The Good Stuff: Scambaiting On YouTube

I don’t know how these videos make their way to my YouTube recommendations, but I’m not mad about it. Scambaiting is the act of purposely baiting scammers into wasting time, revealing information, or sometimes stealing money or data back. There are people who do this a lot and make YouTube videos partially for entertainment but also to raise awareness of how in-depth and scary these scammers can be.

I’ve never been scammed. I’d like to think that I’m smart enough to avoid that, but I know how prevalent scams can be. We’ve had to train my grandmother to never reveal information over the phone. I regularly get scam texts trying to get me to click shady links. I don’t trust some ads on social media. Scams are everywhere.

Kitboga is a YouTuber who goes to great lengths to waste scammers’ time. He believes that the more time he spends on useless calls with scammers, the less time they’ll have to scam real people, so he’ll use a wig and a voice modifier to become a chatty old woman who is very uncooperative over several hours. It’s very interesting to see how the scammers fare against this and also very interesting to see just how the scams work. From fake banking websites to threats to carefully timed text, it’s quite an operation, and it’s understandable how less-techy people easily fall prey to this. Kitboga also often has screen mirroring of some sort so we can see the scammer’s computer sometimes, showing quite clearly what they’re doing. He does a decent job explaining what the goal is and how they trick people, but often he’s interacting with scammers of the same variety (accidentally transfer too much fake money, and real Best Buy/Google Play cards will fix it), so the methods and ‘scripts’ don’t change too much over his videos.

Here are a few to give you an idea of his ways:

Jim Browning is another YouTuber who scambaits to some extent. He doesn’t waste as much time and instead tries to intervene and resolve scams quietly. He’ll gain access to scammers’ computers to find contact info for victims, photos of the scammers, and more, so he can use his technical skills to stop and report them.

And the last YouTuber I want to share is Mark Rober. He’s an engineer known for putting cameras, fart spray, and glitter bombs in fake Amazon packages, knowing they’ll get stolen off porches. He then has insider video and audio of the thieves as they realize that they haven’t gotten away with anything.

I think it’s cool that people are putting in so much time and effort trying to fight scams, and I like that it can entertain me at the same time. And hopefully you too. These are pretty niche videos, so unless you had a specific interest in engineering or computers, I can see videos like these passing you by, but I hope you give them a chance and enjoy just how interesting they can be.

That’s all for now.

 

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Negative Commentary For The Fun Of It

I watch a considerable number of commentary YouTubers. Some that I watch talk about specific topics and some just react to anything or will comment on a variety of things. I appreciate anyone who can get their point across well and do it in an entertaining, well-researched way. That’s why I spend a lot of time watching that kind of content, and that’s why I enjoy reading that kind of content in blog form too.

One YouTuber I watch is named Nick DiRamio, and he does a series called Clip Breakdown where he analyzes movies/TV shows/music videos and reacts to them and explains what they could do to be better. He’s very funny and smart, and I enjoy his commentary. Recently, he did videos on the music careers of Niki and Gabi De Martino (they’re twins and YouTubers, but you don’t need to know who they are. They’re not relevant to this post at all). Nick, with good reason, tore into Gabi’s messy music videos, but for Niki’s he prefaced his video by saying he overall liked her video style and her music, and throughout his commentary, he kept highlighting good things she did and how much he enjoyed them.

And for some reason, seeing a commentary YouTuber who has more positive things to say than negative took me by surprise. It got me thinking about the commentary genre. On YouTube specifically, since people are usually there for entertainment, it’s really easy to get cheap laughs by ragging on something objectively bad. It’s like why people purposely go watch bad movies because they can enjoy how bad it is.

I understand why these YouTube funny people do it because there’s literally an unlimited pile of bad/cringy things to make fun of, but I’m now wondering if there are lasting effects of this. Are people constantly looking for things to dislike or reasons to ruin a piece of media? Are people who do like things being made to feel bad for liking it? Are people unable to enjoy bad media? Are people becoming overall more negative because we’re used to everything being hated on?

In a similar sense, it’s like how in the news, there’s often a lot of bad news rather than good news. Obviously, that can’t be helped as much, but it is worth considering. How many people have built their careers off of being negative and tearing into things others made with (hopefully) love?

As a person on the internet, I’m thinking about my part in it too. I blog reviews on things sometimes, or I’ll Tweet out my thoughts on a movie, and while I won’t pretend that bad things are good just for the sake of it, I do think I’m overall mostly positive. Often when I talk about media, it’s things I love and want others to love too. Maybe I’d do more of the negative stuff if I was making bank from it the way YouTubers do, but who’s to say. To that point, I do think a lot of people who do this professionally do it because it works, algorithmically. But is it right? Let’s refer back to my lasting effects questions.

I’m not saying we should all stop watching things/YouTubers who are consistently negative or making fun of things, but I at least am being a little bit more conscious about how much of it I take in. And I’m also reminding myself that one person’s opinion doesn’t matter, and if some random adult on the internet says something I like (or liked, as often it’s children’s media that is getting torn apart) is bad, I don’t have to agree, nor do I have to explain why I don’t agree.

Do you have thoughts on this topic? I’d love to hear them!

 

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The Good Stuff: Gourmet Junk Food

As I mentioned in my blog post about making your own Magic Eye (a post that consistently gets a handful of views still) I wanted to do more sharing of fun stuff I come across online, be it memes or videos or articles. If I got amusement from it, I want you too as well. So I am starting a series on this blog called The Good Stuff (a phrase I use far too much in my daily life) where I share fun things I find online.

And I’m starting off with a bunch of videos in which a pastry chef attempts to make gourmet versions of popular junk food. Personally, I don’t watch a lot of cooking/baking videos because I’m a picky eater, and I know I’m not motivated enough to try baking something I did like, but I find these Gourmet Makes videos very interesting. They ended up in my YouTube recommendations one night and I watched them all right then and there. These videos on the YouTube channel of Bon Appetit, of the famous food magazine.

Claire Saffitz, the chef and star, seems like a nice, smart person, and watching her work out solutions to obstacles she faces is cool because I know next to nothing about baking and cooking, but she’s very knowledgeable and does it all systematically. You wouldn’t think one person in a kitchen would be able to make a version of something that is normally made in a factory, but she does, and she does it well (even if she has access to a lot of cool baking tools that the average person wouldn’t have in their house).

Skittles are one of my favorite candies, and they did one episode where Claire made them but with the goal of getting natural flavours. I’d like to think that Skittles are already perfect, but seeing her work on making them better and more flavourful is neat, and I wish I was in that test kitchen to try them.

And it’s not just candy she tries to make! She’s done chips, cereal, and even ramen noodles. These are things most people have tried and enjoy so we can understand what she’s doing to replicate them and why and also what changes she should make.

Of this series, there are so far 12 episodes, all between 15 and 30 minutes, and there’s a new one every month or so, and Bon Appetit shares a lot of other videos too. Here’s the playlist where you can watch all the Gourmet Makes. You know you want to.

And here we are, at the end of my first The Good Stuff post! I’m looking forward to sharing more in time!

That’s all for now!

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Snapchat’s Original Content Actually Isn’t That Bad

Are you looking for a new way to waste time? Of course you are. Then let me direct your attention to Snapchat. Yes, that dumb millennial app. It is by no means a perfect platform, but I’ve had it for about six years, and use it every day. Though I’m not using it to interact with my friends. No, see, that would be somewhat productive, and I’m not about that. I use Snapchat to watch content in the same way people watch YouTube.

And guess what? The content on Snapchat is actually decent. It was a really good move on the platform’s part to go from just a social platform to a social media platform. And any company/media production company that jumped on board made a good call. Now Snapchat offers a lot of original content that you could easily waste a morning consuming.

Snapchat’s original content can be lumped into five groups.

1. Compilation videos

These are fun because it’s not professionally produced content; it’s submitted videos from other Snapchat users that are compiled into videos. Best Of College, Best Of High School, Life Hacks, Oddly Satisfying, Sound Up, Bad Tattoos, and 10 Second Talents are a few of my favourites. I also watch a lot of videos of people cutting soap into little pieces because it’s weirdly addicting and satisfying. I’ve wasted an embarrassing amount of time doing this.

2. ‘Famous’ People

Notice how famous is in quotations because this usually just means YouTubers of varying degrees of popularity. Honestly, I don’t watch these that often, but sometimes I like to laugh at how dumb their stories are (useless life updates or selfies or lip syncing to hip-hop in a car makes up 75% of it all).

3. Actual Snapchat original content

Snapchat has a fun variety of original content. Some are like little reality shows (eg. Face Forward, How Low Will You Go, Phone Swap) and there are a few news/update type shows (What The Fashion, E!’s Rundown), but Snapchat also has some short scripted weekly shows. I’ve only seen a few episodes of one of these scripted shows and have no interest in any of the others because they all look very dumb with worse-than-current-Disney-Channel acting, but I’m fascinated with the potential that’s there. Goodness knows streaming services are popping up all over, and it’s wild to think that Snapchat of all things could have a play in that game. Their content is free and short, and that could appeal to many. And honestly, I’m sure if you were bored out of your mind, those videos would do their job of being entertaining.

4. News/articles

Some sites you’re probably familiar with like Daily Mail, Vice, and Refinery29 have their own channels where they post news articles with moderate animation where acceptable (making use of the platform), which is cool because it’s making the relevant world news available in a new way to people who may not otherwise want to go out of their way to read it. Unlike Twitter or Facebook where you have to exit the social media platform and go to a new site to read the article, everything on Snapchat stays on Snapchat. You don’t ever leave the app, and that’s brilliant.

5. Cross Posted Content

It makes sense that media companies want their videos to reach people on many platforms, so there is also a good chunk of content that is from YouTube edited to fit to Snapchat too, and this is a decent idea because for someone like me who doesn’t watch a whole lot of YouTube, I’m now exposed to videos on Snapchat. Try Not To Laugh, Wired Autocomplete Interviews, and How Ridiculous are some of these things I enjoy watching through Snapchat.

Of course there are a few other things that don’t fit into these five categories well, but overall, this is a pretty good outline of what Snapchat has to offer.

The draw of Snapchat, for me at least, is that the content is usually short (between 2-10 mins most of the time) and it’s all on that app and easily available. Furthermore, all I have to do is watch. There are no comments or sharing buttons or anything like that. I just watch, maybe Subscribe if I want to easily find that series again, and that’s it.

And from a content creator perspective, it’s interesting too. Not that I have plans to create Snapchat content, but Snapchat, even from its social side, is not a numbers game. Like with Netflix, you can’t tell who gets the most views, you can’t tell what series get watched, you can’t tell how many people are subscribed. Of course the creators themselves can probably see numbers, but otherwise, it’s purely about the entertainment than it is the popularity, and that’s a cool thing in this world of numbers-driven social media.

The only changes I think I’d make at this time to Snapchat’s content is the ability to scrub video timestamps and speed up videos. Otherwise, I am very much enjoying the content and its availability, and if you want to waste time too (or amuse yourself while on the bus or on a break or something) then check out Snapchat.

That’s all for now!

 

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I Consume Content At Double Speed, And You Need To Try It

I’ve developed a habit of watching things at a faster speed. I now have a need for speed.

It started in my third year of university. One of my profs often assigned videos for us to watch for homework. Some would be short two minute videos, but some were long, twenty minute TED Talks. I did not like the long ones. And then a friend who was also in the course dropped the biggest life hack on me: watch the videos at double speed.

You may be thinking: double speed is too fast. It’s incomprehensible. But it’s not. Especially if you have subtitles on. I love subtitles. I have them on the TV all the time. And sure, YouTube’s auto-generated ones can be hit or miss, but usually they’re alright. They’re enough for me to glance at the text as I process what I’m hearing. And really, your ears and brain adjust to the faster speed quickly so the more you do it, the easier it is to do.

See, people in TV shows/movies and a lot of YouTube videos talk slower than we talk in most real-life conversations because it’s easier for viewers to understand. If you’ve ever given a speech or presentation, you’d know you need to go slow and enunciate. So speeding that up doesn’t make it impossible to understand, it just makes it faster than expected.

Besides, a lot of the videos I was watching, like the ones for that course, were more about the sound than the picture. TED Talks are just a person standing and speaking. I don’t care if they now pace around on that stage at a weird speed. YouTube videos are largely the same. So that’s why I was shocked and amazed when this same friend informed me that he doesn’t just watch meaningless homework videos and vlogs at a double speed, he watches TV shows at this speed too. Shows that he enjoys. Why would you want to spend less time watching something you enjoy? I decided to not do that.

Until I did it.

Look, for a period last year on Tuesday nights I had seven TV shows to watch. Three of them were full hour shows. By the time midnight was rolling around, I was tired and not giving the shows the proper attention they deserve.  So I upped the speed. Suddenly a twenty two minute show was taking eleven minutes. A forty seven minute show was taking twenty three minutes. I was saving time and still being able to consume the content I enjoyed. They just spoke faster and moved faster. I used to spend literally ALL DAY watching the Marvel Netflix shows when they came out. Now I can do it in an evening. And I don’t even feel bad because Jessica Jones Season 2 was a lot of standing and talking anyway.

Of course, you may be thinking, wait, Netflix doesn’t have a speed setting. Do you watch things illegally? The answer is yeah, I sure do, but I also use a Chrome extension that allows me to control the speed on Netflix, so I can watch legally there. It also works on Facebook and Tumblr videos which also don’t have speed settings. I’ve been using it for months, and I love it.

I still prefer to watch a show live on a TV screen (unlike my friend who will wait to watch it quickly online after, and I hope that if he’s reading this, he knows I disapprove) but if I’m in a time crunch and am watching something online, I will not hesitate to speed it up a bit.

Recently I rewatched The Office. I did it at only 1.5 speed (to savour it). Sometimes I’ll watch YouTube videos at 2.5 if it’s someone who really talks slow or I don’t really care about the sound as much as the picture or the info. Either way, I do enjoy the flexibility I now have. And I encourage you to try it. Start slow and use subtitles, if you want. It’ll be weird at first, but you’ll get used to it, and soon be able to watch all the TV shows and movies you never had time for.

You’re welcome.

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