I like watching in-depth documentaries on YouTube about many diverse topics: technology, philosophy, history, film, you name it. I’m actually more likely to watch a half an hour or an hour video that goes into details about a topic than short-form content that feels more like reading a headline. Mind that sometimes some creators manage to publish interesting stuff under the ten minutes mark, but those are the minority in my feed and, when they do so, they’re probably just updating on some news relevant to a topic (e.g., a channel like Low Level). The platform, however, is making it increasingly difficult to produce such long-form content, it promotes increasingly lower quality content meant for people to react to, and the whole thing feels worse and worse even from a functionality perspective. YouTube knows this, though, and they know they’re the only serious player in video hosting and streaming service. They don’t care. So, some weeks ago I started think about an internet after YouTube: What would that look like?

Right now using YouTube, honestly, feels like that era in which we still were stuck using Facebook despite we all knowing that it was getting worse and worse. We jumped onto Instagram, being owned by Meta too, and after time passed, Instagram slowly degraded to a Facebook-level of a bad experience. Everything became low quality content, and we got more ads and “recommended” posts than anything by people you actually followed. There’s this shared dreaded feeling that you keep using the platform because of those few accounts that interest you, while also wondering if there’s a way to get their content in a different way… When it comes to people you know in your life who are on “social media” (is YouTube social media, though?), the solution is kind of easy: you actually are in contact with them via other means. However, what about people you don’t know but you like what they publish on the internet? Well, if they don’t use an alternative platform, you may have to say goodbye to them. That is precisely the problem with stopping to use YouTube: we mostly use it to get updates from people whose content probably won’t be found anywhere else.

I did two thought experiments the other day. First, what would I do if I decided to stop using YouTube, but I wanted to keep following creators I find truly interesting. Can I do that?

You may access YouTube without an account, but it’s the worst experience ever, unless you like to be bombarded with even worse content than you were when logged in. I’m not even factoring in annoying anti-features like their broken age-detection system. So, “to stop using YouTube” would mean to actively avoid videos hosted on it or to use some sort of third-party client. I imagine using a third-part client is a nightmare just to be able to selective about what I wanted to watch, but, if you happen to be doing so, please tell me; I want to know. However, the system is rigged so you use YouTube as they want you to use it: on their website or app, logged in, presumably without an ad-blocker or paying for YouTube Premium, and falling for all the traps laid down by the recommendation algorithm even if you’re disciplined enough to only use the Subscriptions tab. That one still works as a first line of defense, but I wouldn’t be surprised they’ll make it unusable as soon as they find out a way to do so.

Now, the interesting thought experiment is rather the following one: What if Google decided to shut YouTube down?

First of all, I know they won’t, at least not without seeing some serious decline in user numbers that make the cost of running something like YouTube unfeasable. YouTube isn’t Google+. YouTube is critical for Google’s bottomline, like Gmail is. Remember: Google purchased YouTube back in 2006 and they shut down their video hosting and streaming service, Google Videos, in favor of their new shiny toy. But let’s imagine that Google decided to shut it down anyways.

From an archival and preservation perspective, it’d mean the irreparable loss of valuable information that you might not find elsewhere or not easily. I’m thinking of channels like Cathode Ray Dude’s, who was made himself a career on YouTube of researching quite obscure areas of the history of the PC. What about an amazing scholar like Dr. Justin Sledge and his channel Esoterica, who publishes publicly accessible university-level lectures about Western philosophy, esotericism, history of religion, with citations, dealing with primary sources, etc.? Don’t get me started on the Queen of Reverse Engineering LaurieWired, who I absolutely adore; we can’t afford losing her videos. I’m just mentioning some of my favorite creators but I’m sure you have your own: creators whose videos, no matter how new or how old, are valuable pieces that should be preserved. Maybe the information they provide can be retrieved in other ways, but…

I’ll put on my “former academic” hat here.

Knowledge is out there in libraries, yes. It’s in books, yes. It’s even on decades-old websites, yes. However, what good does all that knowledge do if you don’t even know where to start to make any sense of it. YouTube is an amazing tool for introducing people to the “lay of the land” in any topic that interests them. Listening to someone is a great way to be introduced to a new area of knowledge; that’s why academic lectures are basically about listening to someone who guides you into a new field. You don’t begin your journey as a linguist by reading Chomsky firsthand, you do by being taught the basics of the field by someone who is skilled enough to summarize those basics. That’s why YouTube has become an amazing educational tool for any possible subject in the world.

Imagine a world where we lost that. Of course most of YouTube we can do without. I’m sure of that. I remember an internet before YouTube and I wouldn’t go back to it either. Finding good educational contents was hard. Not impossible, though. It was 2006 when I learned my first Linux commands from a website that I have never been able to trace back since. It was all text (black text on a yellow background and it abused HTML frames). No video tutorial, but it would’ve been nice to have one. The internet was mostly text that you were mostly recommended by other users, with search engines being sort of limited as to what they were able to find (I guess that has changed… to the worse). Text is easier to tag, though. Video was almost impossible to search for before YouTube put some serious money on how to make video searchable beyond its text metadata.

I remember devouring the venerable SICP lectures not from YouTube, but directly from the MIT’s website, because someone on IRC pointed me to them back in 2007, maybe 2008. Now they’re on YouTube, just a keyword away. I remember, though, what a huge deal it was when the MIT announced their OpenCourseWare initiative of hosting video lectures on their site for everyone to access freely. YouTube, on the other hand, has made this possible beyond institutions with a budget of millions of dollars like the MIT, but for everyone who wants to record themselves at home and share what they know about a subject.

Of course YouTube’s mission isn’t educational. It wants everyone to upload whatever they want to, no matter the quality, no matter if it’s entertainment, educational, political commentary, or exercises in the worst forms of dadaism… YouTube wants to host every imaginable video file it can access. However, if it goes down, everything goes down with it at the same time: the bad, irrelevant content and the amazing video documentaries, retrospectives, and educational content. We can afford losing the former, but losing the latter feels terrible.

I am aware that we lose content on the internet every single day. Servers need to be kept running, accounts on platforms might be closed or abandoned by their creators anytime, or sometimes it is the platforms that decide to delete something because they don’t like it or due to some copyright claim. I myself have wiped code repositories and old web sites from existence many times. Sometimes it is the platforms themselves that shut down. YouTube feels different, though, precisely because of its tremendous technological monopoly.

There have been attempts like PeerTube to create federated platforms that allow for small servers across a network to leverage the resources that video hosting and streaming demand. It’s been ages since last time I interacted with a PeerTube instance, but I remember it was rough. Self-hosting video is only feasible for an average amateur sysadmin if they know that they won’t get that much traffic and their videos won’t eat up all their disk space. A hypothetical shutdown of YouTube would mean losing content, but also a door to “costless” video hosting and publishing. It would mean a kind of death of the internet as we know it today. Other media might arise and have arisen (e.g., live streaming), but would anyone dare to recreate YouTube if it failed? I guess not.

There is another hypothetical way YouTube might die. It’s scarier because I do think it’s more probable and, also, because I think it’d bring dignity back to creators at the cost of them not being to earn a living from their educational work. It’s creators’ burnout.

Just a couple of days ago I watched a video of a creator (I don’t follow her, but I have occasionally watched her content) who has quit YouTube because of mental health issues brought on by YouTube itself. It was a hard goodbye to swallow because she obviously enjoyed doing the videos she did, but she couldn’t handle the nasty comments, the capricious algorithm that kept her in the dark about projected revenue, and the overall sense that the decisions creators make seem to be increasingly irrelevant to the success of their channels anymore. She was full of grief; this wasn’t Tom Scott’s farewell, which was also driven by burnout, but in which he expressed satisfaction with his long journey on the platform (and he’s doing other stuff now in different formats). Maybe I didn’t follow this girl’s channel regularly, but from the comments it was clear that many people had been inspired by her and learned from her work. There was regret in her words. It was painful to watch even without a deep emotional connection to her.

YouTube is like an abusive employer. It demands you the impossible, while boycotting you at every single corner, and keeps you guessing what it wants from you. You can try ignore it altogether and upload videos without expecting to make it your full-time job, but as soon as you start growing an audience, the temptation might be a bit too strong to ignore anymore. I have dealt with the ego intoxication that Substack produces when people you don’t know start to subscribe to your newsletter and even interacting with you. You start fantasizing about turning on the paid support tiers and “become a professional writer.” If you don’t have a real business plan, you’re toast for sure. YouTube is probably even worse. Youtuber is a concept that has become ingrained into our social brain: it is a way of life, it is a way other people have reached that coveted heaven of having your passion being your job and never ever working in something you don’t like (or maybe hate) for someone else. You fantasize that you might be one of the chosen ones. A YouTuber… I know there are people out there who have been uploading and live streaming on YouTube for years and years, have grown a small audience that won’t grow much more for whatever reason, and have spiralled down into a content hell of decreasing quality that hasn’t annoyed their audiences to the point of them abandoning ship yet. YouTube promises that effort and high quality will transform your life… but hardly delivers… and it’s worse and worse as time goes by.

Maybe YouTube won’t ever shut down, but will become a ghost town. Amazing educational content might start being uploaded elsewhere and we’ll go back to a more fragmented internet… Maybe creators will band together to create small platforms (think Nebula)… Maybe some will decide to host videos on their own servers… Discoverability will certainly suffer. Maybe we will change our habits back to preferring text over video if this happen; I sometimes feel tired of video dominating the scene.

However, in conclusion, I do think that in the next couple of years the YouTube we have known will not be the place we will go to to watch great content with production value from people who know their craft. And that will be internet after YouTube… I wonder how it will look like… I wonder if we’ll like it…