Social media platforms have been paying out for attention seeking behaviour for a long time now. It’s why every YouTube video now has the same lame shocked face, red arrows, and clickbait title. It’s why assholes film themselves intentionally pissing people off for TikTok. It’s a whole category called nuisance tubing.

I remember during COVID I saw a number of YouTubers swing from producing normal content into conspiracy shit. Their views ballooned. I saw a nasty feedback loop where the more controversial content received more engagement, hence more ad revenue, leading to more of it being produced.

These platforms are actively degenerating society; there’s a reason the CCP is keeping tight control and reportedly rebalancing things to promote educational creators on China’s.

Indeed. What I noticed is that the quality of the videos went down on youtube in the last 3 years. Now, the quality was never as great as it used to be anyway, but Google changed various things that made youtube worse. They are slowly killing off youtube without realising it.