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I find myself looking back on the history of YouTube anti-woke politics in light of the whole Charlie Kirk thing. Because I never really knew or cared who Charlie Kirk was, and my first exposure to him led to a reaction of "oh this is just Stephen Crowder but as a smug Christian."
This led me to reflect on the declining quality of human being in the...words fail me. Alt media? Internet political influencers?
I have a lot of nostalgia for The SkepticsTM and that entire era of YouTube talking head. (Often not even a head, just an avatar pic.) Now whenever I fish around for that level of quality, it simply isn't to be found. We are all infected. We are all dumber than we used to be.
Some of this is downstream of the YouTube algorithm in the sense that it incentivized shorter more quickly-produced low-effort content. Back in the day people used to make video essays, or cringe compilations. If they did something live, it was a Hangout, an informal podcast involving people who sure look like genuine friends having genuine discussions. Often with no live video feed. These days it appears to be some guy pontificating off the top of his head, repeating himself often, talking in circles. Kyle Kulinski now does the same thing that Tim pool was doing a few years ago. Hassan Piker appears to just be an LA nepo-baby himbo socialite, and he's very much a step down from whatever Vaush is/was, who was in turn a step down from Chapo Trap House (these are all things I dislike, but I note the decline in quality).
I've also noticed the trad motive decay. Originally, "based" was a punchline and no one pretended to actually be socially conservative, in the same way that Marilyn Manson isn't actually a Satanist, all the upside-down crosses are just there to trigger the normies. I suppose this shouldn't be surprising; the original anti-woke thesis was "look I'm liberal/democrat just like you, but you're so smug and obnoxious and factually wrong I find myself becoming conservative just to spite you."
(That was the original troll op: trying to make the point that the other party is so thin-skinned, fragile and unreasonable that they'll very predictably flip their shit over "it's okay to be white.")
In particular, Twitch seems to be full of fucking townies. No one talks philosophy or has a dignified intellectual persona. The era of Sargon, Dr Layman, Dev, Kraut, and Vee shooting the shit as genuine friends is long over, it's just influencers chasing clout all the way down now.
TL;DR: Asmongold is a shittier Sargon, and current-year Carl is also a shitty caricature of himself.
This is a rambling drunken phonepost, so forgive me. I mourn for the lost Internet of yesteryear. The only place on YouTube I see anything like that old level of genuine quality is EFAP.
Can I just say I think you're just factually wrong about all of this.
First, I'm not sure if this 'Charlie Kirk was apparently just a shock jockey' shtick is genuine ignorance or some kind of bit, but for instance here's the Vice President of the United States taking over his long-form podcast. I honestly can't understand people who comment 'who is this guy' or 'he doesn't seem important' without doing any basic research. He was probably the most important political operative on the right, supposedly one of maybe three people who had the President's ear, and likely also won the election for Trump by being the most significant organizer of Republican's ground game. But instead you watch a couple of TikToks and conclude he's "just Stephen Crowder but as a smug Christian". Don't you have any curiosity at all?
On the idea that there's no long-form content on Youtube anymore, I have to imagine you're just not looking. That's basically all I watch! In fairness, the main topics I follow are religion, various political channels, and some misc nerdy topics (All videos I've watched in the last week). So you may be correct that in the topics you're specifically interested in there's no long-form content anymore, but I kind of severely doubt it.
Yeah I’m literally watching a high quality two hour documentary on the conquest of Greece by Rome while working out, right now. On YouTube. For free.
I think the lament says more about the OP than reality; long form and high quality content is broadly available it’s just increasingly not produced by the typical blue tribe producers.
If you’re deeply embedded in that cultural narrative, yeah sure it might feel like we are declining culturally. Lots of cultural institutions output have been horrific for the last 10-15 years.
But my access to high quality information and educational entertainment has never been better.
I have to be extremely meticulous about deleting any watched video that even slightly deviates from my regular feed of photography and musicianship related videos as well as hit "hide" on any recommendation that deviates from those or my feed will inevitably be invaded by shit tier clickbait crap. Just the other day simply watching one astrophotography video was enough to make a bunch of "nobel winner warns about new voyager discovery" crap videos enter my feed.
The same way if I try to find anything with search, I have to add "before:2026" or within a page or two the results are polluted by clickbait shit.
Wait wtf why does this have any effect? Not doubting that it does, I just struggle to think of a mechanism.
Wild ass guess: It switches to a different internal search engine that's more classic style instead of "recommendation" based.
Maybe it's piggybacking on the cluster of people who use before:2022 or before:2021 to exclude AI SEO slop? Perhaps you have found a way to make yourself look like a sophisticated search user without actually invoking any sophisticated search functions.
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