How and Why We Shredded Your Comments

[Music] hi I'm Tom you a quite giggly today we're on the park bench yes we are to talk about a project that as far as the intent is concerned appeared out of nowhere and then vanish never to be seen again I think the most common description of this project that I saw was y-yeah wait if you haven't worked out we're talking about the we shred your comments livestream yes which which suddenly appeared on the Internet you may notice during all the bits where we're putting comments on screen here that I am blurring out the comments and that's because as I understand British law don't just put him out on the livestream with no moderation we're not publishing them we're not responsible for them yeah but copying that into this video unless I want to check every single comment now I'm just gonna blow them there's only a reasonable level of expectation of moderation for a live thing that's going at first and we were we had a plan to deal with it which was to shred it yes which worked quite well for that verb is deliver yeah we we did get a few requests to explain in order why and what so we thought we'd run through why we did it and then run through some of the technical stuff behind the scenes that made it work the y can basically be summed into the main reason for everything like that that we do in that we thought it was funny we had my idea so we did it it was one of the things that once the idea appears then we really got to do it or not doing it and as always by the time we'd committed to doing it is and actually got to the day of doing it it was a few months later yeah and we were going I hope as everyone else still fight this money makers move in explaining this joke for a while there yeah we were actually a little bit worried going in I think it's safe to say cuz it okay so first of all what it was yeah we we hooked a printer tip well I hooked the YouTube live comment stream - a thing that sent you the comment and I made a dot matrix printer constantly print out those comments so we had a printer which was constantly receiving what you typed in from the live stream yes but then we realize that that's a bad idea because let's be honest live stream live stream comments aren't known for being the best pros no and we also realize that in the in the event that we got some really nasty comments we'd be printing them in perpetuity and that didn't didn't sound right and then be the obvious solution for this was a shredder and like most of the bottom half of the Internet that's where all deserves to go so so once and once we have the idea for the shredder the whole thing fits together as a joke and then we rise it it kind of felt like a performance art piece or something like that so we books to do what at YouTube a cupboard to do it in but they gave us Jeannie oh well that's true cuz like a broom cupboard okay we've put the big studio Philip it's just a printer and a shredder you sure about that yeah yeah and of course because they're using the live stream they have to use the really expensive 4k Sony something cameras yes yeah which which in like five figures sums each and we had three of them pointing the printer shredder so the Y is very brief the Y is because we thought it would be funny and thankfully the interacted as well as for how I sketched a diagram on a piece of paper is what I thought it was going to look like it turns out in the end we did sorry so I start with a YouTube API because weather where the feed starts and we can work through yeah make sense sorry I cut you off there but I was gonna say if we start there YouTube has a live comment stream API it's not like twitch it's not an IRC or anything like that it's just you request it and data comes back there's a bit of a complicated way of getting super chats as well but basically the arrives oh yeah also super juts got printed out from big ASCII art because we never told anyone that know a few people discovered it they yeah which I feel a little bit better about we didn't it didn't feel like going open if you don't know is super jutsu a thing where you can pay money to have your comment slightly more prominent on a livestream chat window yeah so we built in something so then if if someone did that then they'd get something for it but we weren't going to ask you to pay us money to do that because that just feels a bit odd because we're not doing anything it was just a static piece of art almost oh wow you actually just refer to it as art I said almost okay uh-hum was describing was it fair i i mean i so i bundled up those comments stored a buffer of them stored at the most recent hundred i think and then they were just constantly looping him whenever Matt's system asked for comments it dumped the most recent ones to him that way because the printer has like a 64 kilobyte buffer it never got too far behind the live stream if it ever couldn't catch up just discard a few we need to print a lot of things out and to have a constant stream into a shredder a dot matrix printer was the way to go now can you imagine like this is the printer that you'd have from the 80s and the 90s everywhere can you imagine how hard it was to find one of them you're wrong it was piss easy Amazon done next day delivery along with the paper the paper as well yes we and we thought it was gonna use so much more paper we we did some calculations of how much paper it could use so then we had enough so we had a whole box of paper which you can see on the floor and we had a secondary box and we were hoping that it would time out okay so then we could end the stream when the paper ran out yeah our calculations were wrong we went through maximum a third of the box I think it was more like a quarter yeah like you may have seen in the video a couple of times we go and inspect the box that's that's going it's it's it still just looks full but you're pressing it sieve it would come back had uncompacted or anything like no there it just kept going so to get the the comments into that printer we wanted it to be a full stream so I couldn't print pages I had to use it as a line printer like the old days which I tried to do on my Mac and that was hard especially because they were only with drivers for the printer also it's over USB like this it has a serial port built into it but I didn't have a USB serial adapter and it was the we had bought the things we had sat in a place to try and make it work and we weren't going anywhere until it did something so in the end you hooked it up through DOS prompt in Windows didn't you yes it was attached to it it was installed as a normal printer in Windows which then I did it as a network share which then I mounted again on itself the over the network which was itself yeah and then could print to that oh yes the das thing by just sending a command line that was just print the text file of your script copy text file to printer output bodging it's good makes things work reasonably well and to get and to get the the comments that tom was bringing together into the print stream that I just described I wrote a bit of JavaScript yeah because it's no it does the job which means I have written a JavaScript print spooler and that was the basics of the whole that was and then I texted you the night before saying that shredder is it wide enough for the paper now I already knew it wasn't cuz I had to buy the shredder and look for it and they're all a4 yeah there are no a3 shredders under about 500 well we weren't gonna spend loads of money on it because oh and shredders generally have a five-minute duty cycle you know you can leave them on for five minutes and then they have to stay off for a good half hour so then the motors cool down and then it can deal with more crunching so I searched the internet for the shredder I could find that had the longest on time yep and because we knew it would always shred faster than printing so we knew an attorney on earth and the because I couldn't find any that could do wide enough it didn't matter because all shredders can do at least four sheets of paper yeah so we felt old tailed it we felled it over denser foam what I liked about that is originally our plan was we were not going to be in this shot at all it was all going to be fully automated we were going to be turning the shredder off off screen using the just using a power switch but then as soon as we realized now we're gonna have to keep following the paper it suddenly became this thing well no we're gonna have to keep coming in and do them yeah actually that worked out to be honest it gave us something to do yes because ours is a very long time in a room with a very noisy printer yes it sounded a lot better on camera than it did in real life and I don't know why but you got all that lovely little crinkling sound that in the room was completely drowned out by the printhead but the mic was just pointed perfectly the shredder to capture that noise I positioned the mic so then it was sort of off the off the printer and pointing slightly towards the shredder cuz the prints are so noisy it was gonna pick it up anyway then that wasn't a happy accident that was matte gray competent and I didn't want to drown it out of the tech crew at YouTube but listening upstairs yeah as always doing that so what are we gonna do next there isn't a second version of this is there no God no wouldn't do that someone else are we gonna do it again no jokes do know we've done it we thought it was funny it was the reason it went on for four hours is because you kept watching it and then we kept it going until people got bored I'm average watch time six minutes but it never really dipped like people kept coming back and people kept joining in normally with the live stream you're expected to go where no lots of people at the beginning and then no one comes but but it stayed steady it was about the same there was a slight tail off to war the end because we've been on for four rounds but there was still the same amount of people throughout the whole thing and we would have had to stop but we would be like for three hours fifty we would had to have stopped at four hours anyway because that's a part limit on YouTube loves I wasn't wrong they fixed up yep and go do eight hours 12 hours whatever now huh glad we didn't yeah you may seen it break a couple of times yeah that wasn't my code was it not no it was the windows print spooler okay it crashed it'll happen when you send one print job to it every second for ya so yeah that was that was what we did it that what that was what we did it we have recycled all of the shredding they all went straight into the recycle bin I'm sure we'll find another use for that printer at some point yeah in the meantime you've got a great shredder I might put it next to my letterbox so then I can shred all my junk mail or I could just wire it into my letterbox you know wait I'll get new cars delivered off of me you know what the best gag of the whole thing was that decision about five ten minutes before going on air to rig the shredder so we could take the basket out so it just went everywhere yeah there's a security sensor to make sure that you can't get anywhere near the shredding things there was a security sensor there is nothing that can't be fixed with gaffer tape and cardboard and by fixed I mean bodge to hell so there you go that's um that's that's how it worked that's what we did out the whole thing up yeah okay that's flail er [Laughter] that's giving you a new outro [Applause] [Laughter]

Channel: Matt and Tom

Views: 417,605

Rating: 4.9647179 out of 5

Keywords: matt gray, mattg, mattgray, tomscott, tom scott, tomscottgo, unnamedculprit, matt and tom, park bench, behind the scenes, shredder, comments, printer, dot matrix, we shred your comments, MattGrayYes

Id: SpNlp6AtTOE

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 08 2017

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