This almost made me spit out my drink.
3 Likes
I would guess someone created this as an attempt to generate revenue, some kind of “a million monkeys at a million typewriters” thing for youtube, maybe it was a failed attempt and they moved on, but it doesn’t hurt to let it keep running and see what happens.
2 Likes
That is pretty bizarre, but seems like probably just someone trying out an idea and practicing their code.
I’d think that, except that the music gets a DMCA takedown notice if anyone tries to use it. So the fact that the videos are up there with the music suggests that whoever is sending the notices is okay with their use. That doesn’t scan with someone who is just trying out an idea for a bot - you’d expect the videos of the bot to get taken down too.
6 Likes
The stream of video posts looks suspiciously like the feed from r/politics.
2 Likes
Glassdoor has 44 reviews for HexaCorp.
The reviews seem to be legitimate, or at least they are all charmingly written by someone who’s not fluent in English and they are not all positive. My guess is that they are an outsourcing company witha main office in Chennai, India and a client facing office in NJ. They hire Indians on H1B visas because they can pay them less than American citizens.
3 Likes
Clearly a case for the famous Belgian media detective, Hubertus Bigend, and his plucky assistant, Cayce Pollard.
1 Like
My theory is just that someone’s disgruntled with YouTube and just wants to do their part in slowly filling up the servers with garbage. The copyright notice is just a bonus way to waste other people’s time.
1 Like
I recognized that pattern, too.
1 Like
It smells like some psychographic microtargeting experiment. And I would like to emphasize ‘micro’ (0.000001 views per video). I guess YouTube is the next platform to go down into the swamp of influence campaigning.
#deleteyouryoutube
–Anathem, by Neal Stephenson, 2008
1 Like
Hypothesis: a bot crawls for text, copyrighted or otherwise, on the interwebs. Bot then generates a video using this text, then waits to see if anyone flags it. If no flagging action takes place, said pilfered text is then copyrighted (copywritten?). After this, the original creator receives a takedown notification, angry legal letter etc. Then profit.
2 Likes
Adblockers need to start filtering out this crap if possible. Account name based blocking should do nicely in cases like this.
Sounds like flossy has been busy!
1 Like
So they pursue people about the silly song, but in the minute or so I watched I saw 10 different photos which I doubt are in the public domain and I didn’t see any attribution given, so aren’t they violating copyright laws by using those photographs? Maybe they own the rights or pay to use them but that is pretty expensive stuff for something not getting any views.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
