Three years back I sat through a 45 minute video of a guy slowly peeling a giant bar of soap and it somehow got 12 million views

Last week my roommate showed me a new trend where people record themselves methodically crushing random objects with a hydraulic press for 30 seconds at a time and I realized there is genuinely an entire corner of the internet built around watching things get destroyed, has anyone else noticed how these weirdly specific niche trends last way longer than the big mainstream ones?

3 comments

3 Comments

colescott5d ago

Oh man, the hydraulic press stuff is actually kinda therapeutic though (in a weird way). But what nobody talks about is that these oddly specific videos are basically ASMR for people who don't like whispering - like the sound of crushing glass has its own weirdly satisfying audio loop that keeps you watching.

willowr965d ago

Wait, does the crunch of crushed glass specifically hit different than regular breaking sounds?

jordan_henderson135d ago

Does anybody else remember that podcast episode where they talked about how those soap peeling videos actually trigger the same part of the brain as watching someone clean a really dirty window? It's like our brains get a little reward signal from seeing something become neat or get fully destroyed in a clean way. The hydraulic press stuff is basically the same thing but in reverse - instead of building something up, you're taking it apart completely. What's wild is that these weird specific videos seem to last forever because they're not about what's trendy, they're about that one specific feeling you can only get from watching something get crushed or peeled just right.