@jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net The early onset of nearly immediate (within months) after-effects of youtube's monetization are why I actively avoid youtube for anything and everything unless there is no other alternative and i can't go without (i.e. a 'how to replace part x on model z device' in a time-sensitive situation).
The selection was not nearly as expansive in 2007 as it is now, but the fact that early adopters were using it to produce and share quick videos on things that could be demonstrated in moments in video but would require paragraphs of descriptive text and a small multitude of still pictures if it were a messageboard/wiki post instead was an incredibly useful and frequently faster, in addition to superior, solution in many cases. The fact that you could see Andy Samberg making an ingenius joke involving both hip-hop history and american presidential history in song at the same time on the same site was just an added bonus to me personally, but it was a pretty cool one.
Then 'hours' became an ad revenue criteria.
Very quickly, everyone's content started ballooning and teasing like they'd hired the writers on an alien autopsy show.
Something that took 45 seconds to demonstrate (location of hard-to-find hidden item in video game, how to shuffle a deck of catds, cranning on uilleann pipes, etc) was now 5+ or even 10+ minutes of tangentially-related rambling before getting to the content that was the video's title because filler was being rewarded.
There are still concise content creators out there, but the entire paradigm shifted when that change became common knowledge and it manipulated even honest folks into a form of grift.
