When I first went on YouTube, it was a revelation. I think it was my senior year of university, and YouTube had probably just launched that month. I was directed to it to watch the latest Naruto episodes (whatever! this is like season 1 alright!), but I stuck around to peruse the ridiculous amount of content that was on it even then. You see, I am of the generation where if we wanted to watch a funny video of “fat people getting hurt”, we’d have to go over to some kind of E/N site, actually download the video, and load it into windows media player. Watching the video stream nearly-flawlessly was at that time incredible, and im still dazed by all the rich content the YouTube model spawned.
But more and more, I hear people complain that YouTube sucks now, and I can see where they are coming from. When I try and find the latest episode of Kenny VS Spenny, it’s already DMCA’d. But there will always be sites like megavideo that don’t have the kind of money worth suing over to host pirated content, and with services like Hulu springing up to host copyrighted content properly, the idea of trying to catch something on TV is almost a thing of the past.
So what’s so great about YouTube? At YouTube, all that matters is content. Sure, there are little things here and there that let you promote your videos. You can comment on others’ uploads, create video responses, and now even pay to have your video show up a little higher in the ranking, albeit marked by a light gray div enclosure. But really, there isn’t the drama-llama userbase on YouTube which bogs down other social sites. Anyone can upload and by-far the biggest traffic generator is search. Thankfully, there are no forums, and therefore no moderators or power-users or elite circles or any of that nonsense.
Nowadays I watch very little television, but spend alot of time watching video nonetheless. It marvels me that things like The Third & The Seventh or Les Dangereux are immediately available, for free, around the globe, to anybody. I remember buying demo reels of MIT computer graphics courses on VHS. We’ve really come a long way as an artistic and creative community because of sites like YouTube that allow us to share both instantly and at no cost.
So next time you get bummed that the newest Naruto or Gossip Girl clips are nowhere to be found on YouTube, why don’t you sit down and watch a google tech talk. Or a video on how to plant a garden. Or a documentary. Or an amazing CG work. Or even, fat people getting hurt.
