The Chaser Report - Algorithm Hygiene | Craig Reucassel

Episode Date: October 27, 2022

Craig, Dom, and Charles dive into the world of TikTok and try to beat the algorithm. Did you know that what you linger on is what you see more often? Well why not try lingering on our new Chaser 2022 Annual to clean your feed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello, and welcome to The Chaser Report. I'm Charles Firth, and with me today is Dom Knight. Hello! And Craig Rucasel. Good to be here. Great way to bury the lead.

Yeah. Now, Dom, I've heard a rumor that you, and I want to talk about TikTok in general, but I've heard a rumor that you are getting into tennis and the way you do that, that is by watching tennis on TikTok. Is this right? Not quite. So it's actually, I'm not cool enough to be on TikTok. What I do is I watch tennis on YouTube and it serves up shorts. And shorts are YouTube's attempt to be TikTok and have vertically oriented video. And I don't know if you've tried to watch tennis. It doesn't fit well into your screen. It's hilarious. YouTube's perfectly good in the normal way that it works. But now they've invented this stupid millennial way of doing video. And it's very

hard to watch tennis in a vertical screen. It's a fundamentally horizontal sport. So does that in any way help you actually play tennis, or is it, like, have you actually played yet? Or is this just, you're just, you're just prepping for tennis by watching tennis. The important thing to do is to know where would you hit the ball mentally. The problem is, the thing is, what I tell myself is you've got to see the whole of the court, which is actually impossible on those fucking vertical videos. And does that help with your muscle tone? Like, does it actually... Yeah, because you're clicking constantly the next video. You're thinking about... I've actually got RSI.

Yeah, from... Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm visualising the serve. I'm thinking will I hit it with kick? Will I hit it with top spin? Yeah, yeah. I'm maybe a slice serve. And there's anything called the pancakes? I was watching a video at the pancake serve the other day. Will I hit it with Rafael Nadal? I wouldn't had pancakes after watching the pancake serve video. So have you played tennis at all through this process of watching tennis? Uh... I mean, I've played it on the Nintendo Switch.

And I don't know whether you've played Nintendo Switch tennis, but it's like the Wii Sports. You move your wrist at the very least. Because it's got the motion control. So I worked up quite a sweat. See, I reckon the thing you need to do is not be... So I had to delete TikTok this year, because I had to get onto it for work.

And it is quite addictive. like it's really addictive you have to get i had to delete it totally just got into it it's it's ridiculous the algorithm it's funny though because the algorithm is quite clever but it takes a while to get here you are so i don't know like i and i do if the chinese government is correct is listening to this because i know that's the only point of the ticot i would just like to point out to them i'm not actually into cranes i don't know why hang are we talking the bird or the construction no the construction thing because clearly what happened is in the first thing we I was, like, first time watching TikTok, and you just, you know, you just kind of just try

to figure out what it is. It said, it looked at your name, Craig. Oh, Craig, you'd be into cranes. It'd be a crane driver. So clearly at some point it's fed up some crane falling off a cliff or some shit. And I've clearly watched too much of that video. Yes. And it now, like, it seriously thought I was obsessed by cranes.

I'm constantly being fed crane videos all the time. I'm astonished to hear that your TikTok's just not full of preachy environmental videos about cutting down on rubbish. Well, I guess maybe, I guess if all of the cranes fell off cliffs, maybe that's better for the improvement. I don't know. TikTok was just Greta Tudberg going, I am very disappointing. Over and over again.

Well, that's why it's deleted. It's just cranes and Greta. Because the thing is, I didn't realize that the reason why TikTok serves you content is because you linger on that content. And I started complaining about it because everything that TikTok was serving me up was about how to be. liked better and I was complaining about it and then they were going that's because you like that content and it was like oh no this is like a friend of mine who was like you know we're just

sitting there he's on Instagram right and and he's kind of casually as I just I just can't believe how Instagram is constantly serving up women and bikinis all the time and burst traps and I was like do you understand it's an algorithm right this response to you he had no idea he was married, he was absolutely appalled. He wasn't anymore. This friend of yours, Craig. I wasn't even on Instagram, but

he literally, there was, to see the shock in his face, so he finally realized that this, he thought everyone's getting this. Like, he thought this is what everybody's getting on on Instagram, shove bikini models down to everybody's right. How do people get around this?

We just have to scroll through us. I checked them all to make sure that they weren't, you know, some sort of propaganda video. Yeah, exactly. But so he's literally, I met him a month later, and his entire time is spent on Instagram trying to fix the algorithm. Like just trying to watch other things. So you just searches for videos of you preaching about straws to try it up.

Exactly. Yeah, he's really, I told him to get into cranes. So the other day, you know, a budget episode, we were talking about news.com.com. And how when you look, looking for budget news, there was no actual budget news. That's because they know what we click on.

And this is why NetNews is so terrifying because for years, you know, newspaper editors were putting the important stories up the front, thinking that people wanted that. Because when they were surveyed, everybody said, yes, I really want to know about important national affairs. But actually, none of us give us shit. We want to know about the dirtiest man in the world

dying at the age of 94. Stop listening to the podcast and listen to the previous episode if you haven't heard that story. Because frankly, that's fascinating. Yeah, no one wants to listen to the budget. I'm so dumb, surely that's going to be shown. It's not about the budget is the point, because we didn't bother to, anyway. Yeah, because we weren't watching.

Apart from crane videos, though, the actual reason I stayed on TikTok for quite a while, the thing I was obsessed by was this one dude in Florida. You know how Florida got hit by the hurricanes? Yeah. And it was quite amazing. So this guy, just an average dude there, he kind of started filming at his own house, kind of going, you know, the water's up and it's nearly lapping, but he didn't get hit. But then he went down to the coastline, and there was these amazing space.

Botton, Florida, where these houses were on, look like they're on huge stilts, right? They're like about five meters above the water line in the sea. But he was showing that these were like five years ago. There was a road here and there was a beach and everything else. And there were houses that had bottoms and it all been taken away by rising sea levels and by the storm searches and by the hurricanes, that kind of stuff. And this guy is just filming, and every kind of day or two, he would go back. And it would be like, it was the reason I'm saying on this,

to watch how they're going to fall into the sea, what's happening? And then there's all these dudes, like, just obsessing about it. It was amazing just to, but it was bizarre to see this kind of content being made by some dude in America. So you see, because it's really good because, you know, in the past, you'd have to get, you know, $100 million CGI budget to see natural disaster movies. And now they can just be caught on your phone because reality serves up that sort of disaster. Hang on a second. Hang on a second.

I know what Craig's trying to try to do here because this sounds incredibly interesting. He's trying to make us care about climate change Because I really want to see that And if we linger on this conversation Then that will tell his algorithm To service up more environmental content You've got to be joking I fear to even talk about this

Because the one thing that makes you go Oh my God we should open more coal mines Is hearing about Florida people being fucked over Like it's really hard I'm really torn Yeah, pros and cons. I've got to hand it to climate change because that is really almost instant karma.

Like putting Trump in the White House. Yeah, exactly. It's like, within a few years, the coastline. At what point does it inundate Mara Lago? Yeah, exactly. Because that Mara Lago is literally in between two bodies of water. It's from the beach to the lagoon.

He's fucked. I just hope he leaves long enough to see his entire property underwater. Yeah, the only problem with that, Dom, is if Mara Lago goes under, you lose a lot of really important documents from the White House. You know what my son was saying the latest trend on TikTok is? Oh, yeah. Is apparently there's some photo of some sports team that took a nude selfie. Right.

Right. About a year ago. Is this a male or a female sporting? Because normally female sporting teams have to get nude to promote their sport. To raise money, that's true. Because you either get money from Gina Reinhart or you get nude selfies. Yes, it's a nude Wisconsin volleyball team, right? Oh, yeah.

But the whole thing is, the TikTok's algorithm is that you've got to linger on content. Right. For it to serve it up, right. And my son was saying, you know, like, it's just all over TikTok. But the way, no, no, but the way they get you to, like, linger on the content, right? Yes, yes, Charles. is they go in 30... So they've got this new thing called slides

where you've got to flip through a whole lot of different slides to... Right. And they say, on the 35th slide, you'll get to see the boobies, right? Charles, are you outing your teenager for watching... Oh my God, the teenager wants to see boobies? Yeah, did you not hear earlier when we said

you create the content you see through an algorithm? This is officially the least surprising development. I like the way... We didn't need the internet for teenagers to be interested in boobs. I like the way that the child. Charles's son is clever enough to realize that if he just tells it to his dad in a kind of academic way. This is an interesting trend on TikTok at the moment where there's nude people, but you have to go through many slides to get to it.

But the whole thing was it's such a clever trick, because you've got to make it really boring. Got all these people sliding through tons and tons of content, which increases the algorithms of things. Charles, at the end of this quite tedious story, are they going to be boobs? So what you're saying, so under your theory, under your theory, I'm impressed. Like porn hub or something, what it should do.

It would become really boring. And yeah, yeah, the first, the first 35 videos you have to watch are people holding hands and walking on a beach before you get to any sex. And maybe you have a plot, you know, like where, you know, there's a love triangle or something like that. And you have 90 minutes before you get to the booby scene. This is where we should put Craig's earnest environment documentary. It's a whole bunch of that.

It's really important. Yes. You've got to watch my top goes. Straws are a problem. Oh, sex. Hang on a second. I'm about to make another one. So you're saying what I should do is put some sex right at the end of the first trap.

Get the Wisconsin volleyball is on board. So what are you going to ruin now? You've already taken straws from us. You've taken coffee cups. What's next? What are you like, Don. because I really need to look into that, to really research that first. Oh, I really love paying for petrol in my car.

You don't take away my bowser, Roocastle. Yeah, well, I'll see what I can do. But look, if you do watch it, I will not take anything away from you, but there will be sex with the end. The algorithms are a nightmare. But I do think that, Domi, that the thing about you and your approach to playing tennis is not the best. So because I got so into TikTok for a while and became obsessed, even though it was serving up crane videos,

I finally had to delete it. So last week, I played tennis seven times. Whoa. Wow, and you think that that was because... And ironically, by not watching tennis online, you actually got a lot more. Yes. You played physical tennis.

Not just once, but seven times. Who are you fucking Raphael Nadal now? No, I just an unemployed guy that doesn't have tennis. TikTok anymore. It's a bit like TikTok in that it sort of serves you up more tennis. Like reality serves you up more tennis. Yeah, if you play. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's that's how the way the algorithm works. That's your exercise tip. Yeah, yeah. I reckon you should stop watching tennis and try. And this is radical. Try playing it. Look, you've, you've made me feel ashamed and I really, I mean, I know, look, I'm in my mid-40s. My body started to pack up. I do need

to actually exercise more. So I'm just going to go. and watch the next size of YouTube. Our gear is from Road, and we are part of the ACAST Creator Network. Catch you tomorrow.