YouTube

I absolutely love to hate popular things. Tropical house, Regina George and pumpkin spiced lattes can all suck my dick. I will usually completely forego any kind of fair judgment process for something if I knew it's well-liked by the masses, and skip straight towards loudly proclaiming my distaste for it.

So, in the spirit of trying to not be as shitty of a person, today I wanted to talk about how much I love YouTube, and how I think it is a monument to the human experience.

Firstly - YouTube has its problems. Its a subsidiary of Alphabet, so you bet they are gobbling your data. The site has an obligation to appease advertisers and copyright holders so they make a lot of strange and seemingly nonsensical decisions on those grounds, and in so doing threatening the livelihoods of people who rely on their platform as a sole form of income. There's a lot of weird, immoral, illegal shit on there. And it seems like there's a new bizarro world of Ukrainian content farms exploiting children for millions of dollars.

But, let's sweep those all under the carpet for a moment. I love YouTube as a platform. It educates and entertains me, and the ASMR videos on there literally help me sleep at night. Why do I hold it in such higher esteem than most other sites of its size?

I think YouTube offers both creators and consumers of content far more freedom than other platforms. There isn't really a formula for success on YouTube the same way there is on, for example, Instagram (in case you were wondering, the formula there is to post airbrushed photos of your scantily clad, but perfect, body). The infamous 'algorithm', as well as advertising stipulations, naturally reward some people more than others, but channels of all shapes and sizes flourish. With the obvious caveat that this is all based on my personal experience with the recommendation algorithm and my own interests, I absorb content from 30 second glorious shitpost videos to documentaries over an hour long. I watch music videos, comedy videos, journalistic videos, review videos, podcasts, programming videos, lifting videos, gaming videos, chess videos, ASMR videos, and probably far more. Having all these interests in one convenient place, and getting recommendations for similar content based on my habits, is actually pretty neat.

Of course what makes YouTube great is absolutely not the company or the website itself, it's the people on it. Sure, there are literally millions of people churning out hypergarbage every day, but there are a surprisingly large amount of really wonderful, funny, insightful, enriching channels that aren't unnecessarily difficult to find. The oft-feared comment section is admittedly laden with naysayers and unwell-wishers, but there are plenty of corners of the site which feel like an actual community, often formed around a group of niche channels, where people are not all total assholes to each other. If you look hard enough, you can find these pockets of resistance, where people are actually people and not monsters. And I like that.

Give it a few more years and I'm sure it'll have all gone to shit though.