You oughta read some atlas shrugged because you are the reason that book is not completely insane
I’m going to assume that this is about me proposing Youtube limits and that this isn’t the most front-loaded and bizarre compliment I’ve ever received (which is to say that it’s not a compliment at all – I don’t really know, I’m not so good with philosophy).
I am merely speaking as somebody who both consumes a lot of Youtube content and also produces Youtube content to what I feel is a decent standard of quality. Things are very quickly crossing a line where I feel like it’s moving faster than either side of me can keep up with.
I do not like the trend towards pumping out immeasurable volumes of the quickest, cheapest, dirtiest content possible. According to statistics released by Youtube 25,920,000 hours of video are uploaded to the site daily.
Almost 26 million hours every single day. If you whittle that down to the most entertaining 1%, that’s still more than 250,000 hours of video. If you assume the average person lives to be 80 years old, you would spend a quarter of your lifetime watching 1% of one day’s worth of uploads to Youtube.
And that number is only getting bigger.
How are you going to get noticed? There’s already more than enough complaints about what vapid, stupid, obnoxious people Youtube celebrities are, and that’s because they exist in an environment that has bred them to be that way. Their personality has to be louder, more intense, and wackier in order to stand out among an ever-expanding crowd.
It’s become this insane hyper-competitive industry. Almost impossible to even comprehend in size, scope, and reach.
It’s easy to get touchy-feely about how Youtube has made celebrities out of nobodies, and offered opportunities that didn’t even exist as few as five years ago, but from my point of view, absolutely nothing has been done to maintain any kind of structural integrity in this system.
As with the biggest social media platforms, the only thing keeping Youtube at the #1 spot is the dearth of competitors who are willing to challenge them.
Blip died, Viddler’s gone, Vimeo’s all art house now, and Dailymotion chugs along on Youtube’s table scraps. Not a single one of them has ever dared to match Youtube feature-for-feature, or zigged when they have zagged. That in itself has been endlessly frustrating, to the point where I wonder if maybe Youtube has patents on certain functionality and everybody else is just afraid to borrow it.
My thought of a minutes-per-day limit is just a shot in the dark. I’m sure it would create just as many problems as it would solve, but consider it a desperate suggestion from a frustrated lower-middle-class Youtuber who feels like the rut he’s stuck in is impossible to climb out of.
And how many are out there, producing great content that nobody’s seeing. Because they get scrolled off the feed too quickly, don’t post frequently enough, or just can’t get discovered at all because there’s just no room left for them, quality or not?
At some point it stops feeling like survival of the fittest and more like survival of the lucky few who established themselves back in 2012 when this market really took off in earnest and have now cornered the audience by sheer production volume.
That sounds like a problem worth fixing to me.