Come up with contrived BS that caters to younger audiences, micromanage anyone who is holding you up, and attempt to game a blackbox algorithm on a site you don't pay for (YouTube)
The whole modern social media / influencer sphere seems like a huge bubble that will pop eventually. Google has already started wiping inactive accounts[0] presumably because storage isn't truly infinite or cheap. I imagine YT will also take the same path eventually.
0: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290?hl=en
And while I don’t think either can be made explicitly illegal without some pretty nasty second-order effects on freedom of expression, we can’t expect the likes of Google to provide a social fix here. Government will need to take note, label, and activate against this at some level. The TikTok ban means we’ve noticed this can be dangerous at least when rival nation-states are involved, but the call is coming from inside the house.
There are many, many, videos that are literally the adult version of baby videos -- ex. Squeezing rainbow colored Play-Doh through a sieve, really bizarre just pure visual attention hacking.
Your comment reminds me that's the local optima for YouTube x creators and it's just sort of contracting the work of actually producing content out. It doesn't care what it is. Just hours consumed.
The abuse of FOIA for police bodycam content published with light commentary... Zoom court sessions enabled turning judges into stars on a show they have no part of it...
- how programmers actually review code
- 3D Printed Latch Mechanism
- I Always Thought This Border Was Straight (about a border in australia)
- You need to go to a “better” place! (rescue of an injured raptor)
I think YouTube is a lot like twitter (5 years ago), in that what you view and follow affects what you're fed.
It's important to note it's not about individual feeds, but the basins that algorithmic content settles in given the data they have.
As things evolve, they optimize for brutally efficient production. "true crime" starts as "NPR award-winning podcast phenomena" and very quickly come to mean a swath of "DUI arrest" videos.
That's because the initial click, averaged across all of us, is *hyper*optimized for a thumbnail with an attractive scantily clad young female saying COPS DAUGHTER THROWS TANNTRUM AFTER BLOWING 0.24! It's not about individuals, or individuals feeds, it's about these niches get hyperdominated by nonsense because that's what best practice is. c.f. document's comments re: thumbnails vs. mine.
Note also, for instance, the curious absence of any programmer influencers making anywhere near the views of pretty much any other topic on YouTube. t3.gg is the top in software engineering videos by a mile, and they pull in 1/10th of what a bodycam video does.