YouTube's Overabundance Problem

"Better deaf than deafened. - It is no longer enough to acquire fame and be spoken of. The market has grown to large; nothing less than screaming will do. As a consequence, even good voices scream till they are hoarse, and the best goods are offered by cracked voices. This is surely an evil age for a thinker." - Friedrich Nietzsche (Gay Science pg.277/415). Even though Nietzsche said this in the 1890's it has never been more true than it is today. Promises of great fortune & few barriers to entry have lead to an overabundance of content on the internet. We have reached a point at which it is no longer possible for consumers to keep up with the sheer amount of content being produced & not even peer input spread on a global scale is enough. Thus if consumers are incapable of weeding out the good from the bad than in order to make sites like YouTube enjoyable there needs to an algorithm. An algorithm is a "a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem or accomplishing some end"-Merriam Webster, Content not only has to interesting it also has to be advertiser friendly however.  This is why YouTubers who swear will get less views, & copyrighted content is pursued so aggressively. With a source of content that is often less than family friendly, Google has pushed algorithm after algorithm to try to turn itself into cable television, with cookie cutter content & ads galore. Preciously this abundance of content & a focus on quantity rather than quality brought about by the nondiscriminatory nature of ad's are why no YouTube video has ever been considered a "masterpiece". Trying to make a lengthy expensive video that delves seriously into a topic or present some new found moral in a video, is prohibited by the lack of economic incentive when compared with just pumping out algorithm friendly videos. Why waste a year making a complex artful video when you can just make a 10 minute video in a day with big red arrow's & circles in the title. When your only guaranteed source of revenue is an ad at the beginning of a video why make something longer than it needs to be?  We as viewers have accepted mediocrity & watch anything that catches are eye rather than seriously examining are choices because each decision is so trivial we don't want to put thought into it. There's also the issue of hindering learning & yes I said hindering. With any simple topic that you could learn in less than the magical 10 minutes YouTube so adores, the creator will just spread the video out with a few minutes of useless garbage, while begging for subscribers. Not to mention the fact that videos are less mentally engaging than text, & harder to take notes from. Of course this is not to say that educational videos are all rubbish, visual learners may benefit more than most & a clever host can make an otherwise boring topic engaging, but without proper barriers for credibility or quality specially in regards to education, good videos are in the minority & take effort to find. Giving all of the publishing power in the world to big brother like this also means they have the power to censor information & limit the spread of ideas. They've already "cracked down on the videos of some prominent far-right actors and conspiracy theorists"-NYC. While that may seem trivial it shows that YouTube is ready & willing to exercise it power to incur social change, without having to worry about the scrutiny brought out by open ended discussion. This kind of attack on someone else's beliefs is like poison gas, it sounds like a good idea until the wind shifts directions. And the wind may very well shift directions.