The Problem With YouTube: The Challenge of Cringe and Personal Collection

I recently had a lot of things change all at once in my life - school, relationships, living arrangements and more. We have all gone through periods in our life of rapid and rather substantial change where it becomes quite overt that nothing is the same and you are aggressively changing. A small side-effect of that which I'd like to discuss today concerns apps and websites we all use: YouTube primarily.

I, like so many millions of others, experienced a litany of major and minor life adjustments with the lockdowns and covid. And, again, like millions of others, one of those big changes concerned social media and entertainment. I downloaded TikTok. I like the app, though its power is quite intimidating. What immediately drew me in was how sophisticated its algorithm was. TikTok latched onto me very quickly, identifying general aspects of my personality and feeding me videos that kept those aspects highly engaged. I quickly found TikTok far more positive and lighter than YouTube. This became very apparent to me recently as I couldn't use the app for about two weeks. In this time, I turned back to YouTube a little - but this was with much tension and resistance. I have grown not to like YouTube at all in many ways; I almost only ever use it for music and music videos. I have been this way for about 2 years now.

In coming back to YouTube and moving away from TikTok temporarily, I found myself frustrated. There was first the format change; YouTube has the adds, you have to turn your phone to the side, and the home page is a large panel of options. With TikTok, you open the app and simply scroll. It is far more passive, yet also extremely more concentrated and focused of an experience. You are presented videos from a void; there is no sense, as with YouTube, of choice and a general library of videos you can select from. TikTok is rather dependent on a constant conversation between your mind and the algorithm; you dance a dance as it constantly adjusts. With YouTube - or this is at least true of my experience - the algorithm captures who you are early on and feeds you a lot of the same content. I believe it then prioritises how much time you spend watching things rather than the intensity of your engagement. TikTik shifts very fast; if you indicate you like something, it will flood you with many new options regarding it until you pretty much tell it to stop with the 'not interested' function.

The 'not interested' function in TikTok, I quickly discovered, is a powerful tool. I don't like dances and or pretty young women doing nothing - which is how many people see TikTok. Early on, I could tell TikTok I didn't want to see that kind of content and it adjusted fast. If I feel a certain sub-genre of TikToks - e.g travel info on Japan - is getting annoying, I can get the algorithm to cut it out of my feed pretty effectively. The opposite is true in YouTube. My YouTube account is almost 10 years old; its so difficult to get it to show me anything new despite assumptions it has made about me that I don't like. Alas, the 'not interested' function on YouTube videos simply does not work. For many years in university, I listened to a lot of the same podcasts, consuming the same semi-educational content on psychology, philosophy, film, etc. I burned out and grew very disengaged with all of these types of content - which is a large part of why TikTok took over for me. However, I cannot get YouTube to stop recommending the same old podcasts and 'think piece' videos not matter how much I use the 'not interested' function and unsubscribe from what I don't want to see.

I grew incredibly frustrated with this in YouTube's TikTok imitation section: shorts. I never consumed or watched any Andrew Tate content before; I know of him and how he is controversial, but he exists on the periphery of a podcast sphere that I lost interest in years ago. I don't have an opinion on him, and I do not want to form one. But, as I tried out YouTube shorts, I was flooded with his content. With that, I was overwhelmed with so many more short videos on political nonsense that exhausts me. I became so bemused by this that I decided to spend a significant amount of time trying to tell YouTube that I did not want this kind of content. I'd use 'not interested' again and again and again; I would ask YouTube not to recommend channels. But, it never worked. Even blocking certain channels was futile; I'd just have other YouTube channels uploading clips of the exact same content I was trying to avoid fill my feed.

This is a deep problem with YouTube. The algorithm isn't very adaptable, and thus it is constantly visible. What TikTok does so well is hide the algorithm in plane sight. This is what any good entertainment or media does; its form and logic becomes subservient to the manifestation of a space. Take cinema for example. The cinematic space is built on snippets of film and acting, with sound tracks, dialogue, cinematography, and more. The cinematic space is clearly contrived. There are times where cinema plays with this notion; we see this in expressionist works like those of Eisenstein and Vertov that brought attention to montage, self-conscious works of Godard and Tarantino, fourth wall breaking comedies like Deadpool or The Holy Grail, or self-reflexive movies such as Interior Leather Bar or Scream that are about genreisms and conventions. However, in all good cinema, the technics, the form and mechanics of the cinematic space's functioning become subservient - even if visible and perceptible - to a more illusive function. This can be understood in terms of 'entertainment'. As smart, self-aware or reflexive as a film may be, it needs to engage and entertain to work; it needs to capture an audience and generate an illusion of isolated being with the spectator to transfer meaning. I understanding this as the manifestation of immortal moments of synchronicity - but we will not delve too deeply into that. What I mean to draw attention to with YouTube and TikTok is that the algorithm is part of the 'art' in these apps; they are the very real tehcnics and mechanics of the operation of the entertainment. And YouTube fails where TikTok succeeds as its algorithm is too dumb and slow, to obvious, to hide how it really works. I then can see why YouTube recommends what it does; it bores and frustrates me how predictable it can be. Furthermore, I disagree with who YouTube thinks I am. I, on the other hand, have expectations of the tone that TikTok will set, but am consistently surprised and taken down new paths by its algorithm. TikTok has had its influence on my personality.

What is worth pausing and taking the time to emphasise at this point, is a major technical shift that has occurred with the emergence of apps and websites like YouTube and TikTok. These apps initially emerged with the promise of a promise of abundant, free and fresh entertainment. YouTube, I remember from the early days of engaging its most prominent content creators, or YouTubers, has always been under a struggle with its algorithm with content creators frustrated with what it choses to show. Chose is a key word here. YouTube and TikTok function similar to cinema in America back in the middle of the 20th century: the entertainment is shaped by a vertically integrated business model. In the golden age of Hollywood, as many will know, studios had a significant control of the film market at the level of production and distribution; they owned actors and talent under strict contracts, they oversaw and controlled much distribution and owned most of the biggest cinemas. This meant that studios could essentially make what they wanted, how they wanted and guarantee it would be shown in cinemas. With the breakdown of the vertically integrated system and the destruction of the monopolies that Paramount and other big studios had came the death of mid-tier films and eventually the rise of the modern blockbuster. We exist now in a world of mega-budget films and cinematic universes as a result of this structural shift.

TikTok and YouTube function, in many ways, like the vertically integrated Hollywood system did. It has strict rules to manage its talent and what they can produce and they are the distributor/venue that we must go to to consume content. We therefore consume what we are told and allowed by these apps; and this is embodied by the very notion of the algorithm. In revisiting YouTube having spent so much time away from it, I recently came to realise, as a result of this, that you are always 'watching YouTube'. In the same way that you would watch TV channels and less so TV shows before the massive diversification of television and explosion of streaming services, you watch apps, not videos in the modern day. We know this quite instinctively and can take an example of a dead app in Vine. Vine had its own distinct culture and humour that is lost now; it was a type of content as much as it was an app for content creators. This is true of TikTok and YouTube also. However, the more overt this is, the quicker an app dies. Vine is the example here; it was so distinctly a type of content and an algorithm that it fell off when it became all too familiar. A similar thing happened, certainly for me personally, with the popularisation of Netflix.

Netflix had a much wider variety of films on it before it became extremely popular and started making its own content. With the mass production of its own kind of content Netflix, in my eyes, signed its death warrant; it has become no better than a TV channel that produces films - and not a very good one at that. One now then watches Netflix; they 'Netflix and chill'. The notion behind Netflix with its roots being in the Blockbuster era, was that it was a 'streaming service'; it was a library of sorts. And whilst all libraries have to be curated and cannot contain everything, one would never want to 'library and chill'. The same could be said for cinema; no one should want to 'cinema and chill'. The transformation of a noun into a verb is very concerning here and indicative of a huge problem that entertainment industries have always been falling into and then trying to escape.

The value of content and art is in the plethora of unique works that can be produced in the mediums. The mediums, however, consistently fall into classifications - either for commercial or academic reasons. Film has never then just been allowed to be film; there aren't just videos on the internet. The industries that form around this media classify them into genres so that audiences have more direction in what they consume. But, as a result of this, there is a pendulum that starts to swing between having no structure but plenty of choice in art, and too many strict conventions that choice and variety seem to disappear. Think now of all the hours we spend on Netflix, scrolling through nothing. It is not that we are spoilt for choice, rather, that everything seems the same and there doesn't seem to be much of a choice to be made.

I think back now to times when I was most immersed in cinema. There are two key eras that I consider modern golden ages. First was the era of DVDs and the end of video tapes; the blockbuster and Amazon era. The peak of this era saw a new kind of access to cinema; we could bring film's home and could access films from across the world a s well as the vast spectrum of cinema. With Blockbuster, and more importantly, Amazon and other internet market places that allowed audiences to create their own cinematic libraries, we were forced to explore a wide world of film without much guidance and direction. We would develop our own tastes and would always be tasked to go outside of that and explore to find new content. In eras where cinema-going was the only way to consume films, we were far more dependent on cinemas for our choice, especially when independent picture houses were hard to find. The explosion of home DVD granted so many access to films of Asia and Europe, and history also, that we never could have had before; we were less restricted by the conventions and laws of the cinema or the film industry and could consume cinema how we wanted.

This era of personal cinema hit its very peak, in my opinion, during the early times of piracy and streaming websites. Before the popularisation of Netflix and other streaming services, Putlocker and others allowed almost unbridled access the the entire history and breadth of cinema in ways that humanity has never experienced before - and for free. There was the sense, and I believe this to have been more true then than it is now, that you could watch absolutely anything you wanted in this era. And this was particularly true when these dodgy streaming websites came under restrictions and were constantly being shut down. There weren't really dominant streaming services then - even though we all remember names like Putlocker. What was far more important in this era were the file sharing providers (openload, etc.) that were separate from the landing pages and streaming sites. The streaming sites could die and re-emerge every other week under altered domains, but the file sharing providers persisted and formed a bedrock of media that only ever grew until the big ones finally started to be shut down. The streaming sites were a mere proxy to access the films you wanted. It was key then to find the film you wanted to watch on your own, and then locate it with the streaming services as a mere tool. That died with the coming of Netflix.

When Netflix rose to dominance, streaming because 'easy'. This was a huge lie and a disastrous illusion. With the rise of Netflix came the death of the disposable streaming and piracy sites (which I believe are having a bit of a resurgence). And once Netflix captured the market, audiences only became more and more restricted in what they could watch. There came a time eventually that I think all of us came to abandon the Netflix search bar and just start to scroll. We started to scroll because we knew we wouldn't find what we wanted with the search bar anymore, and so had to choose from the limited library provided. This wasn't the case with Google back in the golden piracy era; you rather had to search for the movie you wanted and try to find what streaming site had it - you knew one would. Lists became paramount in this time; everyone was trying to crush the IMDB top 100 and stay on top of the Rotten Tomatoes, Empire, Letterboxd, etc lists. I conquered most of those lists and went on to find my own vision of cinema, forging this website and some of my own lists. And this was in large part thanks to the piracy era. I have come to recognise that my falling out of love with movies coincided with, firstly, an exhaustion with the development of my own library and an excess of never ending choice, but also the death of the piracy era and the dominance of Netflix and other streaming providers whose libraries of cinema I found to be boring and restrictive.

We are in an era of music that is very much so a golden age right now, and we can recognise that with the threat that Spotify seems to be under at present. With Spotify, we can get pretty much any music we want. Only once or twice have I searched for a song and not been able to find it. I love Spotify. Everything I want is there to be found; I just have to go out and retrieve it. I am, admittedly, the kind of person that primarily listens to their liked playlist. However, I also benefit from recommended playlists and notifications of new music. If Spotify really starts to lose artists and we can't find the songs we want, instead have to download multiple streaming services like we have to with movies in the present day, the apps will die and the joys of listening to music will wane. In all honesty, I don't think the market will allow this to happen; the piracy era in music was too strong and completely broke the industry in so many ways to where it just submitted to giving us everything we want to hear for free, or at next to no cost. The film industry has failed to sustain what Spotify does for the music industry with Netflix and will continue to suffer for it, or simply motivate the re-emergence of piracy and make the practice stronger than ever.

Audiences need a balance between choice and selection. Though we can never listen to everything on Spotify - to every song ever made - we yearn to be able to listen to anything we want. The same is true of film. We can't watch every single film, but want to watch whatever we want. That is simply not possible with modern streaming services, and cinema - in my eyes - is dying slowly as a result. Where things become even more complicated and interesting, are streaming services like TikTok and YouTube.

Though there is a lot of cross-pollination between YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and other internet video streaming sites, each have distinct platforms and libraries of content. And each library is overseen by different algorithms, which in turn provide distinct experiences: the TikTok, YouTube or Vine experiences for example. With the internet being so vast, however, no one thinks of ever watching everything and rarely makes lists and genre playlists like we do with music or films. Compilations and reaction videos are the main form of reflection for social media content. We all know and believe that more content is put on the internet in a day than we could could ever consume in our lifetime. We don't want to watch all of the content; so much of it is complete trash. So we rely on algorithms primarily to siphon and precisely control the stream of content we have access to. The same could be said for music here; we don't want to listen to every single song - especially in the modern era as anyone can make a song and put it on the internet: there's so much shit out there. This is why the music industry still stands and there are major music labels feeding us pop stars and setting trends. Nonetheless, social media content is far more vast than music, and so much harder to sort through as an individual simply because there are no sophisticated systems of categorisation.

We exist, and may always exist, in an era of genrelessness in social media. There are groups and cliques on all apps, but most content exists on a vague spectrum of entertainment. TikTok and YouTube imitate the early film era in this regard. Around the turn of the 20th century, there were a vast litany of short films types: the earliest kinetoscope shorts, the Lumiere ethnographs, the earliest attempts at narrative and visual effects from Melies and Segundo de Chomon to the development of the movie star and one-reel narrative film via D.W Griffith, the early Nordic film industry and the first genuine movie stars in Florence Lawrence and Charlie Chaplin. There was not genre then as there is now, as cinematic conventions were still to be established - and this wasn't properly done until the 30s and 40s in my opinion.

There are no genres of social media content; I don't know if there ever will be. The world of social media is far too personalised and dynamic for us to be able to recognise and distinguish genres and labels. There are, of course, recognisable formats of video and content - so this may change in the future. We never know, but the YouTube home page may one day look like Netflix one, with a drop down menu of, not who we subscribe to, but genres and types of content to be consumed. We are already seeing the development of this with tags which sit at the top of the YouTube - but they do not function very well at all, and seem random much of the time, useful only really to find genres of music. Social media would have to move into an academic space for categorisation to properly develop, but the academic space appears pretty pathetic in this regard and, in my eyes, incapable. Our university and educational systems are so distracted by politics and history that they are struggling to effectively engage modern media. Music is perhaps the most modern art form that has substantial academic study around it - but this is in large part due to the physics and mathematics of the field. Literature, of course, has strong academic standing, but I don't know if it can engage modern forms of literature on the internet very well. Academia, alas, struggles to do anything of particular substance as it concerns film in my eyes. We can see this in its failing to influence even genre listings on Netflix. I've said this many times and believe myself to be the only proponent of this obvious fact: drama is not a genre. The fact that we still believe this with film having been in the academic sphere for multiple decades indicates its inabilities in my opinion. That said, new generations will come.

As new generations begin to study and properly engage social media, genres and categorisations may develop for practical use. With this, we may begin to understand social media and its content better. Where film students now study movie production, editing, acting, distribution, etc, eventually students of social media studies will have to learn how algorithms are built and will study their influence and meaning as it regards these apps and platforms. Social media has yet to be recognised popularly as an art also; proper study will always be held back until it is. Defining the art in social media will be difficult however.

So whilst this may all come in the future, and our means of engaging online content mature and shift over the coming decades, what I believe to be of interest at present are more minor and recognisable characteristics; a key one being in what I am discussing generally now with choice and selection.

All arts must have the pool of their productions managed, and thus the selection of available art mediated by an industry for it to be engaged by a spectator's choice. The music industry is in a pretty good place as it concerns the balance between selection and choosing - we can pretty easily find whatever we want at low cost, and are not too heavily force-fed the same nonsense thanks to Spotify, YouTube and piracy before it, which allow us to develop personal libraries and curate them in quite sophisticated ways. Cinema is in a slight crisis with the access to the art being compromised by the modern cinema system. Movies are too expensive to go and see regularly and socially, and there is a dire lack of independent, niche cinemas displaying its history and vastness. Streaming services are fractured and it is harder today to curate your own library of films than it was in the DVD or piracy era in my opinion. This is largely due to the fact that we cannot save films and make playlists like we do music due to the design of streaming apps and websites. As it concerns social media, we are still finding our footings culturally with it. There is all the choice in the world and the access we have to content is seemingly infinite. However, the means of accessing all of this content is undeveloped and controlled by algorithms we don't, culturally, understand very well at all. We have never had art operate via artificial intelligence systems like this before. There is also a lacking of personalisation in social media. Whilst we all share and like what we come across, it is rare to curate and use ones own personal library. We do this with memes, but not so well with video content. Alas, the practice is present and clearly developing.

This brings me back to the problem with YouTube. The app and website makes it rather hard to curate your own library of content and to manage how you engage the world of social media. We are given what we are given with little reason and choice behind it. Alas, there is still the search bar. But it is a skill and a significant challenge to use the search bar in an app like YouTube. In TikTok, this is not really necessary.

What I have found in re-engaging YouTube and shifting my perspective on TikTok recently is that these apps and algorithms tend to shape you and adjust you to their content stream more than you can adjust it to yourself. Such makes the notion of a feed ironic and telling. This is particularly true of YouTube. However, there is a fascinating by-product of this fact: cringe.

In being presented with a vision of how the algorithm of YouTube perceives me, I often grow embarrassed and frustrated, not wanting the pages or 'shorts' streams to be recognised as representative of who I am. I am therefore tasked to curate my own social media stream, but the tools to do so aren't very sophisticated with YouTube. To get the most out of YouTube, I find myself having to resort to the search bar to retrieve what I desire. This is positive as it forces activity and reduces the passivity of mindless scrolling and clicking through rabbit holes. However, there remains the issue that there is just too much content and it is difficult to categorise and distinguish. This makes it hard to search generally for content; it is much easier with music and movies as there are genres, less so algorithms.

This leads me toward a conclusion on what I have thus had to learn how to bear a little better recently: the cringe. YouTube force-feeds me the content it wants to show in so many ways. In stopping to analyse it, to pay attention to types of content I grew tired of, I have found myself becoming more self-aware and sensitive to who I am on social media. A great example can be seen, for myself, in the Joe Rogan podcast, I listened to this for years until I got to the point where I just couldn't bear it or anything similar anymore. When I go back to YouTube, this kind of content is still what I am fed. I can't get YouTube to show me anything different from this other than to use the search bar. And yet in using the search bar and more critically engaging the same old content, I have began to move away from the passivity that TikTok engrained into me, and have began to understand the personal collection aspects of my YouTube feed. But there is still so much to be unpacked and analysed in this; and all in the overcoming of cringe and passive consumption.

Much, much, much more could be explored on this topic. I encourage you to engage social media more actively and curate a personal library of internet content for yourself. One day we will be able to study all of this in university and will be writing books about it for AI to study I'm sure.