YouTube is cool, but YouTubers are lame

[Particle]

Welcome to the latest in my series of rants about the online community.

This time, I'm focusing on YouTube and the community that has quickly sprug up around it.  First, I'd like to say that I like YouTube.  Why shouldn't I?  It's neat, trendy, and gives easy access to information that was hard to find before.  We haven't seen an information revolution like this since effective search engines sprouted some ten years ago.  It's good for comedy, politics, and creative theatre.  It's like the Internet was for text and games a decade ago.

For those of you unfamiliar with what Internet life was like ten years ago, I'll elaborate a bit so you know what I'm talking about.  It was the "golden age" of Internet gaming and web surfing.  You could surf for hours reading about Toby the Gardner's pet cat and what its favorite food was, all thanks to 28.8Kbps modems, Internet Explorer 3, and web sites made from templates in Publisher.  Games were similar.  In May of 1996, Quake was released and the online gaming community exploded.  It was a competitive environment where people had fun blowing the crap out of others and getting the crap blown out of them.  Creativity soared with Quake Movies and the like.  PlanetQuake (I guess it's GameSpy, er, IGN now) was just getting started.  Telefragged was a big rival.  All of the Quake related websites they hosted were listed in a column on the side.  It was the beginning of an age and all was good.

So, what does that have to do with YouTube?  Well, it's the general trend with anything Internet related these days.  Something new, fresh, and exciting comes along and it's wonderful.  At least it is for a while.  The problem is that malicious, dumb, or otherwise undesirable people seem to be attracted to the same things the rest of us enjoy.  What starts out as neat an innovative will eventually go stagnant and turn into nothing more than a collection of a bunch of idiots arguing over meaningless topics and engaging in otherwise unattractive behaviors.  The Internet of fifteen years ago first started to see this problem when more than intellectuals started to get access to the "information super highway".  YouTube is starting to feel this trend already.

What started as a neat repository of videos for all to enjoy has transformed.  We are seeing the infiltration of spambots, trolls, and people who steal other individuals' successful videos and repost them in order to boost their notoriety.  Honor is quickly vanishing.  Intelligent comments are vanishing.  In come the hoard of "me too"s, assholes, and everyone else that always seems to ruin anything good on the Internet.  When will the people who made it cool in the first place start to leave?  It's already begun.  Those who used to enhance the community seem to frequently be going dormant--no longer participating; just watching.

Now, I'm not saying that YouTube is dying or that everybody who posts enjoyable material has gone.  I am saying, however, that YouTube is changing...and not for the better.

Enjoy the atmosphere while it lasts, because it's evaporating a little more all the time.

[KoRo]

Does the timing of this rant have anything to do with the recent Google purchase of YouTube? Maybe that will change some things?

[Particle]

The purchase isn't why I've written this directly.  However, it has given me the time indirectly since the site is being slower than crap due to extra traffic generated from the event.

I mark this as the start of a more rapid decline, though we'll have to wait a month or two to see if that turns out to be true.

[slorge_gridlock]

Been a member of youtube for 7 months.  I've found youtube interesting in that some videophiles have uploaded old VHS recordings of tv segments, commercials, etc (I recently found the old Letterman clip of the band's video "Dress Cool" which I hadn't seen since it originally aired, and also found Tom Snyder interviewing the band KISS, etc.)

I have uploaded some things myself, like a camcorder treatment of a family vacation visit to Ripley's Aquarium in Myrtle Beach (3 parts, almost 1/2 hour total, which, video quality-wise, isn't that great, but it does provide a good look at what the place is like), and a few other things, so I feel I have contributed something useful.

Being a veteran of online life since the old BBS days, I've seen what Particle's talking about take place over and over.  Myspace, youtube, are quickly turning into places that suck because of idiots.  Don't know what this says about me, but I was looking for video's of cats talking (making human sounds) and the same damn video was posted by 40 different people.  In order to find the next relevant video I had to scroll through 4 or 5 more slow loading pages.

These places would do good to have moderators, composed of active users, similar to what Slashdot.org and Fark.com implement, who can weed out/approve/disapprove/greenlight/banninate   the crap that's posted.

Honor?  Intelligence?  I've read such things exsist in fairy and Klingon stories, but as long as there's idiots with a way and a will, those things will not exsist long within the tubes and pipes hooked up to a truck we like to call the intarwebs.