Mr Beast has closed his mouth in all his thumbnails
A few of my students told me yesterday that one of the newer thumbnail trends is subtly photoshopping your face to make the proportions slightly wrong. Apparently the idea is that making your face look just a bit off without going so far as to trigger the uncanny valley effect makes people linger on the thumbnail, which then results in marginally higher click-through rates. Truly the weirdest possible world.
My students are probably a lot younger than yours. So instead my young boys just constantly make these weird lifeless faces in-between more and more disturbing renditions of Skippity Toilet and the Burger King theme song. The hypercapitalistic attention economy is destroying their brains.
my god, i have no idea what you're talking about and I'm so thankful
I saw a tik tok filmed by a parent in like the phillipines. their child was yelling at the bathroom and trying to summon skibidi toilet. frightening stuff
I really like the Burger King theme shit posts and I'm an old man.
I have never watch any of his videos, so maybe they're not as bad as they seem, but his thumbnails always make them seem like dystopian nightmares. "Last person to leave this tiny spot gets x amount of money!!" sounds like an insanely cruel way to torture poor people.
so maybe they're not as bad as they seem
they're worse. they're the embodiment of picture below.
Show
Most of his videos seem to be centered around something someone saw on a Japanese game show.
In one video for little money the people did just form a union and dished out money privately afterwards. That seems to have been fixed via contracts afterwards.
It is the year 2034. I approach the counter at the Amazon Job Factory, having spent the last of my Bezos bucks on a LyftUber to get there. I hand the lady at the counter my LinkedIn job ticket, hoping that I can at least get selected for a position where I can sit down.
She scans the ticket in the ChatGPT 8.0 ticket evaluator. Within 20 microseconds, the AI has determined that my face was not thumbnail-quality.
“WARNING,” it says, drawing the eyes of everyone there. “ENTHUSIASM LEVELS ARE BELOW EXPECTED PARAMETERS. PLEASE REMEMBER TO SHOW ENTHUSIASM WHEN APPLYING AT THE AMAZON SMILE CENTER.”
Before I can react, the floor opens up at my feet. I am sucked down to the fulfillment lines below without time to scream. No one says anything. The next applicant steps up to the counter.
Surprised I've not seen any cyberpunk stuff talk about software suites for emotional masking. Be sweet and pleasant to everyone you want. Rant in your head about how much you hate them and all that comes out is a warm "have a nice day"
I'm surprised too, but I don't think I could ever trust any software that pinky promises to change my words lol.
Because you know some rich exec would have some kind of exclusive pass to see the original message, and then I would be called in to the office to discuss my email of "get fucked get fucked get fucked".
Thinking this through for a million years would mean that there is an evolutionary pressure to fake smiles. At some point humans and smileys will become inseparable.
There already is an evolutionary pressure to fake smiles. People treat you like absolute shit if you don't fake smile in the appropriate situation.
I would argue that culture means that these evolutionary pressures don't have the force they'd have in a machine AI dominated world in which human culture is subordinate to algorithms and capitalist ownership of things. My version was for a more dystopic future vision.
I think youtube should immediately ban anyone who does soyface or AB-testing for thumbnails.
yeah there's never any real join in his eyes in these thumbnails. This is just my impression, but when most people smile sincerely they tend to squint their eyes and furrow their brows a little bit. I've always figured smiles were fake/performative if it was all mouth no eyes
That unnaturally white toothy grin makes it look like a real estate agent ad at a bus stop.
god his gaping fucking mouth is just the worst thing i've ever seen on the internet. i'd rather be forced at gunpoint to analyze every image on ED's offended page than have to see it even one more time
if only for that reason, i am thankful this has happened
Yeah basically. he changed the thumbnail on every single one of his videos from
to because metrics told him he might make a few more bucks in ad revenue from clickthrough rate
The beast has been named Soyface, and as its name is spoken its power wanes. For it draws strength from fear, and ignorance.
