Youtube, cookie clicking, $100, button sticking, Dreamwidth's crappy trigger-happy auto-filling tags

[bluelander]

Youtube

Now that I'm more active on youtube again, I have to resist the self-destructive compulsion to constantly check my analytics page. Like many algorithmic validation machines, it's a lot like a slot machine for feeling bad about myself. Every time I "pull to refresh" is another pull of the lever. I stare at the view graph, hoping a few bars will pop up. Usually they don't, but sometimes they do, and I feel a glimmer of hope. 5 views in 5 minutes? That must mean youtube is showing my video to people! I refresh again, hoping for more. Sometimes they keep coming, and I keep pulling, but I'm inevitably let down. No likes, no subscriptions, no comments, no indication that any of those people watched more than 30 seconds or whatever the minimum amount of time is to count as a view.

And my brain knows that this is fine. The videos I make appeal to a narrow niche of people. The odds of a small handful of views containing people who fall into that niche are very low. But the part of me that desires validation can't help but feel like I'm doing something wrong, that my videos are bad and I'm wasting my time and I should give up.

This isn't true! I'm having fun with my friend, of course it's not a waste of time. But the social media content machine is designed to make us feel worthless and unimportant, so we get addicted to trying to do better, so the subset of the population most vulnerable to that addiction do more and more harmful and outrageous things to please the algorithm and get ever more validation while churning out content that makes the corporation as much ad revenue as they can generate. Shit's fucked.

I've mostly managed to eliminate this sort of algorithmic bullying from my life. I stopped using twitter years ago. I moved to the fediverse, which isn't perfect but is much healthier, and has tools that help me use it in a less stressful way. I don't post on facebook and mostly use it to look at what my spouse posts and communicate with her. I intentionally use a journal platform where I have no idea how many people are reading my posts. I don't want to know! But if I want to play TV presenter on the internet, and have any hope of the people who want to watch it finding it, youtube and their obsessive analytics are the only games in town. Oh sure, I could find a peertube instance that can accommodate a ~4-500MB weekly upload, or just upload them to archive.org, but that means even the small number of viewers I get now would drop to approximately zero. A rounding error. I'm grateful for my fans that would follow me to whatever platform I posted on, there are a couple of them, but like, I think this new series could potentially appeal to at least a couple thousand people in the world. Not enough to quit my day job, but enough to maybe get a few nice comments on each video and possibly bring in a little extra money each month. I always rejected the idea of making ad revenue from videos, but having a job where I don't make a living wage has made me a lot less precious about it. I'm still going to block ads, and I have no beef with anyone who does, but there's a sizable number of youtube viewers for whom ads are normal and just the way internet TV works—kinda like how watching 22 minute shows with 8 minutes of ads per episode was how it worked when I was growing up. I can't imagine going back to that.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that I started playing Cookie Clicker on my phone.

Cookie clicking

I played Cookie Clicker on the web when it was new. I liked it at first, but I ended up hating it because it turned me into a greasy little optimization goblin who would obsessively micromanage everything for optimum cookie output. I would, like, sell old buildings so I have enough cookies to buy new ones, I'd look up forums and websites where people talked about cookie clicker strategies, leave it running on my computer with an autohotkey script to continuously click while I was AFK, I got up to like the octillions or nonillions or something when I realized that I hated myself and every second I spent looking at clicker. I deleted my save and vowed to never play it or any other idle game again.

Since then, I've chilled out quite a bit, and I realized that Cookie Clicker could be ideal for preventing me from constantly checking my analytics, and other things on the internet, while I'm at work and should probably look like I'm working most of the time. I leave it running in a little stand on my desk, screen brightness turned down pretty low. I have an app that lets me rotate my screen 180 degrees, so I can keep it plugged in, and I set the screen to never turn off when it's on power. I mostly keep the stats tab up, so it doesn't look like I'm looking at a big cookie to anyone who glances over my shoulder. Occasionally, a yellow dot will pop up on the cookie tab to let me know that a golden cookie spawned. I click it, and usually I don't have to do anything but go back to the stats tab; occasionally it's a click frenzy or cookie storm, which requires me to furiously tap my phone for 15-30 seconds, but otherwise I just let it go back to doing its thing. I occasionally take a short break from work to do some building management (always buying, never selling) or buy upgrades and research. It barely takes any time at all, helps me stay on track with my work, and still provides little bursts of excitement when I get a nice golden cookie combo. It's maybe not the healthiest thing, but it's certainly better than refreshing my youtube stats over and over. You see, the number can only go up.

Hundred dollars

I found a hundred dollar bill on the way to work. Weirdly, this isn't the first or even the second time I've found money during my walk; I walk through a relatively middle-class part of my neighborhood, and past houses where people can afford to be careless when digging their keys out of their pocket or purse, and it's not well-lit enough at night that it'd be easily noticeable, especially if someone was hurrying to get in from the snow or rain. But $100 is definitely the most money I've ever found from a single windfall, and I thought it was worth celebrating. My spouse and I are going to treat ourselves to something, but we haven't decided what yet.

Button sticking

The button on my headphones started sticking. I love them: the brand is 3M Worktunes Connect, and they're rated to provide 24 dB of noise protection. They connect via bluetooth, but there's also a 3.5mm headphone jack you can use with just about any cable. I always use them wirelessly though. It's been life-changing. I can't express how much better quality of life I have not having to hear the noises of everyday life that overstimulate me and wear my brain down. The wirelessness is secondary, but also nice: it's quite freeing not needing to be tethered to whatever I'm listening to.

That said, I've never been a fan of the "one button does everything" UI philosophy. There's one button. You hold it for a second to turn them on or off. You double-press it to pair them with a new device. You press the button to pause or resume playback. You double-press it to either skip to the next track or skip ahead a few seconds depending on the app's settings. You triple-press the button to skip backwards, but not every app respects this. Needless to say, in the 3 years I've had this pair, the button's been put through its paces.

It's rubbery, and used to make a nice "click" when pressed, but it's lost its click ever since it started sticking. When the sticking started, the headphones would continuously turn themselves off and back on, because it was like someone was holding in the button. I managed to dig it out with an unbent paperclip, but it's not trustworthy. I no longer feel like I can do single presses with it. I think I can get by with just holding the button in to turn them on... it's already paired with both my devices, so I don't need to activate that function, and they turn off when I plug them in to charge, and I can use the controls on my phone or computer, it's just more of a pain in the ass... so as long as I can hold the button in to turn them on in the morning without breaking it, I shouldn't need to replace them. Crossing my fingers. If I was the cynical type, I'd make a comment about finding $100 and then my $50 headphones immediately breaking, so even when I catch a break I can't catch a break... but I'm trying to stay positive. Even if I need to replace my headphones, I'm able to now where I might not've been before, and an extra $50 on top of that is still way better than nothing. Still, it'd be nice if everything in life didn't have to come with a caveat, you know?

Dreamwidth's crappy trigger-happy auto-filling tags

Sorry if you got a premature notification for this post. I was entering tags, and for the second time, thought that I could press "enter" to accept the tag that was currently auto-filled, since that's how it works on most UIs with this sort of feature. But it turns out the "post" button still has enter key priority, causing me to fire off the entry before it was ready. What, I'm supposed to press the right arrow key? I guess so. Maybe now that I've written about it, it'll stick in my brain.

Comments

[packbat]

That sounds like a good way to deal with the whole analytics Skinner box thing.

And ugh, yeah - I guess Dreamwidth predates the "press enter to complete tag" thing? But muscle memory doesn't care.

Its a big world

[(Anonymous)]

And we are glad you are in it. Just discovered your sites and stuff. GL with life and everything!