Okay, but the difference here is pretty stark. YTMND pages were made from people's individual creativity with no monetary incentive. Nobody was profiting from them, they weren't being shown via some mysterious algorithm that creators spent all their time trying to appease. They weren't presented in a format that encouraged constant joyless consumption. They weren't advertisements or corporate messaging or coopted by fascists. There were no YTMND trad wives or manosphere influencers.
It was literally just people making silly, often irreverent pages to make people laugh. It wasn't something with the end goal of addicting people to scrolling their way to oblivion for countless hours as the world fell apart around them, and it didn't literally diminish their cognitive capabilities.
I'm not saying everything on TikTok or other short-form video platforms is bad, but they're fundamentally different platforms. It isn't a generational thing. Amazingly, I was alive for YTMND and am also alive for short form videos. It's not something any generation has an exclusive claim to.
I too find myself at times scrolling through YouTube shorts finding little of value. I too notice that I'm staring at an AI voice telling an engagement-bait story that probably didn't happen while watching unrelated satisfaction-bait arts and crafts videos with no purpose because that's what people have figured out will keep us staring long enough to get through their video.
I try to ask myself if I'm actually enjoying this and disengage the moment I realize I'm not, but I also close the damn thing just to realize I have it back open again a couple hours later.
That's the difference. That's why it's sinister. It's why social media in general is sinister, even Lemmy. Because even after you close the window half the time you just open it right back up again. That's the loop.
I don't remember that being the case back in the days of YTMND and Newgrounds and all those old sites. I'd look at some stuff and then move on and look at some other stuff. Not close the window and then go right back to looking. And nobody was fighting to keep my eyes locked into their shit as long as possible. If anything, there was a ton of weird countercultural stuff that didn't care at all if I looked at it, or even actively worked to make itself unpalatable.
Not as engagement bait, but as anti-art. As crazy surrealist or dadaist nonsense. As experiment and unfettered expression.
These two things are not the same.
