Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

"Titled" (Patreon)

Published:
2026-03-14 02:00:38
Imported:
2026-10

Videos

Content

descriptioned

Files

"Titled"

Comments

Michael Tiemann

I moved to NZ to experience π day first 🥇

Jeff Brown

Oh my gosh Vi. I feel this dread every day in a world plastered with billboards, divided by market segmentation, and hollowed by shallow imitation. Thank you for saying it out loud with triangles. It doesn’t have to be this way! (Happy Pi Day! Hang in there.)

Andrew Reid

Solid take on "efficiency." One of my hobby horses is when people seem to think that there is such a thing as "efficiency" in the abstract. There isn't, of course, "efficiency" is something that's high when you get more benefit for less cost, but both benefit and cost are subjective, so if you value agency, then an algorithmic feed that takes away your agency will never be efficient for you. Edit to add: All of which is to say, thanks for articulating that well.

Erin

yay a video i like it (also i do not believe this virtue list because it does not contain snacks)

Rob Jones

Hi, Ms. Vi! Thanks for all your videos - especially this brand new one because I hadn't it seen before! I'm imagining YouTube giving you an exit interview and saying a) you're very creative b) great presentation skills! c) also, well done on your personality! And d) gold star for technical proficiency. But alas, sadly, e) your tolerance for ever-higher levels of BS is deficient, lacking, problematic. What a shame because it's all that's really holding you back. But weirdly, having something holding you back seems like it's actually pushing you forwards. So perhaps this means you're correctly Arting - and maybe Life-ing too - and certainly Vi-ing. So, yes, thanks for all the Vi-ing!

vihart

Snacks is an unambiguous virtue, I cannot in good faith put it on a list of ambivalent virtues!

vihart

I hadn't thought of it before because I already expect so little of the platform, but isn't it somewhat telling that YouTube has no exit interview? They market it as a place where you can aspire to have a real career, but if it doesn't work out after a decade there's not even an exit survey.

Pat Devlin

Does this count as a "buy day" rant? Either way, I'm here for it

Cai

Thank you, Vi Hart, for being an artist who treats their own work with the respect that I want to. As an audience member it makes me feel seen, gives a moment of connection.

Cai

Alternative comment: "I see Vi Hart, I click." I'll see which gets more engagement.

Cúán Ó Meachair

Titles, even creepy A/B magic titles, are still to me a bastion of the idea that you might actually want to have some say in what you're about to watch. Not that you can really tell based on the title, but you are asked to choose -- or at least do what looks like choosing -- between a list of sparkly titles that makes you the main character of your own little YouTubery journey. It's like wandering through a forest -- you'll probably stay on the beaten path, but there's always a chance you can go anywhere. In YouTube Shorts, you're not the main character, you're an NPC. At most, you're like the player of a video game where you can choose to either read dialogue or skip past it, but you're not quite choosing what's going to happen next -- it's just what's been designed for you. But rather than the goal being those of a video game artist, which might be to give you a certain emotional response or to make you have some fun, the goal is to make you sit and watch for as long as possible. When I think about this issue I think about a Youtuber called Lily Alexandre who seems pretty good at the whole marketing thing. She's a video essayist and trans woman who makes videos that often focus on trans issues, in the US or in Canada where she lives. But she also makes videos on other topics, and I might actually prefer those subjectively. She has an artistic way of making these video essays -- some are shot in 4:3 like her essay on a wikipedia table of contents that she read as a poem and how she was able to get so much meaning out of something unintentional like that. These videos come with a Title (capital T) and it's clearly one that's been considered while making the work. But recently, she's started to change the titles. Does that mean that she's suddenly a disingenuous person? No -- but this is her job, so when her views started to go down I don't really know that she had another option but to try and market the videos better to support herself, even if she eventually wanted to switch careers there's still the intervening period to worry about where she's got to provide for her household from those YT bucks. One of her best videos -- again in an artsy aspect ratio, this time choosing a cinematic widescreen to let you know this is a Film worthy of your Respect, is called "Notes on Vanishing." Here Alexandre talks about how the Trans community, under threat, might want to retreat from public life for safety, raising questions about if that's the right thing to do, if so how do we do it and for how long, etc. She looks at this through the lens of a local protest gone wrong, and a film collective based in african countries where homosexuality is illegal who create films as a form of activism and self-expression, but in secret. She takes footage on ground 0 of protests and conducts interviews all while keeping the video relatively open-ended as to what trans people should do next. This is why the title "Notes on Vanishing" is perfect -- they're notes. But Notes on Vanishing is not the title many will click on. They'll see it in a title card within the video, but after clicking a video called "Trans Day of Vanishing," an alright title that references the "Trans Day of Visibility" event covered in the video. But it's clearly not the title she meant -- on Nebula, a streaming platform that also hosts the video, the original title remains. I don't know if Alexandre engaged in A/B Testing for this video, but I know that this attempt to market the video didn't meet her expectations because recently, she decided to start a low-key second channel and relax her entire strategy on YouTube in a video entitled "i can't do this anymore." So I guess she was right about vanishing. The reason they call it "A/B Testing" is cause the idea is that you're eventually going to pick one of the titles based on the results. Google's whole idea of "testing" has users as the guinea pigs, even when it comes to things like CAPTCHA that seems so utopic at first glance -- using verification tasks a user might need to complete regardless to train AI feels like placing pressure plates on the footpath to get energy from pedestrians -- but really amounts to unpaid data labelling work. I don't think Google can even understand the idea that perhaps users would want to consent to being involved in this type of experiment, rather thinking that what they don't know can't hurt them, and probably that people are getting so much value from these services that their existence itself is a force for good worthy of any cost. Especially if what they don't know can't hurt them... PS: i never thought of putting a page between the notebook leaves to protect from sharpie bleed. were you secretly doing this the whole time?

vihart

This is a very illustrative case study. Though I think, depending on the details, stepping away from a larger audience to a smaller but realer one is the opposite of vanishing. I hope she finds a way to make it all work for her self. And yes, I've been putting a bleed page behind every notebook page for over a decade, and movie magicking out the part where I advance it before going back to film the page flip. But for today's video, because it felt right for the topic, I decided to show the real between-the-page action and see if anyone noticed!

Boondoggle

I've always hated advertising (I refuse to disable adblockers so I can't even watch youtube anymore) because it's an assault on my (fragile ADHD-riddled) attention. I've always viewed marketing, in general, as an attempt to provide me information I wasn't seeking; kind of like unsolicited advice. I hadn't considered that it was also an attempt to influence behavior, so thank you for articulating that idea! I don't think that attempting to influence others (even for money) is inherently unethical or corrupt, even in service to The Algorithm. (Though imposing that work on independent video artists to drive them to maximize the platform's corporate profits sure is.) I also don't think i also think it's very reasonable to want to be informed about the things you're investing your resources in, be it time, money, emotional energy, etc. I do think there's an aspect you alluded to, but didn't articulate exactly which is using knowledge of the thing you're investing in to avoid risk of unwanted outcomes. And I think this very natural human desire is very much exploited by the marketing and algorithms you're criticizing. I also think this desire is almost antithetical to your idea of how people should engage with Art. I would agree that media created with artistic intent is generally much more fulfilling to consume with an open mind and fewer pre-conceived notions. I would also agree that people, much like Art, tend to have a lot more depth and nuance that can be captured in a brief synopsis. I guess all of which is to say I totally agree with your thesis, though I think the problem is less due to marketing, itself, and more due to the push to market everything as a product which can be delivered via algorithm. P.S. I loved the pen-slam-as-mic-drop finish!

Jesse Thompson

Well seeing as how you have remained committed to the format of speaking over a timelapse of drawing on a notebook for a good sixteen years now (I remember when that used to be Henry's jam as well 😁) I feel like it is beginning to sway me into trying to do that as well. Because drawing I can do (though I am not "artistic" by any stretch of the imagination) and Narrating I can do. And while animating digitally is also *technically* something I can do, it might be something I would find more frustrating to do an awful lot of 🤔

Amy Tobol

I wish I could like you twice, one for the pen drop comment, because that pen drop was a premium Vi Hart moment. And one for your very well articulated thoughts which mirror my own fuzzier thoughts, and helped me to gain a little clarity about how I feel about algorithms in general, and the artists that I follow in particular, even as they wander from platform to platform. The artists I follow are genuine to me, and bring me joy.

Amy Tobol

I noticed! :D I do this too, even if it's pen or pencil, to keep from scarring the tooth of the next page's texture.

Cúán Ó Meachair

I personally haven't had any issues with Adblock on YT recently. I use an alternative YouTube client for the web called VORAPIS or V3 which basically gets you a version of the 2015 youtube layout, it's a browser extension. So perhaps that's also doing something to block the adblock detection in YT. But I've been happily avoiding the ads for a while.

maddie Alton

I am a new math teacher and I remember your videos so well. I am desperately trying to find your one on parabolas since that is the unit we are starting but can’t find it anywhere.

Rick

OK, now THAT'S a rant!

Jose Alejandro Vidal

This are the top 10 EPIC things people are saying about this video, the number 3 WILL SHOCK you!