When stuff like this comes up, I always think about the following story about the great Hanoi Rat Massacre.
>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.
A FEW MOMENTS LATER
>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".
An identical story is told about Seattle in the late 19th/early 20th Century... bounty on rats paid upon presentation of the tail, followed by kids setting up rat ranches in their basements and back yards.
Basically you have the ones doing it for fun / as a lifestyle, where progress is slow and that cover many elements of survival/primitive life. And those who build a new house with pool every week or so
> Hopefully they will incorporate this exception into their headline; this is the only "primitive" channel with which I was familiar.
There's only so much you can fit into a headline before it becomes too unwieldy. They pretty clearly indicated that one was legit, and it was used as a truthful example throughout the video. They even used that creator as a kind of outside expert to evaluate the fake videos.
> Just one additional word needed. No excuse. Ironically, this clickbait style is similar to the fraud being described in the video.
The title is "How primitive building videos are staged," what one additional word to you propose adding to distinguish the Primitive Technology channel's videos from all others? If you're thinking something like "many," that really doesn't really clarify much if anything.
It clarifies that there's more than one and only some of them are fake. if you've only seen the original it reduces the clockbate-iness of the video because you can then presume that the original one you saw is actually legit and it's the second comers that are fake, without watching the video.
I always thought that he was some kind of an engineering/anthrophology/... proessor/TA, and after showing a few examples (eg. how a brick is made), a team of students took over the work for a lab course, each of them made 20 more :)
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.
>[...] But wanting to stay out of internet drama. I'll leave it up to the discerning viewer to decide what's real or not.
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. [...]
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.
Ninja Rockstar 100x primitive builder here, I agree!
Seriously, I don't begrudge these people one bit. They saw an opportunity and seized it. Admirable in my opinion. Specifically, the videos are so clearly fake it's hard to understand how anyone can be fooled to believe they're real. I mean "throwing" 50 tons of dirt out of a hole to build these things is just too much.
This has been my attitude for a while, although my use of TikTok really ramped up my disillusion. The amount of cringe-worthy fakery on that app makes YouTube look sane by comparison.
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:
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.
Another trend is fake restoration videos, fake animal rescues, etc...
There is also a spate of videos of two different cute animals together (like a puppy and duckling playing, etc.). A lot of those are produced by content farms and heaven knows how the animals are treated when the cameras are off.
Could we skip to the point that in any trend there will be fakes. A trend is a fad and while they reoccur every so often the ones that are prepared stands to make the most.
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?
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.
>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.
A FEW MOMENTS LATER
>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".