Requiem For Broadcasting Yourself

As a fairly early patron of this high tech, constantly growing, and seemingly endless utility we know as the internet pioneered by Sir Timothy Berners-Lee. I’m old enough to remember the days before the standardization of so many aspects of it. A time when it was going through it’s “wild west” phase as people were still grappling with what this still fairly new concept even in 2005 was and how best to utilize it. I remember the days of playing Runescape for hours on end with my friends in middle school, bypassing my parents permission in an attempt to connect with new people, I remember using this fancy new search engine known as Google to pull information on seemingly anything I could think of or want to know about, and perhaps most tragically I remember being an early “adopter” of a trailblazing video sharing site we all know about and use frequently to this day.

The year was 2007, in the hellhole known as 8th grade (thanks for all the emotional scars!) at lunch one of my classmates and possibly my only friend at the time told me about this video he found on this fairly new website called “YouTube” of Harry Potter puppets singing their names in rhythm and discovering a pipe bomb while doing so. Naturally this kind of content sounded right up a 13 year old’s alley. There was no way I could resist the tantalizing proposition.

Naturally the video was not only a hit with me personally but apparently a lot of other users too. And so it began. As I dug deeper into what the website had on offer over time I found it to be somewhat of a refuge from the social stresses and responsibilities of a young teenage student. Finding video makers on this website that encouraged its users to “Broadcast Yourself”, who not only had a substantial amount of views on singular videos but were regular contributors to their “channels” as their personal pages were cleverly called. The most popular that YouTube had to offer in my 8th and 9th grade years ranged from Harry Potter puppets and finger biting to silly skits by teenagers. One with digitally altered voices portraying a six year old and the other involving concepts such as ninjas and gangsters.

The more I watched, the more familiar I became with the top names of the site. Nigahiga, Smosh, JennaMarbles just to name a few of the prominent names on the platform around the beginning of the new decade. Sure it was still primarily a place of double rainbows and obscure Russian opera singers but beneath that surface there was a growing community of dedicated people that saw fit to use the platform in vastly different and still very new manner. It was a niche place for weird social outcasts like myself who found refuge after the demoralizing days of school where you could escape from not fitting in or being bullied by the more socially adept and acceptable.

It was around this time that I started noticing more changes in the overall layout and presentation of the website. Gone were features such as the 5-star rating system, classification of channels (such as “comedian, reporter, etc”), accolades in the form of ribbons on channel pages, and hell even the friends function started to disappear. But these were only natural in terms of the evolution of the platform. I was only concerned with continuing to discover more prominent creators such as KassemG, Ray William Johnson, Chester See, and JonTron to name a few more of the channels of the 2010s. 

It wasn’t until around the mid-2010s that myself and I’m sure many others started to notice a distinct difference, not just in terms of how the platform was being run, but also how people interacted with each other and the overall mood of the platform, the mainstream audiences it was beginning to garner and the standardization of a lot of the elements in the most popular creators videos. The strange and random eccentricities of the content on the site were largely becoming a thing of the past. Drama between YouTubers and fanbases arose, hostility and intolerance in general on the platform (and society as a whole) started to become more commonplace, comments sections became a quip competition, draconian creative restrictions and copyright strikes were being enforced at a level not seen previously on the platform (or as it’s more commonly known “The Adpocalypse”). What had happened to this niche website and tight knit community that I had known only years previously? It was almost unrecognizable.

As anything that becomes mainstream, the platform sold its soul for the billions of capital it is now surely worth. Obviously they’re not the only ones who have maximized their earning potential. They are a business first and foremost after all, so I’m definitely not singling them out or even necessarily attacking them in the first place. But as it lost its soul, it didn’t have to forget its history too. 

It makes me quite sad to see that the majority of modern YouTube users seem to have either no interest, knowledge, or both on the pioneering names that turned this platform into the juggernaut that it is, and standardized the forms of popular video structures. James Rolfe, ChuggaConroy, Michelle Phan, Michael Buckley, Ryan Higa, DeStorm Power. These were household names in the site’s earliest years. If the contemporary YouTube user even knows two of the six names I’ve just mentioned I’d be surprised. The YouTube brass certainly doesn’t seem interested in bringing up their earliest years as a platform either. There was a time where no one knew or cared who the head honcho of YouTube was. Now we are all seemingly united in our dislike of its current CEO. Naturally the thing that unites us all on the platform today is something negative.

As YouTube becomes a bigger part of the zeitgeist by the day, I’m reminded of a time where it irritated me that the lesser known properties, franchises, and works of art that I found to be of the highest quality received less recognition amongst mainstream crowds than they deserved, maybe YouTube was even amongst those when I was younger. Sometimes it’s not the worst fate to have a small-scale and familiar place be your best kept secret. Being swallowed up whole and distorted to to point of unrecognizable by the hype-train of modern society may give it the notoriety you crave, but at what cost?

To see that the platform that has had such a huge influence on helping me discover who I’m meant to become, has lost any semblance of an identity it once had, it just doesn’t feel good. It hasn’t felt good ever since the mid-2010s. Even as I’ve continued to use it and discover more talented people amongst the standardization of shitposts, nihilism, and memes that seem to love to devour creativity. The cruel irony of a platform that once proudly proclaimed itself to be THE place to “Broadcast Yourself” is without a personality that it could once claim given by creators that could feasibly do just that without fear of having their broadcast and livelihood shut down by a formality as thousands more reap the rewards of catering to algorithms no matter how soulless the content.