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When clicking through all of my subscriptions to clear the little number that’s usually to the left on YouTube, I ended up on Markiplier’s channel and saw he uploaded a video about his dog. I literally only clicked the video because it was about dogs, and I was super surprised to see that it was trending. Even more surprising to me was at the time of me watching this video, the video had been uploaded 4 days ago and it was still somehow trending. The whole thing, even though it wasn’t a big deal, made me think about how YouTube works and what videos YouTube cares about. Markiplier has a lot of subscribers so it’s more likely he would be trending, but the trending videos I normally see are music videos or movie trailers so I still thought it was strange. I thought maybe because the video was about a cute animal it might get it more views to push it into trending. Even then, I wonder how well the video did prior to me watching it. Had it been trending for the enitre 4 days? How does trending work? I also think the whole thing is funny because his dog was in the video less than half of the time, and the rest of the video was him recommending other videos that she was in to the viewers to go watch. I’m not trying to like call Markiplier out on promoting himself or anything, especially because the video isn’t that long so of course he’s just gonna say what he has to say, but it’s still weird how this video ended up trending when it’s supposed to be about the dog but the video itself is mostly telling viewers to watch other videos about the dog.

http://knight-0f-rhyme.tumblr.com/post/172472429892/tumblcoin-introducing-tumblcoin-tumblr-is

I forgot it was April Fools today, and most websites I use interact with their audience by creating a new feature for the day as their prank. Since it’s currently 1 in the morning, I was surprised to find that tumblr already added their prank. This year they introduced “tumblcoin,” which is a bitcoin that you get for interacting with and making posts.

The user can look at the tumblcoin they have earned by clicking an image placed to the right of their dashboard. In this menu, the user can also buy items with their tumblcoin. I always think the april fools pranks on websites are really fun so I’ve already been messing with this and i bought myself a pet horse (bottom left) which was from a different year for april fools. This also could be a way to get people to post more or reblog more if they really want to see what everything does, and just for fun I want to try and “buy” everything in this menu.

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I use the website Citation Machine whenever I need to write a bibliography, and I think awhile ago it became a site that could tell when you were using adblock extensions so it would ask you to turn off adblock. I haven’t used Citation Machine in a long time, so when I actually saw ads it was surprising. One thing I think they do is interesting with their ads is that to use the site ad free for 2 days, you have to deal with an interactive ad. Its funny how they don’t give you the option to just deal with the ads and you have to experience the interactive ad as well, because I did not click anything stating that I wanted to remove the ads at all.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/replace/oemabmglnanjhfchmiojnjhofdgjckcf

I had a lot of trouble getting my extension to work. After having trouble with another idea I wanted to do, I decided to go with the changing thumbnails on Youtube idea. Originally I wanted it to cycle through 4 different click-baity pictures, but I could barely get 1 to work on it’s own. I also would have really liked to work on the comment section and the icons, but when I was scrolling through them I couldn’t find any particular phrases I wanted to track and I had trouble finding words in my other idea. What I currently have is a picture on most YouTube videos saying Click Me! but I don’t know why it doesn’t show up on all of the videos and it only seems to work sometimes. I thought it might be my computer because my computer was just bugging out a lot but I sent it to my friend and the same thing happened for him as well.

This week I’ve been obsessed with the South Park app. Almost every week there is a new event in the PVP mode where they try to draw you in and play against one another more, and you get more cards and money for doing so. This weekend’s event was centered around the idea of being on a team and competing in team battle, which I wasn’t very fond of but found myself enjoying a lot more than any other event I’ve participated in.

I got the first message before the event started, and it says to, “Join an active team, you won’t regret it.” I’d been putting off joining a team because I knew it wouldn’t be with people I knew in real life and I’ve never played an app that had a great multiplayer function anyway, but this app is largely multiplayer where you are fighting against one another to get better. Since I had nothing to lose, I joined “Team Homie” since it was a generic enough name where I didn’t have to really think about it too much. 

You can chat with your team and donate cards requested by your team members after joining a team. Without really thinking about what it did, I would donate cards just to be nice and I ended up in first place for the week for player donations. I’m guessing the week ends on Monday so I still don’t know what that really does, but by donating I was also able to get coins and level up which just makes the whole game experience a lot more fun and easier for you to win.   

When the event started, another news message popped up telling me, “Don’t be a freeloader!” and other encouraging stuff to get me to want to play the event with a team if I hadn’t decided to do so already. When you check the progress of the event, you can see your individual progress or your team progress, which is what I thought was more cool to see. Team progress is also ranked, and I didn’t do as well on this one as I did with just donating cards, but seeing everyone else’s progress made me want to participate more so that it looked like I was helping.

This week I noticed the gaining popularity of a new app (which isn’t actually new and is from 2015) called Vero, which became a big thing and died all in the same week. Vero’s sudden popularity likely came from ads on facebook and instagram, as well as promotions from people saying, “it’s the new instagram.” It promised a chronological timeline with no ads and no “crazy algorithms”, as well as trying to replicate relationships in the real world like the difference between friendships and acquaintances.

Unfortunately, the app got so big overnight it just stopped working, and people trying to get on can’t do anything with it  It also will be based on a subscription fee to use it after the first million downloads. The privacy policy is also shady, stating that the content is allowed to be used by Vero however they want for as long as they want. The creator of the app also has a shady past where he didn’t pay workers, so now the app has just become a trainwreck where everyone is trying to delete it but can’t even figure out how to do that.

I didn’t download the app and I’m for sure not going to now because it just sounds like a mess, but there’s definitely a lot of stuff worth talking about when looking at what’s going on. For example, the ads being placed on instagram and facebook are already organizing a particular audience to be attracted to the app. By saying the app is “instagram but better,” it’s already causing people to interact with it in a similar manner (when the app could be used for a lot more in reality, like recommending books and stuff.) The rush to make an account was even because of the first million getting a free account thing put into place, so the desire for an account now is there.

I think all of the stuff I’ve seen is interesting, but one thing that stands out to me the most is the idea of assigning labels to the people you are interacting with on the app. The people I saw who downloaded the app were all using it as another platform to post their art, so I thought it was just like everything else where you have followers and that’s it. The fact that it organizes everything into friend, acquaintance, follower, etc… is so interesting and unique to a social media platform and I don’t know whether it would be a good function or not. The only other platform I can think of that has something similar is deviantart because you can organize people by friends or by watchers, but not to this extent.

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Last week while looking up drawing reference, I instinctively clicked the button next to the visit button, which used to be view image or something along those lines. I instead was given a little orange square in the button notifying me I had saved the picture. I think the change happened relatively recently, but now instead of just opening an image to view it bigger through google images you have to save the image.

When exploring this new feature I decided to look at where saved images are placed, which doesn’t provide much explanation other than to try it out by saving your favorite images.

At first I was upset by the change but I actually think it will be useful for me because I was looking up reference for art, so now I can have that reference in a convenient space. I originally thought that this was changed so that google could keep better tabs on the things you are interested in, especially because it is directing you to save your favorite things. I looked into it more, however, and the change was supposedly added to make it harder for users to steal images. So, this new button constructs the user by being an inconvenience so you don’t steal.

The media I was obsessed with this week was the Disney Tsum Tsum App. I visited home for the weekend and my mom is absolutely obsessed with this app. Whenever I visit home I always end up playing this app more because of her. The game is also really fun and cute in general. You connect 3 or more matching disney characters to one another to earn points. It’s very simple and doesn’t require a lot of thought which makes it relaxing (and also easy to get sucked into playing for a long time.) The app updates very regularly, with new characters and a new event every month which causes the player to come back for more. Events also make the player play more to finish everything and get a pin, and I haven’t missed a single event yet so I super focus on the game when it gets close to events ending. This month, there were 6 new characters added and the event was for Valentines day. At this point, I mostly play this game because of my mom since it just ends up taking up a lot of time, but I still really like it and this event made me want to play it more again. Every time you finish a card there’s a really cute animation of the characters like the one I posted above. I’ve had the app for a long time so seeing the new animations is one of the things that I like the most because I know what they used to be and I know how much more effort and time is being put into the game now which is super awesome.

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