This is product thinking. Let’s get deep: Story time!
I initially liked the guy but grew a bit tired of him using what could be veiled racism for views — I’m not accusing him of anything; it just felt cringy-er than I like my YouTube. The ethics are more complicated than that, but something bothered me, especially since that special episode where they sent someone physically there, let pests in the building, etc.
I couldn’t put my finger on why. I didn’t particularly appreciate using animals, but that wasn’t it. I wasn’t a fan of the tall Serbian guy and his friend: they felt like standard prankster YouTubers, and I wouldn't say I like those. It felt like Mark Rober was part of it (He’s my favorite YouTuber, like everyone here) but didn’t like it; he should have been more active but wasn’t… More on MR later. It’s relevant—I promise.
In the meantime, my partner (a medical doctor) has been watching those for a while. She loved it: administrative nightmare, people taking advantage of older people, computer glitches… there was so much schadenfreude to keep her giggling for hours after long shifts. I liked watching over her shoulder, recognizing the episode, and telling her if something good was coming (those are long).
I have this pet theory that some jobs are intensive (you work as much as you do, like clinical work for doctors, plumbers, bakers, or therapists) or extensive (you do things that work for you, like teacher, software developer!). Anyone with an intensive job has a terrible life because they have to work too much in construction. So I’m very tolerant of what you do after a shift to rebuild yourself. (And I think we, the tech community, should turn every job into an extensive one because that’s a better life).
But there still was something that bothered me. It was about how he needed the views to justify his time hacking them, and the views relied on a show that was always the same, and the poor, desperate, upset, and soon openly racist Indian “call center” operator had to be the bad guy. Having the bad guy always have the same skin color didn’t make the viewer any less problematic.
I thought about the theory of Moral luck (some people are in a position where they have to make hard choices, neither option is moral, and judging them for their worst decision without the context is complicated), but it wasn’t it…
I thought about how, after that big bust and the subsequent one, authorities arrested many people. They let most of them go because, of course, the police are deeply in the pocket of the owners that you never see in those videos, who are never really risking much. It felt performative: nothing structural happened. It also felt possibly “culturally racist”: again, good reason to suspect corruption in India, but without evidence, it still felt prejudicial. But obvious.
But then I say this video (the first two minutes, I’m waiting for my partner to come from her shift to watch it together — she’s going to love that one). Kitboga didn’t just find something better, automating him wasting time with others: I recognize that team huddled around a table. That’s a product team. It felt more like a physical product team, like what you see in Mark Rober’s video about his toy company, but suddenly it clicked:
I didn't like Kitboga videos, not just because they were ineffective, but because they couldn’t scale. He had to spend time wasting their time, “making content” to get one caller to waste his time. This video is about someone who has done intensive work until now, switching to automation and opening himself to extensive work.
This time, fighting spammers doesn't rely on at least enough of them being “minstrels” (caricatural entertaining stereotypes: the thing that led to the expression “black face”) to make “good content.” It works as a video based on the excitement around building and iterating on a product, led by data.
Well, presumably led by data: I haven’t watched beyond the second minute when he says they were tracking “EVERY click,” so my product analyst self suddenly felt very involved in that part.
That’s why I like (and I’m assuming everyone on HN likes) Mark Rober’s videos: he builds a product. There’s some story-telling, but he clearly follows the ups and downs of trying to build a systematic solution to a given problem. This is something that MR wasn't able to do in the video with spies getting inside the call center.
I sometimes struggle to explain my theory about intensive and extensive work, or what makes a company “product-driven,” and why it’s so important. You rarely have both options that are easy to compare favorably in an industry without the gap in quality being so prevalent: industrial bread vs. hand-make baker, ready-to-wear vs. bespoke fashion. But for so much software, having an industrial option is usually better because quantity has a quality of its own.
Here, Kitboga is trying to fight an industry. It doesn’t matter that he’s witty every time he’s talking to an agent; he just needs to be witty enough to edit it into his video. To fight scammers, he needs scale — a different scale than what millions of viewers can give him. This automation will allow him to waste so much scammer time that he might make the sector unprofitable. Not sure when, where, or how… (indeed, they’ll notice when they step in a maze?), but that glimpse at possible success where no one thought that was possible. Everyone who started a company knows that moment, the product-market-fit, the Road-to-Damascus glimpse:
“Are you a billionaire?
- Not yet, but soon.
- How?!
- That one guy said that I’ve made his day a little bit better.”
Seeing someone work on something for years and finally change—that’s a rare sight. I’m happy it was all filmed.
Plus, those look like horrifying UX dark patterns. I love those. Now that I’ve wasted everyone’s time with my theory, my partner is finally home: let’s watch it.
Kitboga definitely isn't using veiled racism like other scambaiters, unless you consider scambaiting itself racist to an extent.
As far as the "cannot scale" argument. His videos are educational. Most times here starts and ends his videos with a warning and a message to make sure you and your loved ones know how to spot these scammers. I for one have shared his videos with grandparents and they loved them, but were also saddened that some people do fall for these things. Since they were made aware, I would say they are 10x as safe when talking on the phone and browsing the web, maybe even to a fault since now they call me when something looks phishy... Anyways as long as his channel is growing and more people consume his content and spread awareness, it is scaling.
> I would watch a quieter, more humble Mark Rober.
There is definitely too much Californian energy there… but I have to work with guys like that, so I try to get myself used to the unjustifiable yelling and gratuitous positivity.
I’ve mentioned alternatives who I would recommend in another comment:
> * Shane Wighton of Stuff Made Here in the Pacific North West: more earnest about how hard it is to make hardware
>
> * Destin Sandlin of Smarter Everyday is the actual fun uncle, a Southern engineer to the core and a lot more earnest on screen.
>
> * Alec Watson of Technology Connections is a MidWestern fix-it-all who cares far too much about old tech
>
> * Tech Ingredients is the real deal: New Englander, no messing around, projects that are genuine breakthroughs with enough detail to reproduce in your garage
> unless you consider scambaiting itself racist to an extent
Yeah… It’s not that it is, but it’s not clear enough that it’s not. Makes me feel uncomfortable. The best explanation I have is this joke (about a different problem): https://youtu.be/nu6C2KL_S9o
> Since they were made aware,
I see the argument behind education, and it does scale in that way — I initially listed YouTuber as an extensive work because it’s not a million times harder to make 10 million views than 10 views. There’s more than one input into work.
But I don’t know how many aging people have loved ones who will show them Kitboga videos. He still interrupts scams all the time. He’s a preventative measure in a world with scammers. His mocking of them hasn’t eradicated the practice. If he traps enough of them into eternal Captchas, until the center doesn’t make enough money, then he might convince the rich owners to do something else (train AI, I guess) and make the scam centers disappear. And that feels transformative.
Essentially prank calling scammers gets old fast, and is just an avenue to make money from Youtube. Which means upping the ante to keep viewers, eventually videos reach a grey area where they get as mean as the scammers themselves.
This automated method is cool though, so it makes an interesting video. Could have done without the Kraken shilling though, they are part of the problem.
YouTubers have not made the most informed decisions about who they accept sponsor from, but compared to traditional media, they have proven very responsive to campaign from their fans accusing them of shilling the wrong brand.
FWIW, after a few videos I found Mark Rober insufferable, he seems too full of himself. I did enjoy his first glitter vs anti-package-thieves video, but not his later videos
Oh, his latest videos and the package-thieves are way less entertaining than his previous ones. There are interesting hesitations when he ponders the ethics and legality, but it’s otherwise (unfunny) schadenfreude.
I think that’s the influence of other YouTubers: he’s hanging out with the Safety Third guys, who are (as their name implies) trying to fast-run a Darwin prize. They make entertaining science-y stuff. He’s also hanging out with Mr. Beast, aka Jimmy Donaldson, which I suspect is why Mark is less fun: Jimmy has this extreme discipline of optimizing videos for views that carve the authentic excitement out to stuff cliffhangers every second instead.
For example, Mark Rober’s previous projects, like the always-on-target dart board, are much better. He’s quite smug on this one, too, but that’s his screen persona: an over-confident Californian frat-ish dude turning into “the best” uncle. He talks about this offline; it’s his way of making childish pranks fit his adult frame.
If you like the dart-board one more but thought it was too prankish, you might like Shane Wighton of Stuff Made Here in the Pacific North West: he’s more earnest about how hard it is to make hardware. There are still the occasional pranks (and the over-confidence because he’s using a robot), but there are a lot more technical details. His on-screen persona with his wife (who claims, on screen, to hate all his ideas) is not very credible, but more grown-up than Mark Rober’s Nerf gun fights.
Otherwise, Destin Sandlin of Smarter Everyday is the actual fun uncle, a Southern engineer to the core and a lot more earnest on screen. Alec Watson of Technology Connections is a MidWestern fix-it-all, who cares far too much about old tech. And finally, Tech Ingredients is the real deal: New Englander, no messing around, projects that are genuinely breakthroughs, with enough detail to reproduce in your garage.
Well, to derail this to a review of YouTubers I've seen, Destin is okay, his happy optimistic about everything attitude annoys the dark-hearted cynic in me a bit.
Technology Connections: interesting content, sometimes the humor is cringeworthy. He knows he's making a cringe joke or a very very lame pun, so he leans into it, "I know this joke isn't funny but the fact that you're aware that I'm aware that I'm making a lame joke makes it funny again ha ha ha" while my eyes roll hard, but hey maybe some people find the meta-joke (or is it a meta-meta-joke? Or am I missing his meta-meta-jokes?) hilarious and clever. Tech Ingredients is so serious and great!
Other YouTubers I enjoy are Matthias Wandel and Electroboom.
100% with you. Shane Wighton (Stuff Made Here) might be the cynic you want. He makes some cringy self-referential jokes, but he’s genuinely that one magical engineer everyone wants on his team.
He’s the only one who is an engineer first, and an entertainer… maybe?
There are a handful who I haven’t mentioned with the same personality—mostly around niche topics, like RC vehicles, though.
I’m curious what you’d think of Jay from the Plasma Channel: he clearly very personable, but his content is to the point, and he might find something major on the way.
I initially liked the guy but grew a bit tired of him using what could be veiled racism for views — I’m not accusing him of anything; it just felt cringy-er than I like my YouTube. The ethics are more complicated than that, but something bothered me, especially since that special episode where they sent someone physically there, let pests in the building, etc.
I couldn’t put my finger on why. I didn’t particularly appreciate using animals, but that wasn’t it. I wasn’t a fan of the tall Serbian guy and his friend: they felt like standard prankster YouTubers, and I wouldn't say I like those. It felt like Mark Rober was part of it (He’s my favorite YouTuber, like everyone here) but didn’t like it; he should have been more active but wasn’t… More on MR later. It’s relevant—I promise.
In the meantime, my partner (a medical doctor) has been watching those for a while. She loved it: administrative nightmare, people taking advantage of older people, computer glitches… there was so much schadenfreude to keep her giggling for hours after long shifts. I liked watching over her shoulder, recognizing the episode, and telling her if something good was coming (those are long).
I have this pet theory that some jobs are intensive (you work as much as you do, like clinical work for doctors, plumbers, bakers, or therapists) or extensive (you do things that work for you, like teacher, software developer!). Anyone with an intensive job has a terrible life because they have to work too much in construction. So I’m very tolerant of what you do after a shift to rebuild yourself. (And I think we, the tech community, should turn every job into an extensive one because that’s a better life).
But there still was something that bothered me. It was about how he needed the views to justify his time hacking them, and the views relied on a show that was always the same, and the poor, desperate, upset, and soon openly racist Indian “call center” operator had to be the bad guy. Having the bad guy always have the same skin color didn’t make the viewer any less problematic.
I thought about the theory of Moral luck (some people are in a position where they have to make hard choices, neither option is moral, and judging them for their worst decision without the context is complicated), but it wasn’t it…
I thought about how, after that big bust and the subsequent one, authorities arrested many people. They let most of them go because, of course, the police are deeply in the pocket of the owners that you never see in those videos, who are never really risking much. It felt performative: nothing structural happened. It also felt possibly “culturally racist”: again, good reason to suspect corruption in India, but without evidence, it still felt prejudicial. But obvious.
But then I say this video (the first two minutes, I’m waiting for my partner to come from her shift to watch it together — she’s going to love that one). Kitboga didn’t just find something better, automating him wasting time with others: I recognize that team huddled around a table. That’s a product team. It felt more like a physical product team, like what you see in Mark Rober’s video about his toy company, but suddenly it clicked:
I didn't like Kitboga videos, not just because they were ineffective, but because they couldn’t scale. He had to spend time wasting their time, “making content” to get one caller to waste his time. This video is about someone who has done intensive work until now, switching to automation and opening himself to extensive work.
This time, fighting spammers doesn't rely on at least enough of them being “minstrels” (caricatural entertaining stereotypes: the thing that led to the expression “black face”) to make “good content.” It works as a video based on the excitement around building and iterating on a product, led by data.
Well, presumably led by data: I haven’t watched beyond the second minute when he says they were tracking “EVERY click,” so my product analyst self suddenly felt very involved in that part.
That’s why I like (and I’m assuming everyone on HN likes) Mark Rober’s videos: he builds a product. There’s some story-telling, but he clearly follows the ups and downs of trying to build a systematic solution to a given problem. This is something that MR wasn't able to do in the video with spies getting inside the call center.
I sometimes struggle to explain my theory about intensive and extensive work, or what makes a company “product-driven,” and why it’s so important. You rarely have both options that are easy to compare favorably in an industry without the gap in quality being so prevalent: industrial bread vs. hand-make baker, ready-to-wear vs. bespoke fashion. But for so much software, having an industrial option is usually better because quantity has a quality of its own.
Here, Kitboga is trying to fight an industry. It doesn’t matter that he’s witty every time he’s talking to an agent; he just needs to be witty enough to edit it into his video. To fight scammers, he needs scale — a different scale than what millions of viewers can give him. This automation will allow him to waste so much scammer time that he might make the sector unprofitable. Not sure when, where, or how… (indeed, they’ll notice when they step in a maze?), but that glimpse at possible success where no one thought that was possible. Everyone who started a company knows that moment, the product-market-fit, the Road-to-Damascus glimpse:
“Are you a billionaire?
- Not yet, but soon.
- How?!
- That one guy said that I’ve made his day a little bit better.”
Seeing someone work on something for years and finally change—that’s a rare sight. I’m happy it was all filmed.
Plus, those look like horrifying UX dark patterns. I love those. Now that I’ve wasted everyone’s time with my theory, my partner is finally home: let’s watch it.