Comment by simonw

Some are better than others. About three months ago I started seeing channels that were clearly stealing content from other channels and splicing it over a text-to-speech narration. I knew they were doing this because I had seen the original videos they were stealing from.

But then I've also seen a far larger number of channels which use text-to-speech to make audiobooks from public domain works. I recently listened to a couple of Plato's works on a channel like this. The text-to-speech did a fairly convincing reading, with Socrates and his companions each having their own distinct voices. These videos had tens of thousands of views, which might not be great, but if you can put out a few hundred videos like that in less than a year it might be worth it to the right person.

I also suspect most of the film summary channels have been using AI in similar ways since before it was even popular. Those videos get into the millions of views and in my opinion they are not bad as far as low-effort content goes.

I can't read the whole article, but one important point is that Facebook subsidizes users from these areas. It's cheaper to get 'Facebook data' than regular data.

As a result, life revolves around Facebook. All day, every day. It's how you shop, you contact each other, you 'google things', it's everything. And being rather high unemployment areas, people tend to spend all day there.

So given that you've essentially captured an entire demographic with little to no money that spend all their time on your platform, it's no surprise that's where the scams come from, whether it's outright or through such slop. Who can blame them?

And FB doesn't care, they just report 10 million user growth, without telling the actual truth that they're in a roundabout way, paying those users.

a very small amount of US dollars paid out to these people could be considered a "significant" amount of income when converted to those lower cost of living places.