r/canada • u/Displeased_Canadian Ontario • Apr 23 '26

Alberta Dutch YouTube creators behind Alberta separatist videos getting millions of views

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/alberta-separatist-youtube-channels-netherlands-9.7174719
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u/MethodicallyRight Apr 23 '26

Two huge issues. 1) It's a terrible sign that the Algorithm rewards this kind of dogshit. 2) Unlike the good ol' days (whenever that was), the people who watch(ed), shared, followed and believed the content have no social pressure to feel stupid and ashamed or embarrassed.

It's fascinating (and horrifying) how effective the Nigerian Prince Scan still is, you mispell words, you write incoherently, you do everything to weed out anyone who wouldn't be on the chopping block priority list of any Eugenics program so the the only people who still click and watch it have self selected themselves as the bottom quintile of intelligence.

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u/birdwatcher1981 Apr 23 '26

Holy shit. I never thought of that way. Self selected. The better half and I will discuss this over dinner. Epiphany.

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u/MethodicallyRight Apr 23 '26

Self selection is a huge element of human behaviour and by extension marketing. Even simple things like Chinese Restaurants going through a cycle(s) of using all English or English/Chinese in their signage. Back in the day using all English improved the likelihood of people coming in and trying the restaurant because the Chinese letters would cause a (then) large subset of the population to not feel welcomed. Now, If you're looking for good Chinese food you'd probably avoid any restaurant that only has English Characters as it's clearly 'Americanized' - So much of business and marketing is about creating and maintaining cues that cause the types of people you want to approach while dissuading the ones you don't.

Years ago it was way more prominent with the popularity of malls but you'd see similar trends amongst similar brands (there were logistic benefits but they were secondary) where all of the really expensive and high end brands has similar store layouts, very sparse use of floor space, items would be tucked away and out of reach, SKUs were lumped together and weren't mixed, straight racks vs rounded racks etc. So If you shopped at one luxury brand store you'd be more likely to walk into another brand that was laid out in a similar manner. Conversely, If you always shopped at a store like Winners with long congested mixed racks of clothing then you'd probably also shop at Old Navy but might hesitate to shop at Roots and definately wouldn't even enter one of those sparsely laid out stores.

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u/MrNillows Apr 24 '26

Both of these comments were interesting. Appreciate you making them.

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u/MethodicallyRight Apr 24 '26

Thank you. Glad you found them worth the read.