Mr. Beast on youtube is guilty of that. Matt Parker of Standup Maths fame did an in-depth look at how that works. Whoever came up with that type of progress bar must hate people in general.
If you watch him on Joe Rogan’s podcast he gives a full overview of how every single tiny detail down to colors, length of scene cuts, facial expressions, language, total length of videos, time of day for release, thumbnails, sound effects, music is extensively A/B tested to not only optimize for the algorithm but for hijacking people’s attention as well. That weird creepy face with the outline and uncanny smoothing aren’t by accident. Everything is intentional because he obsessively tests anything that might give him even the slightest edge in a sea of videos. The content itself barely matters.
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.
> Whoever came up with that type of progress bar must hate people in general.
My first thought is that the person has a strong grasp of their profession and they love money. A hack like that has to have a really high value/effort ratio.
Yet another data point on why nobody should be wasting a second watching Mr Beast content. Complete algorithmically optimized garbage.
I recall Mr Beast showing up in a Colin Furze video for a few minutes and Mr Beast was very clearly incapable of being a normal person. He was obviously out of place, being in full makeup and styled, and couldn't seem to be bothered to actually engage or express real interest in the subject. I think the guy has replaced his real persona with some manifestation of the YouTube algorithm. If he's not actively making money, he's just a shell.
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].
MrBeast is a hack, but its worth pointing out that all "progress bars" are bad design. You could make the same complaint against most of the progress bars in MsDOS. There was never a consistency in timing so you can never really use them to gauge how much time is left.
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.
transcriptase|1 month ago
Tanoc|1 month ago
everdrive|1 month ago
I take your point, but I am still baffled why people find this appealing.
foresto|1 month ago
fooker|1 month ago
jb1991|1 month ago
kube-system|1 month ago
My first thought is that the person has a strong grasp of their profession and they love money. A hack like that has to have a really high value/effort ratio.
ghostbrainalpha|1 month ago
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%.
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
x187463|1 month ago
Yet another data point on why nobody should be wasting a second watching Mr Beast content. Complete algorithmically optimized garbage.
I recall Mr Beast showing up in a Colin Furze video for a few minutes and Mr Beast was very clearly incapable of being a normal person. He was obviously out of place, being in full makeup and styled, and couldn't seem to be bothered to actually engage or express real interest in the subject. I think the guy has replaced his real persona with some manifestation of the YouTube algorithm. If he's not actively making money, he's just a shell.
climb_stealth|1 month ago
It's scary imagining people getting sucked into that :/
Hendrikto|1 month ago
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.
hermitdev|1 month ago
[0]: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c8/84/8e/c8848e81afa88a42bd4d...
m4tthumphrey|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
duped|1 month ago
drcongo|1 month ago
red-iron-pine|1 month ago
cons0le|1 month ago
Vegenoid|1 month ago
dspillett|1 month ago
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.
--------
[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.
andy99|1 month ago