Have you seen this?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Have you seen this? You wouldn't believe this happened! We were not expecting this! This is what we found! Have you ever experienced anything like this? You won't believe this!

Sorry, that was just the first six video titles I found on youtube after searching for some fairly generic information. There were dozens more.

Can't beat em, join em?

[brotherhood of LAN]

Sceptical people hate this! You'll never guess what they did next...

Youtube is now terrible. The amount of ads, shadow banning of comments and their blackbox algorithm promotion of videos, I really should make more of an effort to support competing products.

[not2easy]

In between things we check the YouTube channel on Roku and it is not too terrible in the afternoon but in the evening it is full of obviously repurposed network news videos. The logo may say CNN or NBC or CBS but the channel name is some person many thousands of miles away from the network. The giveaway is the channel name and some person in the lower right corner semi-blocking the network name and pretending to be speaking. :(

[lucy24]

Don't forget the tried and true Funniest thing* you’ve ever seen! You’ll die laughing!

Yeah. Make me.

Edit: The first time I ever heard of “shadow banning” was when I got curious and read the fine print for Disqus. Thinking about it soberly, the one place it could be useful is handling spammers: As long as they don’t know they’ve been banned, they won’t come back with a new name to post the identical spam, so it remains happily out of sight, out of mind. In other contexts it would be pretty pointless because you’d quickly notice the entire lack of responses, because someone always forgets that you’re not supposed to feed the trolls.


* Odds-on, either a cat or a baby.

[ronin]

Clickbait headlines that went too far. You'll be shocked when you see number 7.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Some very smart people are abusing this and laughing all the way to the bank. Random example: "Escape room". If you search for something like that you'd expect to see a few, perhaps learn more about them... you want to learn SOMETHING.

Instead you get...
- random emotion generating words attached like "Dangerous" or "Most dangerous" or "World's most dangerous"
- a rediculous image with something not typical in the subject
- a person with an open mouth
- etc

It just happens FAR too often on any given subject, it's like the SEO of youtube which WILL leapfrog the video above others. There are exceptions of course, the best videos do return as well but typically you need to search a bit for them.

It doesn't even seem to matter what language the video is in so long as the title and first few words match the user's probable language..

It caters to the ADHD crowd a little much too, software that removes the time between sentences is popular... and if you do something original expect a mashup or reaction to take the views.

This is all food for thought as the "Metaverse" is on the cusp of sucking all web content into it to feed people who've been wearing goggles for hours.