YouTube Delenda Est

YouTube must be destroyed. While you can make arguments for FaceBook and TikTok (personally I think TikTok is way behind just by the other platforms' sheer age) it's my view that YouTube is the one website that has done the most damage to society, culture, and the farce that we call our "democracy."

AVGN and its consequences have been a
disaster for gaming culture.

It goes a little something like this. You start out in the mid-00s as a fledgling little tech company that could, bringing streamed video to the masses. People could upload whatever they wanted, within reason. The limits were initially pretty severe: duration, size, image quality, but over time these limits began to loosen as technology advanced and the site's backend grew to accommodate more and more users. Copyright law obviously had a lot of say over what could get posted, but it was still kind of a wild west. This is the era that brought us everything from "aw fuck, I can't believe you've done this" to the RickRoll. It's the era that made the Angry Video Game Nerd famous, then extremely rich; he's been phoning it in ever since.

Over time as the site became more and more monetized and advertising took up more and more of the site's functionality, a new kind of job began to emerge: the YouTuber. These were people who posted "content" on a regular basis and used this content to foster popularity, which meant clicks, which meant advertising dollars and eventually eyeballs on things like Patreon. Along with this massive growth came two things: YouTube's increasing hostility to its own users and an increasing right-wing tenor to the kind of content that the algorithm elevated and promoted.

So you start with the early "nerd" YouTubers. Most of these were cis men in their twenties and thirties, complaining about video games, or action figures, or horror movies, or whatever. By this point the economy had shat the bed with the lights on, the 2008 market crash having ruined lives and peoples' futures. YouTube, like the rest of the internet, was awash in angry, mediocre men with few prospects and little talent, given a platform for their bad opinions, and as always when you give someone like this a platform, they will use it to the full extent and then some, because heaven forfend that these dipshits ever shut up for five goddamn seconds. So you get everything from angry nerds complaining that the newest video games are all "dumbed down" for "filthy casuals" to the YouTube Atheism movement, which was mostly a bunch of misogynist sex criminals rejecting religious belief not on any solid theological foundation, but on the basis that they rejected any belief system where they might face a single solitary consequence for their actions. Also a little bonus racism by way of virulent Islamophobia.

what the average YouTube feed looks like.
c/o Jon Davies

There were also a number of fundamentally anti-science movements that also emerged around this time and shared a lot of overlap. Most prominent is probably the Flat Earth movement; they posted tons and tons of "documentaries" claiming to prove that the Earth was flat. You also had anti-vaxxers, spurred on by Andrew Wakefield, a disgraced medical professional who lost his license for torturing autistic children while looking for evidence of a fake disease he made up, a disease he needed to exist to justify banning the MMR vaccine, a vaccine he had a vested interest in discrediting because he was being paid by a pharmaceutical company that wanted to sell measles, mumps and rubella vaccines separately and make more money than they would selling them as a single vaccine. This is all true, you can look it up. You also had just more generalized conspiracy theory dweebs. If you dig far enough into any of these belief systems, you'll eventually strike a rich vein of antisemitism. Eventually they all became a part of the constellation of freaks that is QAnon, and after that got either cushy government jobs in the Trump administration (either one), or cushy consulting jobs. Or they just formed cults.

On top of all that, you have the right-wing grift-o-sphere: Stephen Crowder, Milo Yiannopoulos, Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, all these absolute fucking losers, all of them churning out hours upon hours of stupid, hateful garbage. YouTube's algorithm is designed to funnel you in their direction. Just because we can't open the hood and look how the algo works in real time doesn't mean that it hasn't been an observable phenomenon for a decade, and the research is starting to bear that out.

There's also the fact that as YouTube enters its third decade, it's become a hostile wasteland. It's almost impossible to make money on this site anymore; College Humor, once a mainstay of millennial humor on YouTube, fucked off to start a streaming service called Dropout because YouTube actively does not want you to make money unless you're an advertiser or a racist. It's hostile to its users too; the site is borderline unusable without an adblocker, and they're constantly in an ever-escalating arms race to block adblockers. For a while they were just straight up not letting you watch videos if you had an adblocker on; they eventually gave up on that and now just make you sit through a few seconds of loading before the video will start. Ad dollars are the only thing that matter to YouTube and its parent company Google. This can be most obviously seen in the causes of the AdPocalypse of 2017; it was discovered that videos of children, often uploaded by said children, were attracting comments from online pedophiles. For this and other reasons, advertisers revolted, forcing YouTube to find a solution. Their solution? Demonetize videos that might depict children and disable comments on those videos. Why not just ban the pedophiles? Because YouTube didn't want the pedophiles to leave. Those were important eyeballs for advertisements elsewhere on the site. 

How about you verify my ass, YouTube?

Which brings us to the present day. YouTube, like many other sites, have capitulated to dangerous legislation forcing users to prove their identity by uploading an image of their ID card, make a small payment via credit card, or some other method, all of which is an extreme security hazard. Nearly every major institution on the internet has suffered a data leak of some kind; you can expect to have your private data stolen or outright sold and used against you.

This card from Loop Hero
deletes whatever you put it
on. Let's just drop it on the
whole modern internet.

And even aside from the shady shit, there's just also the fact that YouTube has encouraged a lot of damage to our culture. CinemaSins has ruined film criticism; angry dorks screaming about pronouns have had an outsized influence on the game industry. (While AVGN laid the groundwork, I think it was TotalBiscuit who was most responsible for forming this particular content model. We are richer for having lost him.) And there's also just the plain fact that it was the speartip of the internet's switch from being a primarily text-based experience to a video-based one. As someone who is hearing impaired, this is beyond fucked. I'm sick to death of not being able to find any sort of walkthrough or guide for any video game problem or even technical issue without having to go on YouTube and watch some dipshit spend 5 minutes showing me how to do a 30-second task. And the site has gotten so, so much worse to use. It's impossible to find anything anymore. If it's not AI-generated slop, it's six hundred "shorts" that are only barely tangentially related, or it's a thousand videos of thumbs with faces on them talking about how woke feminism is destroying your favorite hobby.

YouTube poses a security risk, a cultural hazard, and existential threat. It must be destroyed, and its parent company dismantled with all the rest. Facebook, TikTok, and all the other tech giants, must be crushed and their leadership imprisoned at minimum. If we're going to make any headway in fixing this broken world of ours, we need to decentralize the internet again. And while there might be better targets to start with than YouTube, I think it'd be a powerful symbol to just memory-hole that terrible goddamn site as a warning to the rest.

-june