YouTube Nostalgia
For reasons unknown, the community site of bestofyoutube.com popped into my head this morning. 20 years ago, this was my go-to site for discovering interesting, usually funny or educational, video on YouTube before The Algorithm™. It is a wholesome site and still rocks the simplest of style and functionality.
I think back to a few of the old school YouTube hits: the Evolution of Dance, OK Go's treadmill music video, Daft Hands, Dude transports 20 bricks on his head. The content is timelessly interesting despite the poor video quality and low-to-no production work. They mark an era where videos shared online where not for ad revenue, "please like and subscribe"-ing, or as part of a vocational title such as "YouTuber" or "Content Creator". It was a simpler time, and with simpler times comes a particular nostalgia.
Looking back at these YouTube classic videos today, I'm not sure I'd consider them absolutely share-worthy. Not that they aren't interesting, but maybe my share threshold must have adjusted with time. The abundance of content has had an inverse effect on my willingness to share something (more content, less likely to share). Or, perhaps the type of content I find worth sharing not longer fits with the YouTube classic genre. Regardless, my personal fondness of "the classics" might be largely dependent on the nostalgia factor.
It's temping to think of when these videos where published, the early days of YouTube, as a golden time where ad sponsorship and click-bait titles didn't flood the feed. Perhaps 10 years from now, I'll look back at the videos discovered today with a similar nostalgia. Before all the videos were AI generated (specifically for you) and with whatever new method of convenient checkout for promoted thing will exist by then (blink to buy?).