There’s Something Wrong With Youtube

The illusion of choice

Alan Trapulionis
6 min readJul 22, 2022
Susan Wojcicki, CEO and mastermind of today’s Youtube. Photo by World Economic Forum via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Youtube has many problems.

Kids is one. Kids of all ages are consuming repetitive, mind-numbing content by the hour.

I took a look at what Youtube thinks is kids-friendly content. Here’s what I saw:

Screenshot from Youtube Kids (via author)

Honestly, I’d rather have my kid watch rap videos all day than float in this psychedelic vacuum.

Censorship is another problem.

Whenever advertisers raise their voice, Youtube jumps to mass-murder a bunch of channels via demonetization or outright removal. Most of these punished channels are absolutely innocent and have zero say in the matter.

Still, the advertisers calm down, Youtubers eventually give up, and the cycle continues.

Youtube is also silently, but actively political.

A while ago, they took down a music video criticizing Joe Biden. Last year, they demonetized a video criticizing AOC, and possibly demonetized a video critical of the Chinese government.

Whenever they get caught doing this, they just reverse their ban and say “oops.”

--

--