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Is YouTube's business model imploding in slow motion?
They've been pushing more inane bullshit in recommended with zero prompting, and the algorithm just seems totally broken from too many manual overrides at this point. I don't see video ads thanks to Vanced, but the image ads are getting increasingly schizo or just plain weird. Who is actually paying for them any more?
Their personalization obviously isn't working too well either, given all my ads for menopause meds and Israeli flag lapel pins. Do they think I'm a republican congressman with a Bulwark subscription or something?
Tangentially I find those youtube thumbnails ghoulishly inhuman. Creators have access to pretty complex A/B testing for what drives clicks with instant feedback, so over time they have slowly "gradient descended" into plastering those open-mouthed staring faces everywhere – not as a conscious decision by anybody, but simply because that's the local minima when you do large scale tests of the minds of children. It's almost Lovecraftian, like a human puppeted by a deeply alien mind that you have no goals in common with.
I just don't understand how it still works despite what I assume is a substantial number of people who are sick of it. I have for years absolutely refused to ever click on any video with one of those fucking thumbnails. Same with clickbait titles. I will not do it. I can't be the only one.
For the same reason people may be "tired" of the Marvel formula, but those movies still make hundreds of millions, because there are millions of literal children/teenagers and also, millions of non-English speaking people globally who have basically teenage minds when it comes to Western entertainment, such as YT videos or blockbuster movies.
In the 70's and 80's, not only did those in charge of making entertainment were largely from the entertainment business, but since you didn't really know why a movie made a lot of money, you could make it a little smarter or whatever. Now, in a world where every script has been thrown into a computer to analyze for best performance, and the guy writing the checks used to run the theme park division of the same corporation six months ago, there's going to be nobody who cares about appealing to more than the median consumer, and the sad reality, is a lot of even successful movies from the 70's and 80's and 90's could've been even more successful if they were a little dumber - the rest of the audience were basically paying a tax to appease smarter viewers because those people were in charge.
Now, they're not.
But, to circle back to the topic of YouTube, new-media creators have the opportunity (modulo sufficient resources) to make things that put the traditional entertainent industry to shame, stuff that has more niche focus.
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