I 'member YouTube back when it wasn't all dog shit. People uploaded their cats, dogs and other pets doing pet shenanigans. Some youth went viral uploading videos of harmless pranks. A ton of people made very good educational content. Some put up chunks of concerts, modern bootleggers.

But nowadays? Content theft runs utterly rampant - and I'm not talking about the oh-so-poor multi billion movie conglomerates being the victims here. I'm talking about the countless content farms that get by just 1:1 re-uploading other people's videos. I'm talking about "meme pages" that do just the same, not even bothering to tag the original creators of the stuff they steal. I'm talking about "reaction video" streamers that not just (again) steal other people's content, but often enough drive their rabid fanbase to dogpile upon whomever/whatever they "reacted" upon. All of that driven by the sweet sweet nectar of YouTube Ad revenue sharing.

And that's just the relatively harmless content thieves. Money also drives a lot of other very problematic kinds of YouTubers, especially ever since sponsoring became the norm rather than the exception for those creating high value/effort content: shilling literally dangerous and unsafe supplements, one-shoe-fits-all VPNs promising much but delivering not much to people who don't need them (other than, ironically, to bypass Youtube's geoblocking), even more supplements, cryptocurrencies, various forms of gambling, questionable "mental health" providers that deliver pages upon pages of warnings and horror stories when you just search once for them, scams like "Established Titles" [1]...

Then come all the "pranks" and "challenges" that often enough led to kids and youths injuring themselves in the process [2] (and sometimes unfortunately even killing them such as with the Tide pod challenge [3]), or outright anti-social behavior that got cheered upon by rowdy commenters. Some particularly braindead, ruthless (or however else you want to call them) arseholes exploit homeless people for clicks [6].

And finally, the politics. The alt-right/incel/conspiracy radicalisation funnel has been documented to insane depths [4], but nowadays it seems to have shifted mostly to TikTok [7] as YouTube (finally) took action after widespread media reports [5].

Oh and then the personalities. It sucks that so many streamers - particularly in the German scene [8] - ended up with allegations of all sorts of misconduct. Domestic violence, sexual abuse, grooming of minors in their fan base, the same shit that happens to a lot of stars that got popular as kids, the fame ruins their heads and makes them believe they can get away with anything.

I miss the old Internet, one that was not dominated by people willing to sell out everyone and their dog for clicks and ad revenue. Probably the only YouTuber I can actually still recommend who a) never shilled bullshit in his career and b) still does the same good content he started with is DaveHax. Even Simon's Cat has gone down the drain years ago when every new video turned out to be 75%+ recycled older material...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Established_Titles

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/01/17/youtube...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumption_of_Tide_Pods

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/23/youtube-g...

[6] https://www.vice.com/en/article/homeless-people-are-not-prop...

[7] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1472586X.2023.2...

[8] https://www.ingame.de/news/streaming/streamer-skandale-2022-...