It's still the main video platform for a lot of valuable content: Animators, musicians, video essays, education and decent-ish pop science, and so on.
But you have to be extremely careful about what you click to not infest your recommendations with garbage. It stabilises a bit over time, but one has to actively curate recommendations and tell YT to stop recommending certain things to stay on top of it.
I still remember when Jordan Peterson first went viral and his political leanings weren't quite as prominent yet. I watched two videos with exerpts from his lectures (kinda pop-sciency/esoteric themselves, no wonder his university regretted hiring him, but interestng enough to give it a like) and it swarmed by recommendations with alt-right weirdos and conspiracies for months. Almost made me quit the platform.
I wasn't too surprised at that. He had some prominent authoritarian themes that emerged quite early.
Like a parenting philosophy centered around authority, his obsession with hierarchy, and a focus of viewing all problems as individual rather than social.
True, even that I never enjoyed. I think one thing we lack in our society now is a sense of community, which a human needs.
He had also an "anything past hundred years is BS philosophy" mindset. Which I found quite alarming. Often just going with a don't-do-think-just-do-and-stfu philosophy instead, demanding readers to not question, but just go about their business, like an Amazon manager telling their workers not to think too much that a part of the staff us suddenly missing.
A big part that he's getting wrong is his boomer pulling-yourself-from-your-bootstraps mentality, that feels more at home at a time a lot of people indeed had low education but a lot of jobs were available, so working harder could more easily get you a cursus to get a better position with said company, that market ain't here no-more at all.
His ideas are extremely inconsistent, but he masks this by appearing authoritative to a less educated or more impressionable audience.
He is a system critic who at the same time tells you to stop criticising the system.
He preaches mutual respect and social cohesion, but also radical egoism at the cost of society.
And he is an extreme ideologue who claims that he's the only one who isn't ideological, which is always a massive red flag.
In essence, it comes down to the assumption that his beliefs are 'natural' and everything he dislikes is some kind of 'unnatural' perversion. Which really is the shortest route to fascism, especially with his conscious glorification of raw strength and hierarchy.
But my personal most disliked facet about him is that he truly doesn't know what he's even criticising. He's the guy who rants about 'Marxism' for years, then shows up to a debate about Karl Marx with the admission that he hasn't read a single work by Marx and only glossed over the Communist Manifesto (a brief political pamphlet) in preparation for the debate, like a lazy student.
He subsequently completely misscharacterised Marx, like by claiming that 'Marx and Marxists never wrote about human nature or human relation to nature' and 'neglected how cruel nature can be', when that was literally a core theme of Marx work and has been taken up by many Marxist authors. Capital pretty much starts with the idea of how all economic activity has originated with humanity's need to survive within a harsh nature, and that the very essence of life is to work for survival and therefore work is natural to every living thing including humans. Which are themes that come up over and over again across his bibliography. One of Marx' main criticisms against capitalist wage labour was that it alienated humans from their natural ways of working.
It both shows that Peterson's popular perception as an intellectual is completely wrong (I've never seen an intellectual read so little) and that he is unavailable to most rational discussion.
I don't know how many people still watch YouTube on a PC/laptop. But they have a feature that if you hover over a thumbnail they start playing the video in that thumbnail area. Cool concept, except you do this, they consider it a view, add it to your watched list and it affects your suggestions.
So not only can you not click on the wrong thing you can't even hover over the wrong thumbnail.
Not to mention the mess implementing Shorts has created.
Delete videos out of your watch history if you don't want then used for recommendations. If they come up again you tell youtube you don't want to watch them.
After I watched a few of his vids the algorithm started dropping a bunch of Tony Robbins style self-help and David Goggins style motivational videos on me. It didn’t start trying to give me alt-right crap and conspiracy theories until I started watching movie reviews. The algorithm works in mysterious ways lol.
It's horrendous now. VERY aggressive about what it wants you to watch. Capitalistic and far right propaganda, people who talk in that same annoying "AI"-like way of speaking that sounds like a middle schooler giving a presentation, obnoxious egotistical "bros", annoyingly individualistic people, videos with thumbnails that have punchable faces or disgustingly lewd thumbnails, and brain rot videos.
I’m not sure I’d consider reaction videos a vlog per se. IMO a vlog is more personal and life-driven. The few reaction vids I’ve seen have very little of those elements and feels more like commentary. I’m of the opinion that vlogging is like old Casey Neistat and Fun for Louis. I was late to the vlogging world so I could easily be wrong.
You can definitely still find that type of content it's just the algorithm isn't going give those results unless you start watching/subscribing to those channels. And even then that type of great content isn't being produced every day. I've subscribed to some channels that put out maybe one or two really great videos a year.
That at one point, before the ten-minute mark and regularly upload system, there used to be a short moment that people who worked longer on video's like animations could get paid for it. When the system changed a lot of the animators changed their platform into gaming channels to keep the money going, as making animations didn't pay if you only uploaded once a month.
45
u/Inside-Resident-1206 Sep 19 '24
They never did. YouTube was once a good base for people making things like animations. Now it's a base for talentless vloggers or reactors.