I think a lot about how youtube definitely, absolutely ruined their website a year or two ago
like usually when someone says "such and such website shot themselves in the foot with <change>" i'm like uh huh, mhm, sure, show me the exec who isn't getting absolutely fucking loaded down with fat stacks of benjamins. they didn't do shit. they're fine.
but i really feel like they fucked up something when almost all of the topics that i used to look up on there are now absolutely stagnant.
like a year or two ago i used to look up car dent repair videos just cause i liked watching the process, and now when I look that up all the videos I get are a year old. Like I'm sure if I sorted by Date Uploaded I'd get something, but I didn't used to have to do that.
There's still Gamers uploading acres of Gamer Content, but the critical thing there is that none of them have day jobs that aren't on a computer. I feel like everyone who actually does things with their hands left Youtube in disgust for some reason.
I don't know if you tube actually *cares* about those people, since nothing will ever compare to the popularity of Gamer Content, but either way i'm pretty sure they ran thousands of productive channels off their site and i wonder if they really didn't feel that
i don't get anything recent for car repair of all types or small engine repair, all the channels doing tool / furniture restoration went silent and the void was filled by russian fake restoration channels
idk, it's all just Feelings rather than any Hard Data, but i'll tell you this: I had to work at an office for a year as they slowly fired/lost employees and didn't backfill any of their positions, and now I'm hyper sensitive to the feeling of something Winding Down
it was extremely bleak watching that place dwindle until it was just two or three employees who often didn't even show up, and nobody said anything out loud anymore, and then they stopped bothering to turn the call center status TVs on
youtube is and was a cesspit and antisocial in the main, but i mourn the loss of anything that was making people get up and breath deeply and Do Things, even if they didn't like the things all that much, even if the product was low quality
the overwhelming feeling i get from... most of society at this point is of this slow slide downwards as we stop picking up our tools, stop inviting anyone over, and just slowly transition into glassy stares from behind our computers, because any greater effort isn't worth it
when the reward for stepping out from behind the computer screen is nothing, why even bother? it sucks here, but it doesn't suck any less out there.
this is not the same as "you gotta get off that computer screen and Go Outside child" because i am literally talking about all of society. not everyone wants to be doing this but we're slowly losing any will to do anything else
