Good morning John. This week MatPat from the game theorists made a video that is both longer and better than this one in which he talks some about the negative ways that YouTube and youtubers have been portrayed in the media and I want to talk about this.

Let's start here. I have a complex understanding of the content and the culture and platform of YouTube. The parts where I spend my time are amazing because there are marble races and knives being made of bismuth crystals and social commentary about the darkness and mouthfeel and careful explanations of ingenious technology.

But when there are big stories about YouTube and what we can consider like the mainstream press it's Logan Paul or ads being shown on terrorist recruitment videos or things that are worse than those things. And when that happens it's bad for YouTube creators because advertisers are like "oooh I don't know about this" and they cut their spending or remove it completely and then YouTube overreacts and starts to strengthen its demonetization algorithms and so if you make anything that is even a little bit controversial you might have your video not make money at all.

And the finger of blame have been pointed in many different directions in this: is it YouTube for overreacting or is it ad buyers who are maybe freaking out but also maybe using this as a tactic to force YouTube to do things that they want YouTube to do or is it the journalists who never cover this in a positive way but are always writing this inflammatory stuff.

MatPat's video points the finger in all of these directions but it is true that no one wants to write like positive stories about youtubers. But I have also noticed that the national news also never writes positive stories about Montana.

The place where I live- people don't know very much about it. They don't have a complex understanding of this place and so when we make the national news it's either because some state senator wanted to legalize drunk driving or because somebody somewhere wanted to sell us to Canada.

People who read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, they don't have a complex understanding of YouTube the way that they don't have a complex understanding of Montana. It's just not part of their culture and the same goes for most ad buyers. Like, they tend to be the ones who are reading The Wall Street Journal, not watching MatPat videos though that might be changing.

In a former career of mine, I wrote news stories for a living and I never thought about whether the story was positive or negative. I thought about whether it was interesting. If your audience doesn't know very much about a thing, they're not interested in nuance takes or thoughts about how it's being successful and growing. They're interested in when it's threatening or scary or dangerous, and that goes double for when the thing that they don't understand very well is also really big and important and they know that, but they also don't understand it. And yes, it's also likely that some journalists don't think that YouTubers should have the amount of power that they have and so they don't mind taking us down some notches.

But, if you're looking for communities that are big and important but people don't understand them very well so they're usually covered in negative and not nuanced ways in the mainstream media, I've got bigger concerns than youtubers, who are by and large actually a very powerful force in culture even if they don't wanna recognize it and instead sort of hide from that as they engage in these sort of victimhood narratives.

So John, here comes the True True Train. What this really comes down to is publications are creating content for a disproportionately powerful audience that is unfamiliar and made uneasy by a massive new cultural force that no one truly understands.

Look, I love YouTube. I love it. But it also makes me uneasy too. The fact that it is a platform without gatekeepers is what makes it so interesting but that also creates real problems.

It is scary to have someone have a huge amount of power over young people with no oversight. It is bad to be monetizing terrorist for recruitment videos or having bad actors stick disturbing violent content in the middle of a kids show. Yeaa, this community has done lots  of great things, but also as a culture, I don't think we've figured out quite what to make of it and that might be why advertisers are hesitant to interact with it and also why I want journalists to be covering it.

Ultimately, in MatPat's very good video, it feels a little bit like we don't know where to place the blame and maybe that is because there isn't a super good place and maybe that's because the idea of a mainstream media in a world where PewDiePie is getting more views than any cable news show that exists is wild. There either is not a mainstream media anymore or YouTube is part of it.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.