conspiracies

Today's conspiracy:

most important:  upvote my new video at http://www.reddit.com/user/paulwheaton/

optional:  view my new youtube video.  Thumbs up, save to favorites and comment.




Video is currently at 188 views.

Reddit:  to the left of each item there is an up arrow and a down arrow.  On the page with my stuff, click on a bunch of up arrows.  They should turn orange.  This is how you upvote.  You can click on as many as you like. 

The video is in six sections on reddit.  The largest is "videos".  The videos section is so big that once submitted it instantly goes to page 2.  I think that there are a bunch of people working hard to promote their own videos, so they immediately downvote anything new.  One downvote takes you immediately off of any section. 

It is for that reason, that I think nothing can ever make it into the videos section unless you have a conspiracy!

The video is currently doing well in the other (smaller) sections.

More news as events warrant!

What has been learned so far with this experiment:

1)  When you are trying to learn how many times a video has been viewed, and you expect the count to go over 300, then ... well .... you really need to just not monitor that at all.  If you view it too much, youtube freezes your view counter.  For about six hours the counter was frozen at 303.  Then it suddenly jumped to 606.  This morning it is at 1147.  I suspect that we received about 2000 views that were not counted.  Which should have been enough to put the video on the big youtube stage.

2)  A wordy description can be better than a short description on reddit. 

3)  To be able to get a video to do well in the videos section, I think I'm going to need 5 upvotes all within the first five minutes.

The digg experiment appears to be a big faceplant.  It looks like if we had a total of six diggs in the first two hours, we might have been pushe up to a list where others might digg it, which could push it up to an area where it could have resulted in 10,000 views in 24 hours which would push it to the main stage of youtube. 

But we only had 4 in the first few hours. 

I think the digg experiment needs to wait until I have more conspirators.

In the meantime, the reddit experiment is still doing pretty good. 

2271 views on the video.  I think about 1400 of those come from reddit. 

Something about youtube:  I think that if a person stops the video before the very end that youtube thinks the video sucks and so they are less likely to promote it.  So, please make sure to play the video all the way through.

Today's conspiracy was to try and get a new video to appear on the reddit video section.

At this moment, the reddit link has been there for one hour.  There are 10 up votes and 3 down votes.  And it appears at #3 on the videos list!  That's the highest a video of mine has ever made it on the reddit videos list! 

Usually, I post something there, it gets a downvote in about 15 seconds and then doesn't show up.  So, this time it got far enough to at least get some attention.  If it now gets 7 downvotes and washed away, that seems fair enough. 

.....  this is interesting.  I just refreshed and it changed from 10 up votes and 3 down votes to 10 up votes and 2 down votes.  How odd.  Somebody unvoted?

I'll monitor it for the next few hours and let you all know how it did.

The view counter is stuck at 316. 

I've done some more reading on this.  It seems that there are some beefy algorithms for determining view counts.  Below 300, they let just anything count.  Once you hit 300, then everything gets subjected to the big algorithm which is run just once in a while.    Further, the counter will filter out dupe views and the like.  So if a person watches the same video five times, the pre-300 counter will count that as five.  The post-300 counter will count that as 1.  And youtube doesn't want the counter to go backwards, so the official count will only show up once it exceeds the count that is showing. 

We will probably see count results this evening.

reddit videos:  now at 14 up votes and 6 down votes. 

I submitted the video to some other reddit sections and it is doing really well in those.  In one, it was instantly hit with a downvote and taken off that list.  I emailed one friend and asked for an upvote which put it back on the list where it now has 39 up votes and 14 down votes.

The view counter is now unstuck.  6233 views in about 24 hours.

The video stayed on page 1 of the videos section for several hours.  Around 8pm it was at the bottom.  It is now on page 3 with 33 up votes and 18 down votes.

I'll try to report on the youtube traffic analysis tomorrow.

Thanks to those that helped with the "diatomaceous earth" conspiracy.  We're still #5 - no change.