What People Want to See

I've seen virtually every alternative to Youtube in my lifetime.

Google Video, Vimeo, Metacafe, Dailymotion, Vidme, Streetfire, Revver, and now its latest iterations, Rumble and Bitchute, and it's the same story every single time.

Good intentions or not, the website gets flooded by people suspended on mainstream platforms, dooming the website to be viewed as little more than a toxicity haven.

One of my family members... wow, I only realize as I type this, the reason why I know about half these sites. While Youtube looked back fondly upon as the wild-west with no monetary incentive, it had plenty of literal restrictions than business or cultural ones which made these other sites a more viable alternative if you say...

Wanted to watch a BBC Show about cars that you definitely don't have any access to living on the West Coast of BC, Canada.

However, that was our mutual interest started and ended.

I clicked on the sites for Top Gear, they stayed for Time Travel conspiracies, and neither of us have deviated since.

The main difference now is that I've now been behind the curtain on what used to be a leisure activity for me. I'm embarrassingly familiar with writing, editing, narrating, conceiving titles, spamming thumbnails, etc; now, whenever I'm visiting family and walk into a computer room of a sixty year old smoker talking over their Grandson's Laptop Webcam about a secret cancer cure you can buy from Walmart , I also know all the shit that sixty year old is doing to hook people.

One day, when this family member sent me a BitChute video "from a place of love and respect" and I responded breaking down its contradictions in just the opening minute, they said "nobody makes money off BitChute."

They didn't respond to my Email with this image...

There's two videos from FD Signifier & Jack Saint that I've found myself rewatching a lot, and while there's the usual qualities I look for within them, good pacing, good quotes, good commentary, etc...

There's lots of videos that fit that description.

Why do these ones get put in the loop so much more often? More than that, specific chapters of them get looped? 10 minute chunks of 60+ minutes about "media literacy."

And I realize now this personal story of mine is probably why I'm rewatching them.

I get a sense of catharsis.

Despite the spark being completely different, for me, a malleable family member's taste in online content, and for these Youtubers, the release of Joker 2, the end result is the same.

We realize that genuinely, people can and often will just see what they want to see... and while that can be kinda terrifying at times, I feel a catharsis, a relived experience in other people no longer fooling themselves into believing that we just need to point it out.

I've done that for 20+ years with this family-member.

It didn't help them.

You know what did?

Giving them a Gaming PC.