In April of 2021, I posted a short to YouTube - a 60 second video in the format of their TikTok competitor. In the nature of shorts, it was a one-minute, necessarily un-nuanced hot take about a subject I like to talk about: character design. Specifically I made the mistake of lamenting that the character design of female heroes in major games tend to prioritize attractiveness rather than using their body shape to do storytelling about their lives or capabilities.
It did okay, garnering about 38k views in its first month. Didn't set the world on fire, but I got my point out there, and while there were some crappy comments, for the most part people seemed to understand what I was driving at.
The short had eventually climbed to about 100.000 views after a full year of being online, which is respectable, but in the world of YouTube Shorts a fairly middle-of-the-road level of success (these are extremely short videos being served extremely quickly to a huge base of users). Fast forward to November 8th of this year, and... something happens. More than a year after it was originally published, it starts gaining traction.
Slowly at first, a few thousand views, but by the 14th it's gained 80.000 views in a day. On the 16th, 400.000, on the 17th, 680.000. I have no idea why this is happening, there's no influx of viewers from any outside source, there's no topical news event that would make the video suddenly relevant.
I tweet about it, bemused by the sudden jump, but also hinting a bit at the other side of this story.
"There Is No Such Thing As Negative Press"
On YouTube, there is on the systemic level very little difference between positive attention and negative attention. If you create excellent work that brings joy into people's lives, they engage with your video and the algorithm reads that as success. And if you create miserable, hateful content that makes people angry and stokes them to responses of outrage, disgust or jeering, the algorithm reads that as a kind of success, too.
Hate-bait and rage-bait YouTubers operate in that latter space, churning out inflammatory or distressing content, hoping to elicit either reactions of horror, or gleeful cheering from people who like it when their favourite online personality trolls the Other.
But there's another way to garner negative attention, and that is to create content which is not at all designed to bait or elicit a negative response, but whose subject matter nonetheless produces a negative response from a certain kind of person.
That is the unfortunate slip-and-slide I have found myself on.
At the time of writing, the short sits at 6.8 million views, has been gaining on average 2 million views per day, and it still seems to be accelerating. Despite those skyrocketing numbers, however, it only ("only") has around 1300 published comments underneath it.
That is because, after the first couple of million views, I told YouTube to automatically hold all comments for review. That is, YouTube allows users to comment on the video, but those comments are not published until I manually approve them.
The reason I did this is... well, it's easier to show you with some pictures. Content warning, these are unfiltered YouTube comments, so expect casual bigotries.
These are screenshots from the "held for review" tab of my YouTube Studio backend. YouTube in recent years has gotten good at filtering out content like overt racial slurs and the worst of the worst insults, which is nice, but the filtered comments tab is still not a particularly pleasant place to read through right now.
Most of the comments are like what you see above: casually rude, fatphobic, homophobic, transphobic or otherwise unpleasant. Some of the comments are more intense, threatening me with violence, insulting me personally, "I hope your mom gets raped by a [racial slur]," and worse. The worst comments are a small percentage, but as you can imagine, they do stand out in the mind, and a small percentage of a huge number can still be a lot of comments.
And that's the thing. There are hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of comments. I scrolled for fifteen minutes and did not see the end of it. YouTube doesn't keep a visible count on how many comments are held for review, but I'd not be surprised if the 1300 comments count would have been doubled if I hadn't stopped it when I did. And since the video is still accelerating, that number is likely to skyrocket as well.
This provides me with the best theory I have as to why the video took off: the YouTube algorithm started showing it not to people who it thought would like it, but to people it thought would dislike it enough to react, to comment. And the more people did comment, the more the algorithm showed it to other people just like those who commented, who were also likely to dislike it.
This causes a feedback loop of negative attention, which the YouTube algorithm (horrifyingly) interprets as a success and an incentive to keep pushing the video.
Moderating this comments section is now physically impossible - I would need a staff of a dozen to handle it, which I can't afford and who I wouldn't want to expose to it, and while this deluge is going on, moderating the comments of other videos becomes next to impossible as well, since the "held for review" tab is utterly monopolized.
One fix for this problem, of course, is to simply disable the comments. But in my experience, doing that only encourages the worst of the commenters to seek out your other content and leave even worse comments there instead. In fact, a couple of dozen particularly irate people have already sought out my other channels to post insults there, adding to the stress and workload of dealing with all this viral "success."
How YouTube Makes YouTubers Worse
This situation is stressful, because humans are monkey creatures with monkey brains that do not like being exposed to a constant stream of rudeness, cruelty and casual bigotry. However rational you try to be about it, however detached and cold, it wears on you. It chips away at your mental defenses and becomes a constant source of low-level stress and misery.
But as far as YouTube is concerned, it's a huge success.
YouTube's systems are all set up this way. They celebrate increases in numbers with cheerful messages and positive green arrows and "helpful" statistics showing just how much things are growing - meanwhile, if you post otherwise positively received work that doesn't attract as much attention, it will give you dour "your content received fewer views due to lower interest this month" messages and greyed-out downward arrows. If you have a video that does really well on the numbers, YouTube will even play a little fireworks animation on its statistics to celebrate.
It's a form of not-so-subtle psychological manipulation. As a YouTuber you are dependent on your statistics to inform your work - if your rent depends on making those numbers go up, you essentially have no choice but to pay attention to them and let them guide your decision making. And so YouTube designs its systems to push its creators towards the behaviour that the platform finds most beneficial: numbers optimizing.
And the thing is, if I went only by the numbers, I would look at the success of this short and go "oh, there's a viable content strategy here!"
I could try and replicate its "success" by creating more content around the same topic, by targeting the same kind of outrage-baiting, by identifying the contentious subjects and trigger points brought up by the angry people in the comments and hitting them repeatedly, hoping to make engagement fall out.
YouTube would reward me for that, quite handsomely, in fact, even as mental health and professional happiness would absolutely crater. I don't have the personality for that kind of content creation, it's not what I want to do with my work, it's not the kind of person I want to be.
But I am not immune to propaganda. I have already changed as a person from doing this job, I know this for a fact. My priorities have shifted, my wants and needs have changed. Not for the worse, I believe, not yet, but the platform is constantly, constantly pushing on me.
It's unpleasant and it's stressful. It's hostile design, coupled with primitive and insufficient moderation tools, coupled with an aggressive algorithm which will go out of its way to ensure your relationship with your audience is toxic, if that toxicity produces better numbers for the platform.
Viral success is often thought of as a desirable thing, something which can launch a career or skyrocket an unknown to success. The reality is, it is mostly just overwhelming. I'm a grown man and I have done online content creation for a long time, and I have learned strategies to manage toxic comments sections over years of experience.
But imagine if something like this happened to a sixteen year old. Imagine if it happened to a teenage girl just starting out making videos. Or a trans person. Or, hell, any person from a marginalized community. I am sheltered by my privileges, but I have seen how dark it gets and how fast it gets dark for people who don't have those extra protections.
Well, it does happen to them, and no matter how rancid, bigoted and horrible the abuse they receive, they will log in to YouTube Studio to see happy fireworks and "Nice! Your video got 20 million views!" with a little green upwards pointing arrow right next to it.
You might have seen articles and thinkpieces around "creator burnout," and I want you to know that a huge part of what burns creators out is the primitive, profit-optimizing, hostile systems that power these platforms and monetize our worst experiences on them as "engagement."
In case you're wondering how much money I've earned from those 6.8 million views, by the way, it's about $20.
YouTube says they're rolling out full Shorts monetization next year, so I guess I just picked the wrong month to go viral.
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Given the volatile nature of their original form and the subsequent pedigree of D.C.’s Black Eyes, suggesting a reunion at any point between their breakup ahead of 2004’s Cough and 2022’s first return rehearsals would’ve gotten you quizzical looks if you weren’t laughed out of a room first. Just have a look at the murderer’s row of related acts that trailed in the wake of the band’s demise: Mi Ami, Ital, Earthen Sea, Esau, Marriage, Water Damage (and that’s not even close to all of them). Unlike countless other early millennial bands cashing in, Black Eyes for a long time felt like a proposition spiritually opposed to such stunts, a beautifully cantankerous moment permanently consigned to history.
But for whatever hellish timeline we may be on now, this much is certain: Black Eyes has returned, and it is very much like they never left.
The big question of why has been given a simple, economic enough answer: Yeah, actually, this did start as a cash-in. The band initially reformed to celebrate the 20th anniversary (and re-release) of their debut self-titled album in the spring of 2023.
“We agreed to do the first weekend and there were some concerns, just in terms of how it would feel to play for three nights, four nights in a row, and just keep that as a very fixed goal … we’ll play with each other, we’ll play with our friends, and we’ll see how it goes,” Daniel Martin-McCormick told Treble recently. What the group found over the course of those shows, mining old material for a zine and a subsequent extended tour, was that there was a thrumming vitality to the decades-old songs, and the encouraging performances led to jam sessions that led to new music that led to new recordings that led here to Hostile Design.
What they haven’t emphasized as strongly is that there are grander parallel conditions at work, too. The current political climate, that aforementioned hellish timeline, a country at war with everyone and itself led by a bumbling fool too blessed by protection to be stressed by election — in those ways, Black Eyes’ timing could not be more apt because they’re picking up exactly where they left off in a chaotic environment only adjusted for inflation of thoughts and prayers. It makes sense this group sounds just right for right now — or, as Martin-McCormick puts it on opener “Break a Leg,” every regulation speaks to an immaculate design.
And what startling design the band has concocted over six songs at just about half an hour. What struck me at one of those reunion shows was just how jammy it sounded, but it’s interesting to note on Hostile Design that they still manage to breathe considerable room into what can at times be a suffocating skronk despite the fact that this is their most efficient release yet. Some of that is due to a slight shift in experimentation: Though the band’s core setup of two drums, a bass, guitar and sax remains the anchor, members’ individual pursuits have now added bass clarinet, live multichannel dubbing, and electronic drum triggers and samples. “Break a Leg” and “Burn” are ideal openers in this sense, leading with the furious fists of old before downshifting to dub (and then escalating again); at the other end of the album, “Yeah, Right” and “Tomtom” wrap things up as both the shortest and longest songs here. The tweaks are subtle on aggregate, but the added depth is noticeable in comparing their three records in back-to-back-to-back listens.
The lyrics haven’t pulled any punches, either. Their words have reliably occupied a sort of liminal realm where they’re loose enough to be about domestic politics, merely putting up with your parents or free-flowing brain fluid poetics, and that remains so here; in any case, though Martin-McCormick’s high-end vocal scrawls sound slightly more weathered, Hugh McElroy’s delivery hasn’t aged a day and even with the introduction of Greek (“Burn”), Arabic (“Pestilence”) and Haitian Creole (“Tomtom”) verses, there’s little question who you’re listening to or where they stand more broadly.
Of Dischord’s millennial post-punk generation that ushered out the ‘90s stalwarts — a trifecta that also included Q and not U and Faraquet — Black Eyes’ disbandment seemed at the time both least surprising and least likely to be resolved. That they’ve not only reformed, but made fresh art that sounds as essential as anything else in their catalog, is one of 2025’s welcome miracles. Let the bruise blood flow, let it be known: Hostile Design is the evolutionary form Black Eyes faithful no longer need lament for not having come to pass.
You know the curb cutters effect, where an infrastructural change designed to help disabled people helps other demographics too?
I feel like we should talk about the evil inverse of that, when a change designed to hurt a marginalized group ends up hosing everyone else too, if only to push against it.
The biggest example of this would be, of course, hostile architecture...
Thanks to Samantha Cole at 404 Media, we are now aware that Automattic plans to sell user data from Tumblr and WordPress.com (which is the h
This post came to my attention today.
It’s difficult to put my feelings (and thoughts) into words right now. I know consent has been a difficult topic in the technology world for a while, and it’s no surprise the whole AI thing became so pervasive so quickly given the absurd investment these companies made in making it the trending topic of the decade and a toy accessible to anyone.
I have many questions, regarding the computational power dedicated to a tool that’s geared towards destroying creative work, a tool that fails so fundamentally in understanding the process of creating art yet claims to surpass it. I have questions regarding the energy and water costs of keeping the massive servers they certainly need, when scarcity is an ever present threat in a world that heats up more every year. I question all the dedication and investment when we have far more pressing issues of illness, hunger, inequality, and the list could go on.
I question why are we living in a world that’s incapable to control the greed and maliciousness of companies who exploit their users at every new development.
I don’t usually talk about myself a lot here, but I’m also a UX/UI designer, so I’m familiar with the process of Design Thinking, of creating a product based on the user needs…and features that hide themselves subtly to make the users fall into a trap is just hostile design. This is the world of hostile design. I don’t get respect as a user, as a creator, as a worker, as a citizen. If I did, my representatives would have the balls to stop all these policies and decisions from companies that want to leech me.
They want to chew my art, spit me out of the market and confine me to this horrible online experience.
I’m not sure what I should do at the moment. Maybe I’ll take all my art posts down from tumblr, maybe I’ll create a telegram channel later to post my art and talk to people. I have no idea which is the best route at the moment. I felt pressure to “put me out there and be seen” my whole life.
Interact with viewers.
create a fan base.
But it feels like no platform respects me enough right now, and I’m not willing to give up all of me. Opt-out is not enough.
I've been using the tumblr app a bit to link a friend posts in-text, and I just want to say that having the Log Out button RIGHT BENEATH THE DELETE ACCOUNT BUTTON is the most fucked up example of deliberately, vindictively user-unfriendly design I can think of. No WONDER ppl are constantly deleting their accounts on accident!
