This seems like innately hostile behaviour. Not to other video creators, but to his audience. Stripping as much as he can using data and mathematics is the kind of thing engineers do to pull more out of a machine, not something you do when you're creating informal communications to other humans.

>That weird creepy face with the outline and uncanny smoothing aren’t by accident.

I take your point, but I am still baffled why people find this appealing.

It seems we're living a Max Headroom episode.

Guests smoking weed A/B tested too? :)

How do you A/B test on YouTube?

I was forced to do this as a developer of Flash websites in the early 00's.

I loved making custom progress bars really fun so people didn't mind watching the huge sites download.

I HATED when they had me mess with the time so that it got to 90% really fast and then spent AGES finishing the last 10%.

Luckily the recommendation system does work to some extent. I'm glad I don't get to see any of that stuff on my youtube. Opening the front page in a private view is a scary place of hyper-optimised drama and attention seeking.

It's scary imagining people getting sucked into that :/

Mr Beast not looking like a normal person next to Colin Furze is impressive.

That guy is so over the top that I cannot bear watching his videos, despite them theoretically being exactly up my alley. I like tinkering videos, I like his ideas, and the high-quality results, but I hate his mannerisms.

Every time see Mr Beast (I don't watch any of his stuff, just accidentally see promos on Prime sometimes), he reminds me of Homer Simpson's forced smile in the Simpsons' espiode "Re-Nedufication" [0].

[0]: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c8/84/8e/c8848e81afa88a42bd4d...

That Colin Furze cameo was so weird.

They somehow got him doing a cameo on this upcoming Survivor season and it's going to be terrible.

explain

We’re not talking about a measure of computational progress here. We’re talking about visually representing how much time has elapsed out of a fixed duration. This is exactly where progress indicators shine, the total time for the thing to happen is perfectly specified in advance.

The difference between a lot of OS/app progress bars for IO (and sometimes CPU) operations and these timers, is that the total length of time for a lot of IO operations is often unknown with any accuracy so you have to use a heuristic to guess the current % done.

For instance: when reading/writing/both many files of differing sizes on traditional drives there is an amount of latency per file which is significant and not always predictable. Whether you base progress on total size or number of files or some more complicated calc based on both, it will be inaccurate in most cases, sometimes badly so. Even when copying a single large file on a shared drive, or just on a dedicated system with multiple tasks running, the progress is inherently a bit random, the same for any network transfer. Worse are many database requests: you don't get any progress often because there is no progress output until the query processing is complete, and the last byte of the result might arrive in the same fraction of a second the first does¹. The same for network requests, though IE (at least as early as v3) and early versions of Edge did outright lie² there to try make themselves look faster than the competition.

The progress bars in videos are a different beast (ahem): the total time is absolutely known, any inaccuracy is either a deliberate lie or gross incompetence.

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[1] I once worked on a system that kept logs of certain types of query so it could display a guess of how long things were going to take and a progress bar to go with it, but this was actually more irritating to the users than no progress display as it would sometime jump from a few % directly to done or sit at 99% for ages (in the end the overly complicated guessing method was replaced by a simple spinner).

[2] It would creep up, getting as far as 80%, before the first byte of response is received. This also confused users who thought that something was actually happening when the action was in fact stalled and just going to time-out.

Many progress bars or other indicators lie, and the incentive is always to make it look good at the beginning, so that’s what we end up seeing most, whether it’s these ad ones (which thankfully I’ve never seen) or installers or especially something like Uber that always lies about how quickly someone is coming to make it appealing and then stretches it out. Even the thing in your car that tells you how much range you have left before refuelling (except it starts showing more than you actually have). I think in all cases it’s probably possible to give a more realistic estimate but it’s counter to the goals of whoever designed it.

If it froze and ceased emitting ticks, it wouldn't advance any more - but the larger point is well taken!

That’s perfectly acceptable, in particular if you also display “step x of 10”, so the user knows the bar doesn’t indicate time.

I feel the same way about newsletters.

“Hey you bought socks that one time! Want more socks??” -> Unsubscribe.

“Hey it’s your weekly sock news! What’s new in socks!” -> But I unsubscribed! Haha no, you only unsubscribed from the “product releases” list. Not the “weekly news” list or our 10 other fabulous mailing lists!

-> Report all emails from this domain as spam. May god have mercy on your soul, cute socks.

I think they mean they leave a 1 star review on the app that was displaying the ad, who probably didn't directly do any of that.

They did work with a bad ad network though so it's a valid enough reason to complain imo.

Which is often not possible because clicking an ad generally closes the ad. And there's no incentive for users to report, by design IMO.

They could have a separate ad-reporting UI in every ad-running app (so you can report stuff later), and they could reward valid reports by skipping all ads on their network for a month or something, but doing that would reduce fraud, and that means reducing their profit. So none of them do it.

I'd say they probably need an oversight committee with teeth, to strongly punish every single violation (so the networks develop functional defenses), but they'll probably just VW-emissions-fraud their way around it.

QA is something an employee should do, not me.

Difficulty is when you don't know what ad network it is, the app hides the ad network they use, and refuse to disclose who it is.

You got served an ad from "one of our partners". That's all you'll get to know, and there's no mechanism to even report the app's shitty behavior to Google or Apple (and they don't care when the app becomes too large, either).

On iOS I have seen ads with very small close buttons, so clearly intended to cause people to miss-click. Buttons should be 44x44 pixels, it’s recommended in the human interface guidelines [0].

——

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

No, I mean there are ads with a "close button" in the corner, and then a few seconds later the real close button will appear and it'll weirdly overlap it. Because the first one was fake, just part of the image asset of the ad.

They're very very clearly click-fraud tricks, and most platforms will ban them if they're caught. But by clicking on the ad, it closes the ad, and there's no way to go back and report them, nor incentive for ad-viewers to do so. By design, IMO.

The whole industry runs on scams like this, there's no incentive for large platforms to proactively block any of them because they lead to money moving through them, where they can extract their rent. They only move against the most egregious, to keep fraud at the same barely-acceptable level as all the others.

A common trick is that the first click on the X will go to the ad, but if you return and click the X again it will close, gaslighting you into thinking you just misclicked the first time.

Another trick that I’ve noticed on the Reddit app is that the tappable area is much larger for ads than normal posts. If you tap even near the ad it will visit the ad