The Material Conditions of a Youtuber
The material conditions of a YouTuber are a result of a calculated effort to addict you to the platform. That's my central point here, that's what I have to say with my understanding of Marxism that ironically came form watching YouTube videos.
Material conditions are as I understand and as is relevant to my argument here, the material (real things like tax policy or the house your living in) things that effect how you act. With definitions out of the way let's get to how this relates to YouTube. A youtuber is fundamentally dependent on the system of well, YouTube. This may seem fairly obvious and it will come as no surprise that this means YouTube has a lot of influence on the material conditions of a YouTuber. As YouTube is an ad funded platform (they do have a premium service but their main funding is ad based I believe) This makes it watch time a great way to make people watch more ads. The longer you use the platform more ads they watch and the more you can extract their personality to make a model that makes their ads more valuable to advertisers. And how do we increase watch time? Simply make them addicted to the service using techniques from the gambling industry.
Ever wonder why google changed their slogan from don't be evil? The infinite scroll, the notification, the like button, even the colors they use are all designed to addict you to these services. They use AB testing to see which slight miniscule changes increase "engagement" by 0.52%. Meanwhile these changes and features have real world effects on real people. The average American spends 4 hours on their phone, and I dare you to tell me they are enjoying those 4 hours to the fullest. I have a serious problem watching stupid YouTube videos for hours and hours, content is the new smoking, it takes years off of your lives by robbing the time you consciously participate on this earth from you. These are decisions people are making for the benefit of their own panama bank accounts, this is not an accident.
So with that out of the way doesn't this mean YouTubers are the devil? No, while the CEO of YouTube might enjoy a cold glass of children's blood after hard day of work, YouTubers are simply driven by their material conditions (Yes, I know the same is true for the CEO is a joke chill). YouTube set up their systems in order to increase "watch time" giving the YouTubers more views, and therefor more money, if they increase that metric. Creating an obvious incentive for addictive content which makes the viewer watch as long as possible. Note that these systems aren't catered to real world value or happiness created by the content, it's watch time, how much of your life your willing or feel compelled to spend on the site.
What can we do about this, well below there's a link to a change.org- No. YouTube won't change what it does under pressure from the 2 people who read a blog post. The only thing we can do is protect ourselves from this trash using willpower or, lacking the former, a blocking app like Cold Turkey Blocker. I use the latter and it works pretty well until I find a way around the block and then fuck myself over again. Additionally it's important to let others know what these websites want and how their designed towards addiction not value. Eventually I would like to see an EU ban on these kind of "algorithms" a term I wish was less vague. Essentially a world where we all see the same thing when opening a website, excluding a subscription box. This isn't my perfect world, I still think there's a lot of room for exploitation there, but it sure is better than the hell we live in now.
The perfect internet is a repository for information like it was intended to be, a world of static pages which have hyperlinks to others. It's almost like HTML is a Hyper Text Markup Language, meant for communication not content. A tool to know how a certain programming language works rather than a metaverse build of addictive trash. The perfect internet has no JavaScript or CSS, no backend code, just an infinite library, a tool not a chain.
Please act on what you've learned here by quitting YouTube for a little bit a couple days, see if you have more time for things you enjoy. And if you can't do it, maybe consider if it's a-ok with you that a website made you compulsively use it.