When stuff like this comes up, I always think about the following story about the great Hanoi Rat Massacre.<p>>During the beginning of the campaign in April 1902 the Government-General of French Indochina hired professional Vietnamese rat-catchers, these would descend into the sewers to hunt the rats down, and be paid for each rat that they had eliminated.<p>A FEW MOMENTS LATER<p>>The rat hunters amputated their tails and then let them escape so they could breed and create more offspring with tails to then repeat the process.[10] Furthermore, there were also reports that some Vietnamese people were deliberately smuggling in rats from outside Hanoi into the city.[10] The final straw for this plan was when French health inspectors discovered rat farming operations popping up in the countryside on the outskirts of Hanoi, that were breeding rats solely for their tails as some sort of "tail creation factories".
Except for Primitive Technology:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA</a>
I feel bad for the Primitive Technology guy. He started this genre, and there's only so much you can do honestly. People's appetite for ever-iterating content is still there to be exploited, and others have taken his concept and run with it.
The email from Primitive Technology says it all:<p>><i>[...] But wanting to stay out of internet drama. I'll leave it up to the discerning viewer to decide what's real or not.<p>My advice to people who really want to know if the techniques on display are legitimate is to put them into practice and see. If you can follow the steps and get a similar result then it's probably legit. [...]</i><p>For people with some dirt in their hands/construction experience it is obvious most of the time, so I kind of suspect that some part of the audience knows that they are served a package here: ordinary construction work delivered in the popular style of PT. A soothing fantasy.
I think it's important to be honest, but my kids are mesmerized by these videos. I'd rather them watch fake build videos over the videos of kids playing with toys or unboxing videos.
This guy has something like 100M views showing himself totally bored finding comical amounts of surface "gold". He turns off comments on most of his videos now though:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/@MaximovRo">https://www.youtube.com/@MaximovRo</a>
Same is true with some cooking/food videos... and luckily there are people actually debunking them:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSBSzWmjXO0">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSBSzWmjXO0</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eINllOc0hc">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eINllOc0hc</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf9lD523C_k">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf9lD523C_k</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3st8RSq4bq8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3st8RSq4bq8</a><p>etc.
I’ve seen these videos abs thought that this was laughably obvious and didn’t need an expository video. Who’s fooled? The content is still mildly entertaining when understood to be an act.
Another fake video trend is some people gluing barnacles on land turtle's shells, then pretending it's a sea turtle and then making a video where they removes the glued barnacles.<p>Another trend is fake restoration videos, fake animal rescues, etc...
I mean...did we really think the vast, perfectly square construction projects, filmed with expensive cameras were in fact roughing it alone out in the wilderness?<p>It feels like this video is a lot of pearl clutching about how many views these projects get...while being a video getting a lot of views and ad revenue.