the title says that's what the image shows you and that's really sincerely what i'm talking about when i talk about game of thrones sorry i was just scrolling through my my recent videos every single one i'm looking at several hundred videos here most of the time when i'm talking about something quite trivial this way from my own perspective i have some kind of reasonably profound point i want to make about it like from my perspective what i have to say about batman is profound and important and interesting even if batman is trivial and from my perspective what i have to say in my critique of a natural vegan and nina and randa and these other personalities james aspie maddie limberner personalities primarily who have known through through vegan activism some sometimes some other way from my perspective it actually is profound and worth talking about and i'm sincerely motivated by the the topics at hand now the other problem with the sort of click bait mentality i don't mean the mentality of people creating clickbait but people perceiving my work as clickbait is that they're they're often overlooking the extent to which there are profoundly important things that the two people having the dispute through youtube videos really care about and an outsider might not even be able to perceive what those things are so this is one of the reasons why i'm humoring fandar with this response video phandar is not vegan phandar has no interest in vegan activism and phandar's interpretation of why a natural vegan became furious with me is a hundred percent wrong what made a natural vegan snap from being kind of to some extent my friend she was actually quite positively disposed of she spoke positively about me in a number of videos she made videos specifically uh supporting me she had the link to my channel from her channel she did a lot of stuff for a brief time she was openly a fan of my channel um spoke positive both of me as a person and the channel and then she snapped and became my enemy she started saying vicious things to ask me why did that happen for many many years she really passionately supported propounded and cared about the philosophy of peter singer i don't know to what extent she's changed to what he said she's lost her passion or addressed in the workpiece center but i could i can definitely say peter singer meant more to her five years ago than socrates has ever meant to me or aristotle has ever meant to me she really like her sense of identity her sense of why she was vegan why she was utilitarian the meaning of life what it was she discovered and learned in her universe degree peter singer was a big deal to her really big inspiration in life and she was uh she was hurt to hear me in such an offhand self-confident way just completely insulting and denigrating and discarding the intellectual tradition of peterson like his work and also his influence on others and indeed the whole utilitarian tradition before him and all the people who followed his footsteps which is which is sincere now at that time i think i already had made some videos talking about that in in greater depth uh but part of what she's saying because the the emails are public part of what she's furious about is that i would dare to say these things without backing them up without substantiating them further and i did rush at that time to say like okay i'll i'll explain further what exactly my position is in peterson today there are at least 10 youtube videos talking about philosophy peter singer veganism animal rights what the conflicts are between them peter singer his view of intelligence and life and death and murder and all these all these funny things i i mean it's it's a complicated peculiar thing in the history of philosophy and peter singer is very unusual because he's kind of an academic philosopher but he's ended up becoming famous on mainstream television and look i have a human heart i mean maybe when i was 14 or 15 years old i thought woody allen was a real intellectual maybe it was 13 i don't know i don't know how far back this goes and you know like you have this moment of recognition like woody allen is not a particularly intelligent person like woody allen you know he made a couple of funny films in the 1960s and everyone acts like he's this intellectual but i mean why why would anyone respect what you have some point where you're maybe an image you built up and you know for me really like what did it mean to be an intellectual or be a creative person uh in the 21st century i was looking to people like woody allen that today i just laugh at i just score and see the most no significance i see no value in their work whatsoever but look i have a human heart it is very easy for me to relate to and i could feel it in a natural vegan's videos where she talked about peter singer again this is videos made more than five years ago now i could tell that this really was a big deal this thing she was really passionate it's very easy for someone to come in from the outside and just say oh no this is clickbait you know this isn't what the dispute is really about that's not what's really going on here you're driving at something else for some with some ulterior motive some other reason no unnatural vegan really cares about the philosophy and intellectual legacy of peter singer i'm really a very harsh critic of it or you could say i really despise it what did a natural vegan do to try to hurt me in response she tried to frame me as being a phony scholar of buddhism which she did a very poor job of now probably for a lot of other people that would have really hurt their feelings you got the wrong guy i am a terrible scholar but you know okay go right ahead you know uh i'm not real easy to intimidate i'm not really it's not really to hurt my feelings that way and if you read the correspondence between us i'm saying to her things because you know i didn't know she was going to continue talking to him saying this like do you know what it's like to really work hard on something and research something for 10 years do you know what it's like to really become an expert in a field with like 10 years of hard work that involves learning a language and sleeping under a mosquito net and chopping firewood with an axe and learning another language learning another language so you can learn another language and studying the history in poland like you know like think a little bit about what i did and what this means to me and i said look if you want to criticize my work on buddhism you're welcome great nothing could be more welcome i would love to have other youtubers or other go ahead here are the links to my articles read the articles say i'm a terrible scholar of buddhism or tell me where i'm wrong or tell people where it is great but if you're going to denounce me as a scholar of buddhism actually look at my work and think about what i did during whatever you can pick five years ten years whatever period of time you want you want to look at so you know in that case it's kind of more hypothetical than actual but she felt i was striking out at her and hurting her by saying these insulting things about peter singer from my perspective i'm not i'm really i'm really genuinely insulting peter cena um and i think she tries to she tries to hurt me in return expecting that i'm going to be really defensive if she starts to call me out of buddhism so for an outsider these things may be you know maybe easily misinterpreted maybe easily misrepresented and certainly i've seen this happen again again with many many disputes and people now admittedly not all of my conflicts with other youtubers are so profound what i had to say about nina and randa that a small number of people remain obsessed with for whatever reason melissa is here off camera i had an interview lined up once with another vegan activist this was a guy who uh he had experience in the early days of anonymous for the voiceless in chiang mai thailand he was a white guy who was involved he got on the ground level with paul bashir and in chiang mai thailand i thought we were going to have a long conversation about vegan activism and a whole maybe politics of thailand maybe there were kind of a lot of things worth talking and the minute he gets on the phone with me he wants to give me a morality lecture about nina he's never even seen the video right vegan foot soldier was that i think three years or four years that he hated me and basically sent me hate mail and made hateful comments about me on the internet about what i allegedly said about nina miranda and eventually i established like i talked to them about it like periodically over a period of like three years and eventually we established that he had never seen the video he had just made up in his own imagination what and when he when he finally did see the video because they i you know conferences like look do you mean when i said this and i sent him two times again he said oh well that's like a way more polite video you made later covering up which is the first video i said no dude that's the video that is the video you never watched it you've hated me for all these years or what you think i said you don't know what i said that old it's not a more polite video million that's the original video it's supposedly so scandalous so a small number of people have let this um blossom in their minds into something it's it's really not but look um at a very early age this distinction between high culture and low culture was something i learned to reject right my parents were communists but they were also people who really uncritically worshipped high culture which is insert snarky remarks here my parents were people who would just completely uncritically assume that there was more political significance to a new production of shakespeare's king lear or shakespeare's king henry viii can have king emory the fifth top head i don't know how many king henry's shakespeare did they would think there was more political significance to a new production of shakespeare like this then there would be to say um a mainstream movie like boys in the hood came out right so if you don't know the film boys in the hood had a lot of political significance for a whole generation of people the united states mary really did for better or for worse right um for absolutely no valid reason something going on in an art gallery in paris or milan which would reach a tiny number of people and it would only reach people who were already really inured to this art form like even if there's an exciting new painting in that exhibition it's being shown to an audience of people who see an exciting new painting every month that the people who go to these art gallery openings it really has very little impact but there could be something really politically significant happening in rap music for me i mean when i was a small child i remember really responding to the comedy of chris rock openly political comedy of chris rock about you know basically the shadow cast by the the rise and fall of the black panthers and 1960s radicalism the united states american of course racial tension black and white these things really had political significance and also they might really have artistic merit you know worth talking about i became very very skeptical at an early age of the assumption that you know there's this distinction between high culture and low culture and what happens in high culture is what really matters i don't believe that you know i don't um and this makes sense but even within the vegan movement you know i don't believe that like i don't believe there's some sense in which uh gary francione uh presenting an academic paper at a conference and only 30 people ever listen to this academic paper or read it or see it on youtube this is so-called high culture because it takes place on a university campus i don't think that is more meaningful than the rise and fall of freely the banana girl you know for better or for worse for a couple of years there freely was one of the most politically influential voices in veganism i was one of the critics saying was for worse but i'm someone i really want to deal with rap music and batman and freelee and nina miranda i want to deal with human nature as it is i want to deal with human beings as they truly are i do not address human beings as they ought to be right i do not write books appealing to you know angels trapped in human flesh i write appealing to your flesh i make youtube videos i make monologues i'm speaking to you heart to heart flesh to flesh i'm someone who's all too human and you are too all right for me there's real sincerity when i look at nina and randa whether i'm you know offering a criticism or whether i'm saying something you know more sympathetic or more appreciative which if you watch all all of our videos about nina miranda you will actually sometimes see there's an extent to which i can sympathize with this struggle um look really really briefly because we're doing this for the fans and we're also doing this for one special fan out there called fandar you know have you heard of the merrell twins nina and randa's whole channel is a second-rate imitation of the merrell twins and the contrast between the two is actually worth philosophizing about briefly unto itself nina randa lists their videos and then click sort by most popular so you're looking at their videos that the highest number of views of all time and what are you looking at three million three million two million two million two million one point four million big numbers right merrell twins 22 million 19 million 17 million 13 million they're on another level the mayoral twins started first they became successful before nina miranda they always have been better looking than more talented than harder working then and more successful than you know right nina miranda's whole career has been in the shadow of this other pair of twins living in some ways a parallel life and they know each other and i'm sure that makes it worse if you're looking at the list of the most successful videos that have ever been on nina and randy's channel number three is a guest appearance from the merrell twins and they did appear they did a song with they appeared on the merrell twins channel but they've been to each other's houses they know each other face to face too to some extent i don't i don't think they're friends and there's another contrast when you look at the most successful videos on nina miranda's channel they're all trying to exploit the sexuality of nina miranda number one is dirty truth or dare number two another video titled dirty truth or dare number three is the guest appearance from the merrell twins as i've mentioned before there were a lot of videos of them doing wearing blindfolds and licking their boyfriends the lick my body challenge and this kind of thing and when you look over at the merrell twins oh for some reason that's that's not that's not what i'm looking at at all all right i've got a i got a human heart you know i can sympathize i really can't sympathize with the struggle that nina and iran have been through i can even sympathize with the extent to which their unearned success being entirely handed to them by their father makes the situation they're in now worse or all the more tragic to my knowledge just a couple months ago they bought if they didn't buy they leased or have a long-term rental on but they seemingly bought a studio where it looked like they were going to really crack down really start working hard on making making youtube videos they've renovated a studio and then mysteriously in the months since nothing of the kind uh eventuated they renovated stu i can imagine the kind of struggle they're in as creative people now a lot of others have done worse there are a lot of other people whose lives have really been ruined by a brief period of fame on uh on vegan youtube sorry i'm forgetting the gal's name now there was a skinny blonde vegan the former girlfriend of pantriotic and she made a video recently talking about the fact that her income is fifty thousand dollars a year her rent in los angeles which she says she's lucky to pay is about two thousand dollars a month she got a huge amount of university debt she went to a very expensive university and got a university degree that is apparently completely useless to her she had a brief period of fame as uh both doing asmr videos and being a vegan iggy the fruit bat that was her name izzy davis is he the fruit you know she had a brief period of illness she's not even vegan anymore she doesn't have any significant number of viewers anymore you know a couple thousand here in there look at henia mania the rise and fall if anyone think about what it's like to be honest openly suicidal today there are a lot of people for whom this rollercoaster ride has turned out much much worse has ended on a much lower low than nina arenda but look us i'm not cruel or vicious about this i can see the trajectory for nina and miranda and frankly i see it starting with the fact that their rivals the merrell the merrell twins started their youtube channel in 2009 whereas nina and aranda who were groomed for fame by their parents from birth who had a social media career literally while they were in diapers because of who their parents were they started their channel in 2013. the merrell twins have over 1.1 billion views utterly dwarfing nina miranda's career i've got a human heart so and all of this stuff i am sincerely interested in i don't have an ulterior motive in this case there's no more profound philosophical issue as there was in the fracas with a natural vegan like this isn't about the philosophical legacy of peter singer or something equivalent of that it isn't you know um it's about the fact that we live in a world where people like nina randa people like vegan cheetah now known as charles marlowe were literally invited to appear on stage they were put on stage they were platformed by nina miranda's father and nina rana's father basically purchased his position as a leader in the vegan movement so what would be just a sort of funny footnote in history that this pair of twins who you know play the guitar badly and make awful music videos and make comedy videos that aren't funny you know they're really not um for me has a lot more political significance than it might have for you or you or you in the audience it has more political significance and has greater consequences in my eyes it has consequences that might be invisible to someone like fandar who's just coming in and regarding this from the outside as someone who doesn't know about veganism doesn't care about the past present or future of the vegan movement and when they look at my videos no matter how honest i am in the title and the thumbnail saying hey this is what i'm going to talk about this is what we're going to talk about this is why and all my videos they come to a pretty clear conclusion right when they see that and they think no that can't be why he's making this video there must be something else going on here and the truth is there's nothing else going on here i'm i'm just someone who who really cares about these ethical issues about the future of the vegan movement about the future of life on planet earth when i made videos about onision they were not clickbait i was really interested in talking about the ethical issues raised but whatever the drama was at the time surrounding an instant when i made video i made a video recently talking about uh kevin smith and the amazing atheist my motivations completely sincere completely transparent and the the reason i'm making the video is right there in the title it's not clickbait and i'm not trying to like steal viewers from kevin smith or the amazing or anything else right um we have this great idiom in english you know occam's razor i think we need a new idiom where you stop and challenge yourself and wait a minute what if the simplest explanation for what this person is doing and what this person is saying is that they really sincerely mean exactly what it is that they say what if the secret message that they're trying to deliver isn't so secret what if it's right there in the title what if it's right there in the conclusion of the video what if what i'm driving at is exactly what i've been trying to say all along in 2020 click bait is a problem it's a problem for creators it's a problem people in the audience it's a problem for a whole lot of people who order a book in the mail and then when the book arrives you know it's not really what you were expecting based on the on the title and the cover and i do think that part of our personal integrity as creators is to put a title on the video that lets you know what i'm talking about lets you know where we're going maybe it doesn't let you know the conclusion i think you've got to be sincere with your audience and i have to ask the audience to recognize my sincerity and to criticize me for the things i actually say not something they imagine that i said because they treat my content as if it were clickbait