Oh yeah, re-reading my comment I didn’t make it obvious enough, but I assumed this was something you found and didn’t make yourself. When I said “they” and “them” I was talking to you about the creator, not talking about you (and past you) to the rest of the community.

I remember when all the named sites were good. Facebook was once the gold standard because they kept out the young’uns and boomers. Amazon not only had trustworthy reviews, but also only sold from trustworthy sellers—e.g. you didn’t have to put up with shady sellers mixing in lower quality merch with the generic stuff that goes into big grab bins in the warehouses. Google searches were good for finding information beyond the most surface level of any topic without getting slammed by SEO procedurally generated blogs. Yahoo outperformed google in everything but search for a hot minute; I remember using it for email, news, and watching the latest music videos on their embedded RealPlayer java applet!

Youtube got monetized is what happened. The original owners sold off to Google because Google Video sucked, and the owners couldn’t keep up with the growth of the site. Google decided that they should make money off of their shiny new toy. It stopped being about sharing videos, and became about keeping you engaged with “Content” so you could see more ads. YouTubers got incentivized by the algorithm to go with what appeals most to the broadest possible audiences, and the algorithm evolved in the direction of showing people whatever kept them watching ads. The front page, which used to be about highlighting odd, unique, and (most importantly) new ideas became about showing you whatever was most like whatever you had already sunk the most time into. It’s like how once you buy a product, all the targeted ads change to selling you the same type of product. Their algorithms don’t understand one-off purchases nor limited reserves of interest in a topic.

And on top of that mound of removed, they changed the community to enable their greed: once being a “Content Creator” was a sustainable source of income production values increased, which drove a need for a future guarantee of further income. This wave of videomakers attracted a userbase that, on average, cared more about quantity and style than substance. In turn, these types of users became instrumental in maintaining revenue for youtube-based businesses, so catering to their expectation of high-volume with ever-increasing production values became the most important factor to creators, which drove a need for increasing revenue streams. That’s why even with an ad blocker, youtube is still mostly ads: sponsored segments, product reviews, and soooo much shallow pop culture engagement—references and reviews and critiques and thought pieces about media and people that won’t matter in 5 years’ time.

Ironically this is exactly what went wrong with analog TV and then cable, and it’s what’s going wrong with streaming services now. The iriny being that that is precisely why they had a large influx of users early on: it was all thevTV watchers who were tired of 1/3 of their valuable time being wasted with ads. They learned nothing and refuse to acknowledge the shortcomings of the For-Profit model, electing to blame the ad-blockers, pirates, and “striminals” who make up a percentage of their viewers—instead of ever introspecting and considering that it’s really their fault for pushing away the even larger subset that simply just stop watching entirely. Those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat it, just faster and in a more spectacular way.