A very common and rather annoying theme of conspiracy videos is the comments sections are loaded with the most ridiculous excuses for meaningful content. I’m not talking about, “Great vid, as always bro!” These are to be expected. The same way it’s inappropriate to deny someone their grief over loss of a loved one (assuming it wasn’t a hoax) allowing them the opportunity to announce to the video producer that they indeed are one of the 👍 ‘s is quite all right. I’m talking about the comments that I’ve called the attempts to win a cookie. “That’s a Pi tribute with it being 3rd down and 14! See 3-14!!!”
Why yes, congratulations. I suppose that 3rd and 14 never happened before in a football game. And I hardly had my pattern recognition skills going and I needed you to point out that to me (still wishing I had a sarcasm font). Now maybe nobody pointed that out before you did and that makes it newsworthy. But explain why this comment deserves to be liked 20 times and be embellished with additional comments, like “good point!” which themselves may be liked a bunch of times.
There is a point of overstating the obvious. And the gematria videos have no balance at all. It’s our old friend the low operating standard of you agree with me today, therefore you must be right.
Now turning back to the TED experiment. My jokes do not add any value to the topic at hand. From the complaints I constantly see that their content has taken a sharp downturn recently people seem to expect something pithy and meaningful. Heaven forbid a music video gets put up just for a change of pace. Yet, mostly I garner at least a few likes. I’ve noticed that it could be that the dislike button might be disabled. More research is required for a final assessment on that. If somebody thinks you’re wrong the only real option is to offer a comment that states that. Announcing 3rd down and 14 yards to go = 314 = Pi seems innocent enough. Yet, do these people realize that they just insinuated that based on the video topic that they suggested that football is an elite class method of propagating a race war between the whities and the niggers because of Pi? This goes beyond the social media system of simply enjoying to be praised for a nice/funny/meaningful comment.
There has to be a reason for this. And as this is all highly speculative I offer my opinion on what is going on. It’s the YouTube Alarm system. When you comment the default setting is to have an email notification that somebody has replied to your comment. The two main advantages:
1). Ego massage seeing that somebody does think you are providing meaningful input.
2). Troll alert.
My experience shows that getting the channel ❤️ is worth about 116.7 ordinary likes (119.3 in Europe if you have an adapter) and is an immediate signal to the rest of the hive that your comment is worthy. This isn’t from TED, that’s from the chess jokes. Truther videos mostly don’t discriminate that way. Nobody gets a distinctive ⭐️ on their vocabulary test or everybody does. So the biggest distinguishing feature for worthiness is the amount of 👍 and comments. My experience also indicates that once the ball gets rolling then others feel free to chime in. The cognitive bias that everyone says it’s true, so it must be, even if it’s just a vocal minority.
There’s an Emperor’s New Clothes bias to not be the first to take a chance on offering an opinion unless you can hide behind the keyboard via just 👍 or sock puppetry. Once that alarm goes off though, the hive takes over and the stingers are brandished. Now instead of just 314 meaning whities vs. niggers a photograph taken on February 27th of players with jerseys 21 and 27 that has the “1” partially obscured also takes on cosmic significance. Somebody said Pi, well 227 also means Pi. I’m sure glad that they commented about that or I might have missed my chance to provide this tidbit of misinformation! Where’s my cookie?
Providing additional information like that 227 actually requires some effort. The troll alert doesn’t. I swear it seems like people comment on every single video just so that if the unlikely critic pops by they can drop the beneficial honeybee persona and bring out the Africanized killer bees. Trolls are dealt with IMMEDIATELY. There’s no such thing as a day later somebody is accused of being a troll. While a TED video might go by weeks before even being viewed the hive looks at every single video (and blog post) scanning for the slightest hint of contrary content.
I haven’t been stung by an entire hive, yet. I’ve tried and so far the most attention has been three comments on my sex joke test. Three. On a video viewed tens of thousands of times. For a comment that also has more than two hundred 👍. A gematria video viewed a couple thousand times where somebody says, “You never predict winners in the NFL correctly” gets stung at least three times within a few hours. The point being this. The retaliation is based on the cognitive bias and not the content of the comment. You exist, you offend me, you don’t agree with me today. Die heretic! Even if the commenter doesn’t necassirly believe that the Illuminati is trying to start a race war and just wants to use gematria pretending he can make predictions to win money gambling.
Everybody’s doing it. Well, at least the 50 or so regulars here. They must be right and the millions of other people must be wrong.
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