Ask Lemmy

I stopped using YouTube a while back.

There's still content creators and people in there still trying to do good work, most of these (although not all) are on Nebula, in case people wish to support them and ditch youtube altogether.

But YouTube as a platform has become unusable for me. And it was not recent.

And I don't want to use second party clients anymore either. Chasing which one isn't blocked now is a hassle that is just not worth it for me any longer. The culture that exists in there is not something that I want to bother myself with this much for anymore.

Throughout the last decade after Google purchasing the platform in 2010 (if I'm not mistaken?), I saw YouTube become the first epicenter of everything that is the most horrible online. Gamergate started on YouTube (and was maximised and driven by its embedded algorithms after the Google purchase) before moving on to reddit, 9Gag, instagram and virtually any other platform. And now it's just rampant common ground in culture, with "SJW" becoming "Woke", and "Anti-SJW" becoming "Anti-Woke".

And the masses took the silly pill.

Clickbait articles are the least of the problems that YouTube has for a very long time.

Misinformation unchecked and even blatant lies allowed freely to circulate for years and years now. Just check how many flat earth channels are spewing nonsense freely over there for so long now. And that is just one example. Just one.

Rage and disgust rewarded by the algorithm, resulted in deranged forms of behaviour and rage inducing statements to become common ground in the pursuit of monetization.

Then there's ads there are openly scams for the gullible to fall for. Yes, I know Meta allows these as well, but I stopped using anything Meta even before stopping youtube. Yes, even WhatsApp. The Cambridge Analytica scandal should've made everyone quit in rage and never look back. But hey, I guess I was mostly alone in that. And look at where that got us now. Not just the U.S. but the whole world.

And then there's AI...

If people need a case study for how the once considered silly "Dead Internet Theory" is becoming true, take youtube. Plenty of AI generated content as a non-stop sludge, reacted by brigade bots, scam bots and sex bots, all rising in the algorithm through faux viewership. The human is becoming incidental in their current model.

Now, everytime I end up on youtube through some website sharing a link to a video there, I can tell you that the feeling for me is one of entering a loud space of derangement, a most horrifying circus, displaying mental illness and sociapathy as their acts.

But to be honest, ever since I moved to the fediverse exclusively in the last couple of years, that's how I feel about every major platform now. But youtube still does feel worse in many ways to me.

And I hope nobody here takes this as judgement for their usage of these platforms. Youtube alone took hours of my week before this. Reddit too. I know how absorbing it all is. But now, on the outside, I also know how draining it was.

But if your focus is truly just on "clickbait", know that predates youtube and even the internet in the form of sensationalist headlines. Tv made it worse. Then the internet exploded it in scale. And Social Media consolidated that as the only viable option through the algorithmic incentive for it.

Just check News Headlines from reputable sources from each decade and you'll see the issue glaringly worsening throughout time.

Good luck on your project and I also hope you'll share it on the fediverse.

Cheers.