Some people have alluded to this, but I find it sad that so much energy in our modern society goes towards trying to exploit arbitrary particularities of arbitrary platforms. Even if we set aside the stuff like "you're taking a risk building on YouTube because they could ban you", there's the more practical stuff about how the plan is all about the title and thumbnail. Like if YouTube somehow switched to letting you have two thumbnails, or some other UI element that you could customize, suddenly everyone playing this game would have to scramble to figure out how to maximize in that environment.
It just seems to me like following a rich person around hoping some coins will fall out of their pocket. It's a parasitic ecosystem that encourages content to focus more and more on "what works" in the self-perpetuating context of that ecosystem, and less and less on making contact with any kind of external reality.
I don't feel this is that different from software eng jobs. We A/B test things to death just to get tiny metrics improvements.
Sometimes i feel like we shit on youtube creators because it seems like what they do is silly or frivolous. But is that last software feature you worked on that nobody is ever going to use but is needed to check a box so marketing can say we meet some standard so that we can sell the product to some big corp decision maker who is never going to actually use the software, really any better?
Jobs a job. Ultimately people are doing it to pay the bills, not for the sake of art.
It's clear by now that youtube is just a platform designed to produce the Infinite Jest video. Mr. Beast accordingly just appears to be a step on the way there.
> suddenly everyone playing this game would have to scramble to figure out how to maximize in that environment
These people are the best positioned to figure this out. They've been experimenting with youtube changes for years and they already know how to experiment out the particularities.
Of course they're best positioned to figure it out. The question is whether it's a good use of anyone's time to figure out such things, or whether we have a good society if it's one where people think that is a good use of their time. I am best positioned to pick my own nose but I don't think that means there needs to be a manual on how to do so.
if you genuinely think that "literally everything in the creative industry" is chasing trends within the well-defined boundaries of existing paradigms that giant corporations have created for you, you aren't a creative
It just seems to me like following a rich person around hoping some coins will fall out of their pocket. It's a parasitic ecosystem that encourages content to focus more and more on "what works" in the self-perpetuating context of that ecosystem, and less and less on making contact with any kind of external reality.