About

Can You Cast Obsidian? refers to a video by the YouTube channel How To Make Everything that quickly went viral thanks in part to its ubiquitous presence in "recommended videos" sections on other YouTube videos. The video's presence there led to the creation of photoshop memes referencing its popularity in the algorithm.

Origin

On August 4th, 2018, YouTube channel How To Make Everything posted a video titled "Can You Melt Obsidian and Cast a Sword" (shown below). In less than a week, the video gained over 8.3 million views.

Of note, the video's thumbnail reads "Can You Cast Obsidian?", and the thumbnail is what would go on to be used in later memes about the video.

Spread

The video was featured on Digg^[1] later that week. YouTube users quickly noted that the video seemed to appear in their "recommended videos" feed, even if they don't watch similar videos. On August 9th, 2018, a user on /r/OutOfTheLoop^[2] inquired about the video and memes made about it. In the ensuing thread a user who claimed to be Digital Marketer and YouTube advertiser explained that the video was friendly to advertisers due to its inoffensive content and potential interest in the young male demographic.

The backyard science genre is extremely popular with a wide-range of people, especially younger audiences who love risky/fun science experiments they wouldn't be taught in school. Their parents don't know/don't care about the Obsidian sword in Dark Souls or Minecraft or whatever, but they do. It's an eye-catching non-controversial topic so advertisers love it.
Viewers are willing to watch a "pre-roll ad" in order to see what happens. "OMG is it possible?!" People leave a ton of comments requesting more and different experiments and argue over who said what or what they would've done differently. Tons of commentary = tons of mentions. mentions = notifications. notifications = revisits. revisits = more impressions. more impressions = more money.
YouTube loves to feature 10-20 minute advertiser-friendly content that is getting a ton of clicks and comments for this reason. If you start a brand new YouTube account and watch just one backyard science DIY video, you will be recommended ALL of them and tons of things young males love like Fortnite. Once they know you like this stuff, they show it to you a lot. For this reason I saw this video in my recommends too.

Memes about the video began appearing on Reddit nearly a week after the video was posted. Popular examples can be found on /r/MemeEconomy and /r/dankmemes. For example, one of the most popular posts on /r/dankmemes gained over 4,200 points (shown below, left). A post on aminoapps^[3] compiling multiple memes about the video appeared on August 10th (example shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References