YouTube is Actual Garbage
YouTube used to be one of my favorite spots on the internet for years. I'd watch endless videos from various creators (half of which got outed as being absolute freaks [derogatory] in the last 10 years, but that's neither here nor there). It seemed like a place where people would just... well... broadcast themselves. That was the motto of YouTube for a long time.
I'd come home from school and watch Halo 3 machinimas, Equals Three, SMOSH, some let's plays, someone's vlog, a bunch of college students putting things into microwaves, some stoned Canadian reading some insane news article and giving his thoughts, so on and so on.
I'd largely consider YouTube to be at it's best from around the mid-late 2000s up to the early 2010s. With I think the biggest turning point being the ham-fisting of Google+. It slowly degraded away from people posting whatever they felt like and were passionate about to what appeased this black box algorithm.
Don't get me wrong, YouTube had problems before, I remember the reason behind one of the algorithm changes was because people would post clickbait thumbnails of some hot woman and get a shitload of views. However, it seems that the platform has devolved to a point where it shares little DNA with the spirit it had at it's founding.
I tend to hold the opinion that the monetization of the internet was a mistake. And boy do I feel vindicated regularly. When people stopped laughing at you for saying you wanted to be a YouTuber, that's when things started to go downhill.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that creators can make a living, but it also comes at the cost of ones soul in order to maintain that status. You've suddenly stopped making hobby projects and instead have just started doing whatever the platform tells you to.
A bunch of people all talking about/doing the same hot-button topic/trend isn't new. But I'd take 1000 let's plays of Slender the Eight Pages over 100 of these commentary channels all giving the same milquetoast delivery of an unenthusiastic handjob. If you're gonna be a commentary channel at least say SOMETHING of substance.
Editing styles have become homogenized, vocal cadence, punch lines, and topics have become overdone and stale. Seriously how many times do you see the classic gag of: fumble on words -> screen gets rotated 45 degrees -> commentator says "editor cut that out" when THEY are in fact the editor -> proceed with the fucking point. You get the guys who feel like they have to shout and talk like if they go below a certain words per minute average they'll explode. The Mr. Beast clones "I just like 10 babies in a cage with 5 rabid Chihuahuas, the last one standing gets a fully funded Gerber Life policy!". Or the drama slop channels where for the 5th time in a row "X Influencer just FACEFUCKED their career!"
Last night I watch the late-70s classic "The Warriors" (seriously, go watch this movie, it's fucking fantastic). I tell you got far more enjoyment from those 2-ish hours than I did the however many hours I've blown on YouTube while bored at work this past month.
I started to wonder what the hell was even the point. Most of what comes up in our recommended feeds is drama slop, people yapping about shit that doesn't matter, to people who either don't give a shit or care way too fucking much.
Even channels I've watched for a decade and a half have shifted towards this. Penguinz0, aka Cr1tikal, was one of my favorites ever since I found his channel in the early 2010s. Never imagined he'd get as big as he did, and while I still watch some of his videos, there's some where I'm just asking myself "who the fuck cares?" I don't care about the drama going about idubbz and h3h3.
I'm just kinda keeping YouTube as a dedicated time capsule for nostalgia videos. I'll watch old lets plays or old webshows like "Is It A Good Idea to Microwave This?" or lets plays, but for the most part I'm just kinda done with this platform. I have a couple channels saved for what I wanna watch with my wife (we like Hannah Alonzo and Chad Chad in this house). And that's all I really care to watch.
There's a lot of other things I'd rather have my eyes glued to.
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as of writing this...
Surprise, at work again. Mrs. Pirate made me some breakfast and lunch to take to work, though we might go out to lunch today depending on schedules. My stepdad gave me access to his SiriusXM account so I've been listening to that, been really digging Green Day's station where they play a mix of their music as well as various other punk bands throughout the years like Dead Kennedys and The Misfits. Been finding some more obscure bands from this station like The Queers. I wanna hit the media store on the way home and maybe snag a CD or VHS tape while I'm there (so check my microblog later today to see what I got). I spent some time yesterday programming the $1 universal remote I found at the thrift shop to control my CRT and VCR. Gonna watch Ghostbusters with Mrs. Pirate tonight after I put our girl to bed.