20 years of YouTube: How have algorithmic videos changed the world?

[Intro updated on 12/11]

Can we even imagine what the world would be like without YouTube and its many imitators/innovators? YouTube was founded in 2005 and purchased by Google a year later. In 2024 it had around 2.5 billion monthly users, including 90% of U.S. teens. Basically, anybody and everybody for at least a decade has been watching videos of any length, on any subject, on demand and on all our devices.

All for free, as is the price to create and post the videos. Some videos we look up unprompted by YouTube ("2024 Honda Civic tutorial"). But many or even most are fed to us by algorithms. Of course, I am using "YouTube" as shorthand for all of the major free video hosting sites, like Tik Tok, Flickr, Vimeo, and others (but not for paid streaming services, like Netflix).

These sites are so embedded in our daily lives that asking how they have changed the world is kind of like asking how cable TV changed the world. Everything has been affected. But hopefully we can break it down a bit. How have free, algorithmic videos changed -

• The ease of everyday life, from work to parenting to household chores?
• Education and childhood socialization?
• Our propensity and ability to read and write?
• Politics?
• News consumption and production?
• Mental health?
• Culture, broadly, including globalizing culture?
• Many more.

Obviously, this list emphasizes downsides. The YouTube era has brought many benefits, like entertainment, how-to do almost anything advice, as an assistant in workplaces and schools, etc.

And now AI is moving us beyond reliance even on free videos platforms. As a link below discusses, people are starting to ask their AI first for information, analysis, and advice and then go to YouTube or a search engine only if they need to. There are also various forms of enhanced/augmented reality to consider, but maybe enough is enough for one topic.

I am looking forward to researching this issue and to listening more and talking less on this one! I don't use YouTube etc., very much. Hopefully many of you will want to share your experiences of living in a video world, and your views on "YouTube's" major goods, bads, and uglies.

Optional Backgrounders –

• Wiki entry: Social impact of YouTube.
• What’s in all those YouTube videos?
  - Google won’t say, but research shows some surprises.
  - Some YouTube videos that changed how we see ourselves.
• Who/how we use YouTube: 5 Facts. Note that 35% of Americans regularly get news from YouTube, 20% from Tik Tok.
• ChatGPT and other AI are replacing search engines and YouTube as the first place people go to for information and analysis.