Here's a complaint about the printing press enabling the same dynamics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism#/media/File:...

Things can always get worse.

The complaints about the printing press were _all of them_ valid.

We can look back at the age of the News Publication and see that the concerns of the few were not taken seriously. The lack of concern for those issues, is the same lack of concern over the issues of Social Media.

Those alarmists were _overwhelmingly_ correct in their concerns over mass produced print media.

Those same concerns should be placed with heavier weight on Social Media outlets.

Printing press spam was local, cost money to distribute, and not that many people were literate enough to bother. None of those are true of social media. $8/mo is nothing for a spammer charging $50 a pop for his AI mastery e-course.

It's true but I'm not sure youtube creators ever really claimed to be "authentic", a lot of them are acting as presenters and always have been. Twitter was always more towards "this is the real me"?

I miss the old Youtube when it was so hard to get money from ads that inauthentic channels were actually rare.

Most people just wanted to share stuff likes video games or memes, some dreamed of fame and money of course, but they had no idea how to get there, they filmed with whatever camera they already had without Youtube, they didn't take a loan to invest in a perfect sound studio setup.

Of course, I'm not taking unpaid labor for granted, I really wish they'd get the money they want and deserve from ads, but stayed simple. But because of competition, that's impossible. Now they all look the same, because they got advice directly from the Youtube company on putting red arrows and stupid faces on thumbnails. And jumpcuts.

Good thing there's still 10 year old minecrafters who don't give a damn about all this or can't buy decent equipment, if I can still find their channels through the impenetrable algorithms.