On the subject of Youtube grindset culture - I used to think people were being too hard on Josh Weissman, because he knew his stuff and would lay out a recipe in a way that was relatively easy to follow. (as long has he didn't use any special equipment which was a fair complaint earlier)
But lately you can absolutely tell he's chasing "the algorithm" because he's now completely dependent on getting views for his income.
Just a few short years ago this was just some guy, in his kitchen with a camera he set up in his cabinet, explaining to me how to keep a sourdough starter going. His korean fried chicken and char siu pork recipes are in my recipe binder. But the videos don't feel authentic anymore. This is no longer a guy excited about what he's showing you. This is a guy trying to game the system and I think it has made his videos worse.
Edit: I think my point is getting lost because I'm hearing about Josh Weissman a lot specifically but he's just the latest in a long line of people. The problem is YouTube and creator culture catering to the lowest common denominator.
i gave up on his ass when he got that new editor and his videos went all like CWISPY rewind, slow down, base boost CWISSSPYYY
You can ordinarily see the exact moment when someone realizes what they're going to have to do in order to make their channel really spin rent money. You can spot the video where the light goes out of their eyes, where they put their face to the table and took a long hit of nothing more substantial than glitter. It sucks, and it sucks mostly because these are the people that're propping up a platform that doesn't give a single, solitary fuck about them. They are lining up to be wrung dry, and they know it.
It is a blessed handful that remain true to what they've wanted to do from the outset, and an even luckier few that can actually make a living from it. Max Miller of Tasting History is basically a hero and deserves all the success he can wrangle from the bastard machine that is YouTube, for example. Some you can see when they realize where the money is (desperate) and sometimes, even worse, there are those that see where the money is (evil) and how hard they pivot. You might be able to think of a couple off the top of your head.
Anyway, every day I'm glad of the fact I never tried to pivot How I Paint Things into anything more serious than 'I will here show you some tricks I know and stuff that works for me,' because having to make a face for my thumbnails like I'm trying to pass a razorwire pinata would make me walk straight into traffic.
This is what people mean when they say capitalism is an enemy of art. Not that making money destroys artistic merit or that capitalism has a vested interest against art. But there is one answer to "what project is the most profitable" that every one of the most monetarily successful people in your field are going to spend their entire career repeating until the algorithms designed to identify profitability spit out a new answer.
The creative process is, well, a process. It's a step on a ladder. A work you put out relies on all of the steps before it. And hopefully, it will be used for the next artist to take another step further. But profitability is a goal; which is to say it's an end point. If somebody thinks (or is told) they've reached the goal, they'll stop. I'd call it an act of coercion: shape the public forum to the point where marketing is infinitely more lucrative than journalism and "Pop Content" is infinitely more lucrative than art. These youtubers got famous by the merit of their work. Youtube's goal is to turn that fame and goodwill into revenue as effortlessly as possible.
