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Notes -
I wanna say it was around 2020-ish when YouTube changed their algorithm to put a lot less weight on channels' upload record / consistency and a lot more weight on individual videos' watch-time. (Hard to know for sure because all information about the YouTube algorithm is buried under a mountain of "how do I get rich on YouTube" slop articles.) Previously the dominant strategy was to release a lot of short, punchy videos, ideally on a daily release schedule; Captain Disillusion griped about that in his 2018 parody video. But by 2021, creators like Quinton Reviews were seeing success with five-hour monstrosities that were actually just a bunch of shorter videos combined into one upload for algorithm purposes.
"Short daily video" YouTubers and "long infrequent effortpost" YouTubers have both existed on the platform for a long time (and still exist), but now that long videos are a popular/successful format, I see a lot more low-effort attempts at making them. It doesn't help that YouTube Shorts (and TikTok) provide a better path to success for people interested in making short videos.
I truly do not envy the lives of those whose paycheck and general live trajectory is dictated by an algorithm that is constantly and aggressively being tweaked but uncaring corporate interests to maximize eyeballs on ads, or whatever they call the actual metric they care about.
Arbitrary-seeming changes that often wreck your previous strategy, or even diminish the viability of the very style you prefer to express in.
Your work output dictated by constant compliance with a disinterested (not malicious, but it'd be hard to tell) program that remains, to you, a complete black box which you can only appease by offering up your best efforts and seeing which get rewarded with views and money, then adjusting from there.
It is true that we ALL live under someone else's algorithm (and, if you wish, EVERYONE is living under the meta-algorithm known as "the market"). But it'd be particularly maddening to me when there's a corporate entity that owes me no allegiance, and refuses to disclose the most important standards by which it judges 'success,' meanwhile it doles out the rewards as it sees fit with seemingly no regard for the quality of the creative work.
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