Paper jam: YouTube and the content copying industry

Original content on YouTube is hard to find.

The algorithm gets in the way

The other day I stumbled upon a video recording of a podcast (that, in itself, would be worth a post) where Jordan Peterson was discussing various topics with Andrew Huberman. Smart people, great talk.

Jordan Peterson is a kind man of exceptional intelligence. For the purpose of this blog post, you don’t have to take my word for it, you don’t even have to look into it. But he is. Easily one of the five smartest people I’ve learned from. But again, believe what you want.

So here’s what happened. The video was on YouTube, and there’s this feature on YouTube where in the last few seconds of a video, there’s a game of skill where you have to click Cancel before the Algorithm picks a terrible video to keep you glued to your sofa (or Starbucks queue, or toilet, or whatever). In that case, it was a video called “How to succeed in life by Jordan Peterson” or something similar that started. Except it wasn’t one of his videos; it was some half-baked sequence of stock photos and videos with a Jordan Peterson speech in background (with a little bit of echo for dramatic purposes), posted on some lousy channel. I skipped, and the next video was more of the same, from another lousy channel. And so on.

That’s nothing new. Try to watch a Grant Cardone speech; you get all fired up, ready to take your business to the next level, and then the next video auto-starts and it’s some bottom feeder channel with a bunch of Grant Cardone clips glued together badly. Pick any thought leader or Ted Talk person, regardless of the field – Brene Brown, Marie Kondo, Bill Gates, Seth Godin, name it – and it’s the same thing. Instead of promoting actual content from actual people, the Algorithm throws copycats and remixers at you like a night-time AM radio DJ going through a bout of diarrhea.

The wasteland is spreading

That’s why I don’t spend a lot of time on YouTube. It’s really hard to find real stuff, most of it is losers stealing content from relevant people and “remixing” it without providing any additional value. It’s really sad because I’ve had life changing moments watching real videos from the likes of Jordan Peterson and Grant Cardone on that platform, and the nameless losers filling it up with garbage are making impossible for me to find the next thought leader I could learn from.

I don’t know if it’s a case of tragedy of the commons but it’s a tragedy indeed.