For years, YouTube has been the most profitable platform for content creators and attracted hundreds of thousands of people[1] who think nothing but about money. They don’t create to express themselves, they produce content.
The simplest of the questions easily becomes a 10-minute video explanation to optimise the ads you put into the video as well as keep the attention of the viewers.
What could be a cute thumbnail to help a potential viewer understand what the video is going to be about, becomes a shitty thumbnail with cliche tricks like a person with a weird expression and a big red arrow somewhere.
The biggest channels[2] are so driven by profit they make whole videos around sponsor integrations, not the other way around.
Compare that to Twitter or Instagram, or any other major platform, where there’s less financial incentive and little to no room for clickbait maneuvers. It’s mostly YouTube videos that I feel most disappointed with after clicking on them.
There are so few people who actually use the platform to express themselves in a way they like, without giving the slightest damn how to please or trick the almighty algorithm.
The brain rot of video creation is so real now that you see the same YouTube tricks even when people post to other platforms, for example, PeerTube instances or Odyssey. They feel like cheap YouTube because thanks to the latter platform everybody[3] forgot how to make meaningful videos.
1, 2 and 3 - there are exceptions, of course, but the ratio is insane.
YouTube is so big that you can’t recently talk about the culture there without being more specific. It really depends how you use the site. I’ve certainly seen many meaningful videos on YouTube, and I still do on a somewhat regular basis. But I do feel that the quality is dropping as a direct result of the pay dropping. And I would never use the site without an ad blocker.
The fun part is that you can get an algorithm where people trade kids and do fucked up shit.