This video feels curiously relevant today.
I've noticed with increasing frequency that, rather than ignoring things that are wilfully stupid and very obviously, deliberately provocative, people are responding to them. The intention is presumably to show how intelligent the person is and how they wouldn't ever fall for anything so stupid, but in fact it tends to have the opposite effect; it just spreads the original stupidity further, and the cycle perpetuates.
As I type this, Twitter is currently a-boilin' at a YouTuber apparently notorious for such things having put out a particularly dumb video on the subject of Dragon Quest XI. Rather than just leaving this person be to fester in silence, however, the well-oiled outrage machine has fired itself up and is now — much to the YouTuber's delight, I'm sure — spreading the video far and wide, ostensibly so they can say how stupid it is.
This doesn't work. To people who are chasing clout, chasing numbers, it's that old "any publicity is good publicity" thing. And it's the same thing as the "hatebait" that commercial websites put out. If you can post something so inflammatory it makes everyone want to come to your site/profile/video and leave a comment, you've won — even if those comments are all swear words, exhortations for you to kill yourself and all the other joys of the modern Internet. If you got someone to click, you won; you got your ad revenue. It doesn't matter how. Moreover, the "engagement" you got from that inflammatory post moved you up a tier or two in "the algorithm", be it Twitter's or YouTube's.
The only winning move is not to play. Unfortunately, it seems that human nature makes it impossible to resist.
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