r/NonPoliticalTwitter • u/Feeling_Valuable5239 • Sep 08 '26
Other This happens with almost everything, until it eventually becomes cliché.
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u/FyouPerryThePlatypus Sep 08 '26
I just wanted to post funny videos of me and my friends doing dumb shit. Now it’s all monetize this, that’s cringe, algorithm sucks, ai will steal your shit, etc etc
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u/WallScreamer Sep 08 '26
You can still post those videos, it's just that no one but you and your friends will see it.
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u/Weeeelums Sep 08 '26
That was how it was for most of YT history tbh. In the REALLY early days anything got views but the generally thought of early YouTube still had it’s favorites, random shit being posted had a little more chance to get big views because of a smaller content pool but it wasn’t like every homemade video of some guys dicking around was spread far and wide.
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Sep 08 '26
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u/WallScreamer Sep 08 '26
Sometimes they were really mean lol.
Yeah, buddy, I know the video sucks. My friend and I are 14 and playing Call of Duty 4 in his basement. What do you expect?
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u/Neveronlyadream Sep 08 '26
The mean ones were always funny.
Why are you berating a child posting silly videos no one is making you watch and holding them to the same standard you'd hold Stanley Kubrick to? Fucking chill and just enjoy the silly videos.
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u/HarambeTooSoon Sep 08 '26
YouTube was purchased by google within a year of launching.
Every time this comes up there's a bunch of people who seem to think YouTube had a prolonged run outside of Google'a control and this moment in time barely existed at all.
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u/TheLastPeanut_ Sep 08 '26
idk sometimes a gem randomly pops up in my algo that reminds me of the early days of YT. It's rare, but it happens.
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u/heyyall1899 Sep 08 '26
You can still do that.
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u/FearTheImpaler Sep 09 '26
"sticks a stick into own bike tire spokes*
"Why wont youtube let me post videos anymore?"
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u/JohnnyChutzpah Sep 08 '26 edited Sep 08 '26
YouTube is the largest repository of free guided educational content in the world.
You can learn how to fix your lawn mowers carb or you can learn everything you need to enter a career like IT. All without paying a dime.
The only thing that comes close to that level of information is the public library system. But that is unguided education.
I love what YouTube became. It turned from a meme machine, many more of which still exist, to something I can rely on constantly to learn how to do things.
And then on top of all that it has an unlimited amount of educational content that can be consumed for entertainment.
It also just has a lot of slop and bait content. But I think the trade off is worth it.
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u/stiff_tipper Sep 08 '26
The only thing that comes close to that level of information is the public library system. But that is unguided education.
the wikihow disrespect is unreal
warranted, but unreal
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u/Murky-Relation481 Sep 08 '26
I mean I would say that 90% of the people that complain about YT content are self-admitting to watching fucking brain rot most of the time and literally complaining that the brain rot that they thought was good is now bad, but it was always brain rot and I bet a good chunk of those same people are experiencing some sort of arrested development where they think they need to like the same content they liked as a kid/teen and now are a teen/adult and think its dumb, but they refuse to move on to other things because of said brainrot.
Basically we cooked fam.
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u/ini0n Sep 08 '26
Dude people are forgetting how cringe early YouTube was, if you think now is cringe it was 10x worse. Annoying orange, Fred, Smosh. All of this was funny when you're a kid, but go and watch any of that early youtube stuff now and you'll realise you had rose tinted glasses.
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u/Iceman6211 Sep 08 '26
one of my earliest youtube memories is people messing with Walmart Intercoms
it's still funny as shit, but you can't get away with it now
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u/Confident_Algae7731 Sep 08 '26
I do silly little day in the life vlogs (I cat sit and am a professional singer). Like no one watches them but it’s fun for me to make. Kind of low effort but it’s a nice way to document things
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u/bullitt-rider Sep 08 '26
Worse: three of my shitty quality just for fun videos, including one of my cat eating sweetcorn was rehosted and got millions of views while I have like 2k and forgot it existed.
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u/Dank_Nicholas Sep 09 '26
It drives me crazy how every type of video needs to be part of a bigger hustle. I recently was trying to find an assembly video for my new weed wacker. Pretty much every video was some dipshit in his garage trying to become a lawn care influencer or an appliance reviewer.
Finally I found a video recorded by a literal 12 year old who just assembled the damn thing without trying to push his "brand." Being taught lawncare by a child was hilariously humbling.
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Sep 08 '26
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u/lemonylol Sep 08 '26
The funny thing is that all of those types of old random videos are still available on youtube, many times over than they previously were back then. People simply don't want to watch them anymore. Reels and shorts have more or less taken their place now, and even there you can fuck it up and watch only the same people remaking the same video trends or some political bullshit, because they have a monetized channel, but you don't have to.
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u/iiw Sep 08 '26
Old videos rarely get recommended anymore except for the already viral ones. I'd have to actually click on an ancient video to get recommendations from that era, and much like the pornography it disappears when I open other videos.
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u/BoogieOrBogey Sep 08 '26
That's weird, I'm constantly getting recommended videos from 5, 7, and even 11 years ago. Some are videos I watched way back then, some are videos I never saw but have millions of views. Maybe it's something YT is testing in the recommendation algo.
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u/ThePupnasty Sep 09 '26
Oldest video I've been recommended was 16 years ago I think? Holy fuck it's wild to think 2010 was that long ago....
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u/Talonsminty Sep 08 '26
Go try and dig some out.
It's all buried super deep, any keyword you use will prompt a tidal wave of guff Youtube would prefer you to watch.
Then you scroll halfway and it just throws away your search away entirely and shows you recommended videos including some you already watched
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u/Connect_Version_1560 Sep 09 '26
When u search for something,it only shows a couple new item and then the rest is what u already watched ,I mean who thought that was a good idea
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u/Arek_PL Sep 08 '26
yea, even i when i tried to become a youtuber (stopped because i lacked charisma and my content sucked) managed to get earnings from ads iirc. it was around 30 cents total?
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u/Chrownox Sep 08 '26
It really started dropping around 2013. Sure there were people getting getting payed before then but it was really only the big channels
In 2013 youtube relaxed on the conditions to join the partner program and many many channels were now monetized. This was also when pre-roll ads were introduced (note: probably had testing before then but were now appearing everywhere)
So youtube was good for about 6 years
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u/pigeon-check Sep 09 '26
I think it's more the fact that people treat it as a career so everyone is trying to gain the algorithm, 9/10 videos i see i just blatant click bait now and it gotten worse with AI but before the pic is usually just a frame from the video itself.
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u/nimbledoor Sep 09 '26
You weren’t alive back then were you? The number of people actually making content specifically for the money was minuscule.
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u/Etheoff Sep 08 '26
Idk I still find great content every day on YouTube
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u/YTmrlonelydwarf Sep 08 '26
Definitely still tons of great content it’s just harder to find in the sea of shit. Sometimes it gets to the point of searching for “top 10 best (insert type of content you wanna see here) creator on YouTube”
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u/TheLastPeanut_ Sep 08 '26
Gets harder to find every day with the slew of slop being slung in your face every second. The search function is borderline useless now and I have to wipe my history every other week just to clean my feed.
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u/off-with-your-thread Sep 08 '26
It's useless. I used to get a billion results and now it's 5 kind of relevant ones and then cycle over. Extremely annoying. And that's without even referencing the AI slop.
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u/ChefCurryYumYum Sep 08 '26
A big part of the problem is how awful YouTube is at recommending videos.
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u/Original-Reward-8688 Sep 08 '26
Sea? YouTube is incredibly sterilized now a days and it mostly shows you hyper specific content, or things I've already watched.
I miss when it was a sea of shit where you could scroll endlessly.
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u/SiliconTrolley Sep 08 '26
It doesn't help that the search function is getting worse and worse. You can't even order by recent uploads anymore. It's hard to believe YouTube is owned by a search engine company.
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u/The_Exuberant_Raptor Sep 08 '26
Real. There are days where I am shown trash, but most of the time I use the search bar and find hours of content on things I want to watch.
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u/thadcorn Sep 08 '26
I've been watching a lot of RC car repair videos recently on YT. Most people are just recording to share knowledge. It's very wholesome and makes me happy.
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u/The_Exuberant_Raptor Sep 08 '26
Yeah. I have used YT as a learning tool as much as an entertainment tool. YT was a third parent who taught me about the stuff my parents couldn't.
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u/thadcorn Sep 09 '26
Oh 100% about the parent part. My dad did no maintenance around the house, so YT had to basically teach me everything.
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u/OnceMoreAndAgain Sep 08 '26
The "Don't Recommend Channel" feature really helped improve what videos get recommended to me.
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u/SyrusDrake Sep 08 '26 edited Sep 08 '26
And most of my favorite creators are able to do it as their job because they can monetize it.
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u/txijake Sep 08 '26
And a lot of the content I find that’s good is because you can monetize it so they can spend more time/effort working on it.
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u/kakka_rot Sep 08 '26
If you're someone like me who doesn't really like watching fictional things alone, youtube is by bar the best bang for your buck, esp if you have literally any hobby.
Sure the owners and management make terrible choices, but the platform itself if probably my favorite piece of the internet 2nd only to maybe wikipedia.
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u/vonseggernc Sep 08 '26
Its getting worse and worse because people are now making AI generated scripts that sometimes aren't even factually correct.
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u/coldblade2000 Sep 09 '26
I straight up don't watch any historical content from unfamiliar channels that are less than 3 years old
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u/WingZeroCoder Sep 08 '26
Once things become something to be hyper optimized, either for money or fame, it becomes not fun.
See also video games and most video game communities, where the joy of experimentation and discovery are very quickly replaced by “the meta” and an over optimization of flying through content… which then leads to an endless stream of complaints.
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u/gigglefang Sep 09 '26
This is WoW to a tee. When it was first released everything was a mystery and nothing was optimised. Now you know what's coming before it's even released.
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u/kukkolka Sep 08 '26 edited Sep 08 '26
I remember when it was sold for google for like 5 million and everybody was shocked someone put so much money out for it, it became an engineer's dream to build something like this and become sensationally rich selling your platform. Now it sounds ridiculous
Edit: it was 1.6 Billion, sorry my memory skewed the fact to make it somehow mediocre
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u/UnchartedCHARTz Sep 08 '26
It was definitely a lot more than $5 million lol
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u/kukkolka Sep 08 '26
Lol, I check and felt embassed
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u/HojaCereeza Sep 08 '26
Stretching short topics to ten minutes for ads
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u/lemonylol Sep 08 '26
Okay but you're choosing to watch it
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u/WeekendWarriorRC Sep 08 '26
Not any more I’m not. I can’t remember the last time I’ve sat down and browsed YouTube to find something to watch. Only exception is if I’m looking up how to fix something on my vehicles. But I’ll exhaust every text & image based option before begrudgingly watching a YouTube video.
It’s all become so clickbaity and over the top. I’m just done
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u/lemonylol Sep 08 '26
Well yeah, but are you out there clicking on ads too instead of searching for your own products?
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u/mydadisyourdad2 Sep 08 '26
You can say that about almost anything
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Sep 09 '26 edited 20d ago
[deleted]
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u/Deocefiro Sep 09 '26
The horngus of a dongfish is attached by a scungle to a kind of dillsack (the nutte sack).
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u/anrwlias Sep 08 '26
I miss the OG internet where people would just set up pages for their niche interests and you'd have pointless stuff like the MIT coffee machine.
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u/lemonylol Sep 08 '26
There still are pages for niche interests.
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u/OhCLE Sep 08 '26
zombo.com was an example of this, but the domain owners have recently changed and site almost feels like a knockoff now, despite holding the original website name
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u/OldSpray9986 Sep 08 '26
Me too. Almost every niche interest I followed the individual web pages died off over the years and now some YouTuber does it, and with most very niche ones, that youtuber is just reading off someone else's work, but because it's on video people think the guy is just smart as hell. I'm not talking about big, mainstream YouTubers because those people usually put in some amount of real work, but if you go niche enough it comes down to stuff like that.
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u/MySchoolsWifiSucks Sep 08 '26
HARD disagree
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u/carlosos Sep 08 '26
It was great. Little content, only short videos, low production quality at amazing 240p when lucky. /s
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u/Barrel_Titor Sep 09 '26
The people saying this probably didn't use Youtube in it's actually early days when 95% of it was TV series uploaded in 240p split into 3 videos per episode but for some reason one of the parts wouldn't show up when you searched for it.
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u/Thumbkeeper Sep 08 '26
Stuff costs money
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u/HowDareYouAskMyName Sep 08 '26
See, artists should be paid well for their work, but no money should ever change hands, especially not if it inconveniences me
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u/Awes12 Sep 08 '26
And I'm down for people making quality content, the issue is when people fill the site with slop to make a quick buck (or clickbait). It's just much better when it's genuine/a passion, even if they're doing it for money (do what you love and all that)
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u/LarrySupertramp Sep 08 '26
I mean at some point isn’t it the fault of the viewers clicking on trash content? If people like it, why would creators stop making it, especially if it makes them money?
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u/Peter_Panarchy Sep 08 '26
This is something I've heard a lot of creators complain about, specifically with clickbaity titles and annoying thumbnails. They don't want to use them, but when they don't their videos underperform and the algorithm reads that as people being less interested in the channel and it stops recommending their videos. I really wish we could go back to the days where titles were just a straightforward description of the video, but I can't blame the creators for where we're at now.
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u/LordMarcel Sep 08 '26
I make videos explaining the old videogame RollerCoaster Tycoon. It started off as purely a passion, but now it's my living. That doesn't mean it's not a passion anymore though and I pour just as much passion into every video I make now than I used to. Probably more actually since I've gotten much better at the art of videomaking. But it also pays my bills so I can spend much more time on it and you get more videos that way. What's the problem here?
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u/Mjk2581 Sep 08 '26
Products and services cost money? They don’t just give you shit for free and then starve to death?
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u/meleejuice Sep 08 '26
Genuine schizo post. YouTube is good now because people get paid to do it. Early YT was shit compared to what it is now.
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u/Notmyrealname5282 Sep 08 '26
Literally
For informative content, YouTube is better than ever
For brain dead content, the hay day was 2016
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u/baconater-lover Sep 08 '26
People could make money pretty early on in the YouTube days. I think what really ruins a lot of the current landscape is the corporatization of it.
Instead of individuals posting what they want that just so happens to make money, many channels (not all) are more intent on chasing the algorithm for money, hiring teams to do work with or for them, or just generally treating the channel as a business.
The best channels are the ones who avoid these pitfalls or can still shine through as individuals while still focusing on monetization. Money is not the issue, the mindset of why you’re uploading videos is.
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u/Infinite-Condition41 Sep 08 '26
Money ruins everything.
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u/_HIST Sep 09 '26
Money is why you have a phone you can type shit on instead of breaking your back plowing a field with 40 years of life expectancy
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u/TheGruenTransfer Sep 08 '26
What? No. YouTube was good the first few years of monetization. Then they started lowering creator payouts and perpetually screwing with the recommendation algorithm until it burnt out a lot of creators.
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u/ChefCurryYumYum Sep 08 '26
If it weren't for the ability for the small creator to monetize their work YouTube would NEVER have become what it is today.
I just wish there were true competitors to YouTube, because they have made moves which have hurt creators to pursue greater revenues for the company.
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u/LarrySupertramp Sep 08 '26
So artists shouldn’t be paid for the content they produce through their labor?? I thought we hated AI because it takes money away from human creators? Now all art has to be free?
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u/Arek_PL Sep 08 '26
they talk about times when youtube was just random stuff people decided to upload purely for fun
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u/Beneficial-Act-9933 Sep 08 '26
That wasn't he case. To quote Hbomberguy in his plagerism youtube video about past youtube
"There may have been no capital, but there was social capital and that spend is just as good. Everybody was competing to be THE guy to call NES Batman a shitload of fuck"
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u/Salty-Spring7096 Sep 08 '26
So many educational channels I used to watch but had to drop because they started locking half the video behind Nebula or whatever. I know they gotta pay bills but I just don't have money for yet another fucking streaming service, sorry.
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u/_HIST Sep 09 '26
You can still watch the other half you know. We live in time of literally free entertainment but folks still complain endlessly
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u/Hikikomori_Otaku Sep 08 '26
Path of Exile 2 hasn't launched yet but it's economy is already fucked from botters
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u/randy__randerson Sep 08 '26
I mean, yeah, but YouTube couldn't be completely free without ads unless it was somehow state sponsered (and not like it would be free there either). Servers need to be paid, as do the people who work on the platform.
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u/ya_boi_daelon Sep 08 '26
So true, I would much rather my favorite creators were broke working full time jobs or just not making videos at all.
I mean I understand the sentiment, but seriously do we really want to go back to random field recordings and lets plays? The standards are so high on YouTube right now, and more often than not good content takes effort.
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u/Youremomsyouredad Sep 08 '26
I made three videos on YouTube for fun. Yeah it’d be cool to make money and whatever. But it’s just a side hobby. The fact that one video got 2500 views without any fancy clickbait or trending games. Was cool. It net me 36 subscribers. When I only had 24. All of which came from my first two videos.
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u/Apprehensive-Bit7145 Sep 09 '26
Fr, I feel like o can’t find anything good to watch, cause they don’t care about good content, just if they can make money off it
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u/snuwuky Sep 09 '26
YouTube is still awesome. If there’s not something for me one day, there will be the next. I don’t think I’ve consumed any ai slop thru an entire YouTube video, so that never gets recommended to me. It’s usually pure entertainment games/routine creators and creative content in general thru “crafting” for lack of a better term. Lots of good cinematography, story telling, and exploration and education.
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u/Pesty_Wanderer_ Sep 08 '26
Now here's a sponsor from some scam product half way through the video that's twice as loud as the rest of said video. They shouldd lose a limb each time they do that. I pay for premium, I shouldn't be getting literal jumpscares for some Chinese scam vpn or stick that let's me breath in poison whilst pretending its healthy. Fuck right off with that. I wanna go to sleep listening to someone talk not an ad half way through that's three times as loud as the rest of the video because they don't know sound mixing. MAKING VIDEOS IS YOUR JOB! Fucking learn how to make them
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u/A_Genius Sep 08 '26
That you for your comment. /u/Pesty_Wanderer_ ‘s comment is brought to you by GroundNews, some ball shaving clippers and NordVPN.
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u/NobodyLikedThat1 Sep 08 '26
So what, like 30 seconds after it was created?
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u/KosherPeen Sep 08 '26
It took about 2 years, but in the grand scheme of things yeah, unmonetized youtube was very brief
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u/thomsenite256 Sep 08 '26
I actually think a lot of the long form content is very high quality if you are interesting in learning about new things. Your algorithm is what you make it.
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u/Automatic-Leg1668 Sep 08 '26
Youtube is scared to show me up and coming YouTubers and instead shows me the same videos released 2 years ago max1
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u/Glum_Bookkeeper_7718 Sep 08 '26
This was less the 2 years after youtube launched, big creators were always doing for the money, its a job an the end, it was from the start
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u/JigglIypuff Sep 08 '26
Depends on what you watch, science and amateur documentaries are better than ever and I'm glad those creators can make some money.
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u/nxtlvlWASABi69 Sep 08 '26
I think you still get creators that make genuinely good video, but unfortunately a lot (maybe the vast majority) is just slop
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u/Feisty_System_4751 Sep 08 '26
I remember the advent of sponsors. Overnight every single YouTuber "needed" a sponsor to remain on YouTube.
It felt incredibly cynical.
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u/Prohapppyboom Sep 08 '26
YouTube was good until YouTube wanted to make money on it while making others not make money on it after saying they could
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u/Material_Ad9848 Sep 08 '26
Ya, there's still good stuff on youtube, but I miss those special videos that were made because someone had a single cool story/idea they wanted to share and then they disappeared forever. Before things got standardized to fit in ads or were trying to garner likes/subscribes.
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u/witness_smile Sep 08 '26
Same reason why Twitter now is full of rage baiting, engagement baiting shit tweets from blue checkmarks… There used to be genuine gems of tweets on there, now everything is engagement baiting in order to get as much money as possible out of it.
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u/hip-indeed Sep 08 '26
Big companies buying out a handful of the most popular sites and forcing search engines to funnel everyone into that small handful of sites rather than the open freedom of how the web used to be, keeping those sites as simplified and centralized as possible so everyone's just smushed into one big mass, and of course the random people starting to make livings on these sites doing everything possible to maximize "pleasing the algorithm" and awful shit like engagement baiting has absolutely obliterated the internet.
I kinda wanna just go back to IRC and join neocities and just forget about the rest of it. Internet version of moving out into a cabin in the woods
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u/ITriedSoHard419-68 Sep 08 '26
I always say, I'm sad I was about a decade too young to get in on the ground floor of the YouTuber scene. I would've loved to do something like that, but nowadays everybody and their mother's trying to make it big on YouTube. The market's beyond oversaturated, the heightened standards create a financial bar to entry for equipment/editing, and the whole platform is so corporate-sanitized it's not even worth it anymore.
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u/DazzlerPlus Sep 08 '26
Its advertising. Advertising drives almost every terrible behavior we see on the internet. Ads of every kind need to be banned
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u/No_Region_4719 Sep 08 '26
There is objectively far more high quality content on YouTube than there ever has been.
It's not difficult to curate your algorithm to recommend you the good stuff. If you consume slop, you will be served more slop.
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u/item_raja69 Sep 08 '26
Nah to be fair the product as a whole got shtty but if you curve your channel enough you can get some pretty good content.
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u/kakka_rot Sep 08 '26
This isn't even slightly true.
The amount of educainment channels ran by solo creators who quit their dayjob to make youtube videos is alone enough to disprove this
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u/ReactionJifs Sep 08 '26
If everyone only posted the #1 video of the funniest/coolest/weirdest thing they've ever done, it would be a paradise.
The push to post multiple videos a week -- whether they're good or not -- is what makes it so bad.
I remember the pre-Youtube internet and every video that was posted somewhere on the internet was golden.
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u/nocktock Sep 08 '26
I remember when yt announced paying creators, I thought it was a great idea sharing ad money to those creators. I have since realised it was actually a disaster and ruined the entirety of the internet and possibly made the world the mess it is now.
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u/GrungeLord Sep 08 '26
I still watch and enjoy a ton of YouTube, so it would be kind of hypocritical for me to agree. But I do very much feel this way about Twitch.
I used to watch a ton of what were considered "big" streamers in 2013-2016, and the vibes back then were just so wildly different to popular channels today.
I rarely watch Twitch anymore, and if I do it's much smaller channels who still retain a bit of that old school Twitch flavour.
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u/PomegranateHot9916 Sep 08 '26
soul (passion) versus soulless (greed)
this is why we can't have nice things btw.
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u/born_lever_puller Sep 08 '26
Sounds like the second cousin of Cory Doctorow's principle of enshittification.
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u/rush2sk8 Sep 08 '26
I got roasted on Instagram for asking a posted if they would ever post the recipes in the captions anymore (they paywalled all of them to a site) and the monitizarion bootlickers were like "do you expect him to work for free" and "imagine complaining about monitizarion. It's like you ask your boss for a paycheck and he roasts you for complaining about money"
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u/brownox Sep 08 '26
They always knew they could make money on it, but they wanted to rid themselves of competitors (like Vimeo) and get everyone bought into the ecosystem before enshitifying it.
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u/wiseguy4519 Sep 09 '26
Making money is fine. The problem is when people start to take advantage of the system to make more money with the same or lesser amount of effort. Clickbait is a good example of this. Everyone hates it, but for a long time it just made money.
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u/Itchy_Suspect4968 Sep 09 '26
Youtube started in 2005
Youtubers started making money from ads in 2007
Maybe it was always trash
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u/MTGandP Sep 09 '26
Creative people do better work when they can afford to quit their day job and do it full-time. YouTube paying creators is good actually
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u/ServoControl Sep 09 '26
Youtube is still pretty great all things considered. A platform that let's you upload an unlimited amount of video for free and makes enough money to pay creators on top of that is crazy. And I don't think making money on the platform is really been the tipping point.
When I'm signed in the feed is ... ok. Don't click on slop and if you do accidently click on something go into your history and remove it immediately before it destroys your recommendations. All it takes is like one movie recap video click and it will drag you in. I wish it was better for sure but it's still pretty great.
Also I get it. Adding money to the mix does corrupt things a bit but there aren't easy fixes. A while back I had one of my videos take off (4 digit views when I normally get 2) ... just a slightly more polished than usual passion project and immediately I was getting comments trying to tell me all the things I should do to be more successful like I'm some hustler.
Out of all the platforms I'm more worried about the fate of sites like reddit.
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u/Sufficient-Page-875 Sep 09 '26
"We paid for this ourselves!"
Yes. With the monitiaztion of your channels at $20/1000 views plus sponsors.
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u/Revolvyerom Sep 09 '26
Hitting "Random" and getting some 13 year old kid holding a shitty potato webcam and telling you his pet theory about Transformers with great enthusiasm was peak internet.
It's been downhill ever since we lost that.
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u/TheLoneWandererRD Sep 09 '26
Quite the opposite, it drove competition between creators which in turn raised the quality of content
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u/WoodsLovelyDarkNDeep Sep 09 '26
There are very few things where a profit motive improves the experience for anyone not trying to become the next Elon
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u/daviddisco Sep 09 '26
it is still pretty damn good for me. I don't watch crap and if crap gets suggested I don't click on it. Use this one weird trick.
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u/Silverlitmorningstar Sep 09 '26
I feel like there are still alot of youtubers who are just making videos for shits n giggles like the old days. The algorithm rarely ever shows them though.
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u/BruteSlayer Sep 09 '26
The monetization of the internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
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u/Lau_wings Sep 09 '26
I think it actually got better for a while once people were earning money from it.
It allowed creators to actually treat it like a job and could keep putting out good content.
However like most things its swung so far to the "my video needs to make money so ill say things like unalive and grape", that videos become nearly unwatchable.
That an how i rarely get new creators recommended to me, its always the same ones which is annoying.
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u/traevyn Sep 09 '26
Hey dude just find people who make videos about the things you’re interested in. There’s tons of cool shit on there but if you’re just zombie scrolling the front page for whatever slop got popular this week, of course you’re not goin to have as satisfying of a time
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u/gotaflattire Sep 09 '26
Can say the same thing about the internet as a whole.
YouTube wasn't the only video site or even the first. It was just packaged all neat and clean for sale to corporate buyers.
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u/Sparktank1 Sep 09 '26
CinemaSins used to be fun and charming. Now he's doing 20 minutes movies because he knows you'll watch every second.
There's great longform content, but there's a lot of people who just abuse the system and they have the audience to sustain.
I like a lot of the longform content on movie and game creation/art/style.
You win some, you lose a lot. By miles.
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u/DRUGMUSIC_ Sep 09 '26
that's the same for X really, it's called the cobra effect, people optimize for the number and not the goal - which was to get more UGC.
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u/EsrailCazar Sep 09 '26
Back then people would leave your channel if you had an ad or tried to speak about a sponsor, today every single thing is an ad.
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u/Expensive-Border-869 Sep 09 '26
Then you complain and its "but these people deserve a living" no they dont. Full stop. If you dont just enjoy making videos and find it fun and you want to do it when you have free time then just dont do it. Im okay with having less content if its content exclusively made by people who are only there to have fun.
This goes for the modding community too. Doubly so when they try to copy right their mods so that users cannot upload better versions of their mod prior to it being updated iykyk
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u/willowzam Sep 09 '26
I think that's why I love finding videos over 15 years old, it's like a time capsule of a bygone era
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u/bonbonron Sep 09 '26
I still like YouTube, as there are still plenty of channels for me to watch and discover on topics I find interesting.
The amount of ads are doing my head in though (going forward/backwards in a video or pausing it too long triggers another as), as do the ADHD riddled gamers screaming nonstop in their microphones like a bunch of kids, all jumping on the same latest viral game for the money.
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u/NflJam71 Sep 09 '26
Youtube was great for a long long time after it became clear that money would be made. It went downhill when people realized they could make more money off of lower effort videos. If you are good with subscribing and keeping up though, Youtube is still awesome.
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u/TheUnluckyFarmer Sep 09 '26
Once the Vine folks started coming over. Vine was fine as it was but it didn't have to take over YouTube.
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u/voideaten Sep 09 '26
Almost any modern service is good during the start-up stage: its operating at a loss to attract customers. The service becomes 'ruined' when they move to stage II and monetise it. Stage I can't last long by design.
Which sucks, because we're not getting early-era versions of these services back. Ever. But once you see the pattern, you can appreciate their ephemeral nature for what they are.
AirBnB. Lyft and Uber. Youtube. Facebook. Twitter. Any service that looks great in its infancy inevitably goes through puberty. Cloud gaming and Game Pass are nearly there.
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u/ScaredPractice4967 Sep 09 '26
OK im going to disagree here.
Youtube has excellent content. It's often pretty niche and the posters aren't making major $$$ out of it but it definitely there if you want it.
The people making a lot of money are pkaying ge algorithm game to the max bit you dont have to watch them.
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u/Legitimate_Main8244 Sep 09 '26
Reddit still works fine. I don't see bots farming karma points.
Wait.....
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u/Dommccabe Sep 09 '26
"enshitification" It happens with everything that people monitize.
People rarely make things for passion any more- everything has to be productive and profitable.
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u/Riggler82 Sep 09 '26
It's known as enshittification (yes really) look it up. It's all very sad yet unsurprising.
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u/qualityvote2 Sep 08 '26 edited Sep 10 '26
u/Feeling_Valuable5239, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...