The weird side of YouTube

I’m about to show my age again in this article. In the last article I wrote, I talked about some of the cool stuff that you can find on YouTube. Now, I’m going to chat about things that make me scratch my head and wonder how and why.

Let’s start with the unusual amount of people who live in their vehicles and that’s basically how they make a living. Seriously folks, you can find so many of these types of videos. These are folks who travel around, seeing the sights, maybe finding spots no one else goes to, and they have no home. They live in their vans or cars and post everything that happens as they go about their lives. Now most of them don’t make tons of money off YouTube for this, but they get sponsorships from companies to promote products related either to the vehicle or to the stuff they need to make life more comfortable in a vehicle. These aren’t people who lost their jobs and homes, these are folks who choose to live this way. Not going to lie, there are times when I wish that I had to cajónes to do something like this, but I’m too old to sleep in my SUV.

Then, there are the gamers. Now, I have a few favorites I like to watch because they are great at playing games and they have great personalities. But seriously? There are gamers on there that make a better living than some CEOs. I’m not kidding. Ever heard of Markiplier? He had enough clout and money to make his own feature film, and it was a hit.

I remember when game consoles like Atari came out and parents were freaking out because they were afraid their kids would do nothing but play games and become stupid. Now, there are so many gamer channels where all they do is sit and play video games for hours and make more money than if they had a job. I don’t begrudge them their success; they found a niche that works and makes them money. But it bothers me that someone playing a video game makes more money a year than a lot of people who work 40 hour work weeks.

You can find videos of people who are building their own houses or buying a house and renovating it. Not just people in America, but all over the world. Some of these are quite well done and the people are engaging, and in some of them, they have no idea what they are doing and you can learn with them about the trials and tribulations of building a house. I’m not sure what the fascination is with channels like this. Maybe people like to watch others struggle to get things right. Maybe it’s watching people overcome their limitations to do something as hard as building or renovating a house. Maybe it’s the reason I watch them; the people are the kind of people I can relate to. I don’t know how to build or renovate a house, so I can relate to their struggles.

The strangest channels on YouTube are people who just sit around basically doing nothing but talking to their subscribers in live streams. I just don’t understand why people are such…. voyeurs.  Is your life so, for lack of a better word, boring, that sitting and watching someone act like an idiot is fun?

Reaction Channels are also a huge “business” on YouTube. Want to watch a Gen Z person watch music videos of bands from the 60s, 70s and 80s and learn how great the music was back then? Want to watch someone check out a movie for the first time? It’s wild. I can see the allure. I’ve relived the first time I’ve heard a song through a 20-year-old hearing Pink Floyd for the first time. It’s fun to see the looks on their faces when they realize what they’ve been missing.

The last type of channel I want to discuss are sports channels. It’s amazing to me how many people think they know everything about sports. Now, I’m just guessing here, but Joe Blow sitting in his basement tearing apart coaches and players because they lost a game, and how they did this or that wrong, have no real insight into the sports they rail about other than being a fan. It amazes me sometimes just how ardently they lambast the people who have spent their lives either playing the game or coaching the game and the hosts a lot of the times aren’t even athletes themselves.

In the “old days,” we would get together with friends and rant about our teams. Now, we can just go online, make a video, and someone somewhere will watch it and agree with us whether we’re right or wrong.

YouTube is strange. It’s basically all I watch these days because you can literally find anything that interests you on there. There are great channels, there are so-so channels, and there are channels that are a waste of hard drive space. But I think that’s what has made YouTube so big. You can watch whatever tickles your fancy. You can spend your free time creating videos, upload them, and make a decent living at it. But you better have a thick skin, because people will most certainly let you know how dumb you are, or ugly, or misinformed, or your voice sucks, or anything else they might feel about you.

It’s a strange world we live in these days. Now GET OFF MY LAWN!

Tim Marlow lives in Storm Lake.