All Your Favorite Social Media Channels Are Going To Hell

This year, and I mean This Year, a lot of social media companies, unhappy with merely not capsizing and deflating and disappearing, are going through the unprecendented step of making themselves nuisances. From disenfranchising userbases to creating nonsense features that do nothing, to removing the publically-visible metrics that made their platforms interesting (before algorithms built digital cages so impenetrable that you need an anonymous browser to get anything useful out of them), to making themselves User Only Content, and more—the lions of yesteryear are shittier than ever, and less likely than ever to be replaced with better platforms. Let's face it: all your faved social media channels are going to hell.

Come on, YouTube.

You used to be a place where I could sensibly browse for videos. Now you offer me a few topics and "Recommended for You" shit. I loved when there were 15 pages of 'most viewed today' videos, and you didn't creep my video history to tell me what to watch. Every one-off video I watch when I'm logged in now means I get a bunch more recommended and have to go all over the place in search of something original.

Oh, for Me?

"Most viewed" is too archaic, apparently. I can only watch what you want. Sure, there used to be all kinds of segregated sections of videos, and lots of things were hard to find, and there was pretty much always a bunch of bullshit. You always hyped the worst things based on the metric of how popular they were. I didn't care. I knew there was always an unbiased list of worldwide views. People gamed that system all the time but it generally brought me joy and decent videos. There used to be a front page where unsorted videos could be browsed according to whether they were recently posted, most views, most liked, most subscriptions. Y'all remember that? That was awesome. There was a 50/50 chance, every day, of finding something new and either interesting or funny, or just completely strange – no searching, just actual, lazy, unguided browsing.

You still got the search bar. If you got rid of it you'd be Web 3.0, of course: the era in which all the internet, like a modern game, plays itself. You redesigned a bunch of times. I never saw the reason for it, but I'm not a capitalist so my opinion doesn't matter for shit. I realize people need money to make things 'better' and the internet is hugely profitable. But your reconstruction wasn't for the better. If I can't see ~100 of the day's most viewed videos then what's the point? You want me to play the game your way, but there's not that many channels worth subscribing to, no matter how many of them can waste my time more or less enjoyably.

It's not about me anymore, it's about You. I understand why I can't find any television show ever made anymore. That was never going to last. I just want to actually browse. I mean I want to see a large variety of things in one place arranged logically, not according to metaterms or what's trending or what you think I should watch. I used to be able to do this, to find new, unlisted, unhyped things every day, but now I feel blind. I get 'trending' instead of 'most viewed' and it's just plain frustrating that there's no way to arrange things logically anymore.

You're like a giant focus group now, YouTube. Except they're all yes-men and cronies, and they're crowding me into a small room, and there's no window, so all I smell is their terrible coffee breath, and all I hear is their terrible opinions about what's good, and it's dark, and I don't want to have Minecraft videos recommended to me. 2010 is over, YouTube.

Maybe I'm a bad internet browser. Maybe I get frustrated about nothing, and I just don't know how to navigate your many avenues properly, and you still offer a 'most views' section, and I'm just crazy for not getting to it. I hope that's the case, because then I'd have a reason to have a bit of faith in you, and it would have been me who was blind. Not you blinding me. I don't think I'm crazy. I think you changed for the lamest, like you've always been doing, and if this is the future of the internet then good luck with it. We both know I'm not the center of the universe, and playing some terrible algorithmic joke to make it seem so is unimpressive and creepy. I want options, and less of this Mickey Mouse horse shit.

I know that much of the internet wants to know every last thing about what I do so they can further reduce my purview and essentially control what I see, do, and buy. Nationalism online is already an old story.  I don't want or need that kind of reduced outlook, and their methods are increasingly obvious. The worst part is that I couldn't even put a date on YouTube's last upgrade, but essentially it was the day the videos died. At least there's still a search bar.

Squatters' Revolution

Well America is looking as dirty as the last 30 years predicted. Sometimes I get the sense that there are significant instabilities in North America in general, and that the oligarchy can no longer mask itself and therefore has adopted the obscurantist angle. "Obscurantist?" you ask, mouth agape stupidly. Yes, stupidy, obscurantist as in not revealing anything to anyone AKA dealing with the world sensibly - information-as-necessary style living. Which is a pretty great hypocrisy in a system where your bank is entitled to know your state of employment in addition to the wealth of other personal information they are entitled to. Yes the ability to go to your bank and cash a cheque and go home without them having explicit statements from you concerning your status is probably eroded.

Now it seems a small thing, and it is. Frankly I don't really care so much as I find it odd the bank cannot just simply assume a thing like that. So you know nothing about the people who ultimately shape your reality (unless you think actors, celebrities, and personalities do this) and the global reality, but you share your information on a 'no-need-to-know-basis' because the information of your life is so useless to anything but a marketer or criminal that it is a balm to your existential angst that at the very least you can have a cyber-billboard. This could be protested by refusing outright to identify yourself on the internet, boycotting Facebook, Google+, etc... but of course your networking opportunities would suddenly revert to mid-90's standards. In other words we could go back to making personal statements in person, but then we can't hope 1000 strangers will praise us. We could hope for maybe 10 intimates to admit our ideas have some merit.

Not that protest will mean anything since freedom is still exactly what it was at the dawn of humanity: a dream that can be indulged in only by the most powerful individuals or through the most powerful delusions. Freedom is a pretty goddamned stupid goal, yet it is a noble one Oh, but ironically the idea of freedom has generated the idea of slavery. Currently there is also a pervasive mode of thought which infers that freedom can be bought, assuming freedom is laziness, recreation, or inaction and time is the currency which buys it. Microfreedom does exist - yes in day to day experiences you have a sense that anything could be done; in the macro scale there is no significant freedom at all. You must acquire and spend wealth, dress well, pretend to be contented with the system, and enter automobile culture or else live as an abnormal, stunted, or subnormal individual.