YouTube And Sensationalism

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I love the medium of video and I have love having a choice of thousands, or even millions of videos to choose from. In effect my love of the medium of video should mean that I love YouTube. I don’t, because of sensationalism and clickbait.

I have paid for YouTube prime twice now, to cut out all the adverts, and I love that. In theory plugins do the same thing, for free, and I did use plugins for years before finally deciding to spend money on YouTube Prime.

The thing that paying for YouTube Prime can’t remove is the sensationalist headlines and clickbait titles. It also doesn’t remove the content creators with a million viewers saying “please like and subscribe” ten seconds into a video. It doesn’t cut out of them saying “with my half a million viewers” and other grating phrases.

The second thing I don’t like is having videos with hundreds of thousands, or even millions of views recommended. I want to find the smaller content creators that are sharing video for pleasure, rather than as a job. I want to use YouTube on a human rather than a broadcast scale. If I want to be an anonymous statistic I can watch mainstream media content.

By showing content with hundreds of thousands or even millions of views it feels like an enormous amount of content is being ignored and silenced. We are seeing what the algorithms think everyone wants to see, rather than what individuals want to see.

A content creator camps in interesting places with a diversity of equipment. It’s interesting until you notice that the content has a million or more views, for what would be considered junk, or a waste of time in other scenarios.

It feels like a positive feedback loop. Popular content gets promoted so people watch it, and because people watch it it gets promoted even more. When I refresh YouTube today I get 6 videos, where I used to see 20 videos. The most popular content is forced upon us, making it even more popular. It feels like we’re being compelled to watch certain content, rather than free to choose.

And Finally

I come from a time when we browsed the web. We had 20-30 articles and bits of news on a single page and we chose which content we wanted to view. Today browsing has been replaced by algorithm driven recommendations, so we are forced to see sensationalist, populist content, rather than something that is unique and interesting. We need to revert to browsing again. I don’t want recommendations. I want choice. I want to feel that I am not being forced to see content that an algorithm chose for me. I get fatigue, with YouTube today.