Comment by nonameiguess

What I feel gets missed in these kinds of discussions are that YouTube is a thousand things to a thousand people. I probably have it running more than any other streaming service, but I almost exclusively watch music videos and skateboarding videos, and there is nothing obviously algorithmically driven about their production. They're not made for YouTube at all. YouTube just happens to be one of many distribution channels they end up available on, but the basic style and production methods of these videos hasn't changed a whole lot since the late 1980s. I'd have never heard of Mr. Beast if not for HackerNews talking about him all the time.

My wife is probably closer to a YouTube-native watcher, in the sense that what she's watching is created for YouTube specifically, but even then, it's informational deep-dives, lately on liminal spaces lore, Twin Peaks fan theories, and 3d printing. She raved glowingly lately about a 4-hour long Twin Peaks explainer. I'm sure that is many things, but it isn't flashy, short, there is no skimpy clothing, bright colors, or whatever it is that YouTube is supposed to be incentivizing. Whoever made it almost certainly made no money off of the effort and dumped decades of his life into the study of what ultimately came out there, and nobody is watching it because of the algorithm or a clickbaity thumbnail. The only people watching something like that are the most serious of serious nerds who deeply love Twin Peaks and probably have for most of a lifetime.