YouTube
YouTube is a video sharing platform and the place your child may be actively getting introduced to porn from. They are also known to intentionally make their website worse just so that people can have something to complain about. It also spies on your web history and everything you do.
REMOVE THE "?si=1248972456" IN THE VIDEO URL BEFORE SHARING IT.
YouTube was created in 2004 as a dating website before later being changed to a video sharing platform after its founders started using their brains. The oldest YouTube video is "Me at the zoo" by jawed, one of YouTube's founders. The platform was later bought out by Google for $1.65b in November 2006. YouTube's popularity would spike around this time, with some of the first YouTubers starting their channels around this time.
Early days of YouTube
Prank videos
SMOSH
Screamers
Elsagate
Find the main article on Elsagate here
Elsagate is a type of content posted on YouTube that is both marketed as kid friendly and made to look kid friendly while including NSFW themes.
YouTube Rewind / The removal of Dislikes
YouTube Rewind is a tradition YouTube kept from 2010 to 2019 where they would invite a bunch of YouTubers to perform trends that happened during the year. This tradition was originally seen with support from the YouTube audience, but that started changing around 2016 as YouTube Rewinds only started to feel more and more disconnected from the YouTube community. This all culminated in YouTube Rewind 2018, which ended up bombing so hard it became the most disliked video on all of YouTube. YouTube Rewind 2019 does not exist.
It is widely considered that the action to remove the amount of dislikes visible on a video was directly caused by YouTube having the most disliked video on their platform.
YouTube Shorts
Find the page on Short-Form content here
YouTube Shorts is YouTube's answer to Short-Form content, with it having become one of the most widely-used forms of social media of all time (~90 billion views per day). YouTube has since intentionally made the Long-Form content scene more difficult and annoying to use in an attempt to get YouTubers to move to Shorts.
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Clickbait
Clickbait is the act of altering a video thumbnail/title to make it more appealing via exaggerated truths and lies. Many YouTubers use Clickbait to get the attention of children, who are by far the primary audience for Clickbait. Another common practice of Clickbaiters is to saturate the thumbnails to make it more appealing for children, along with bolding text to make it easier to read, having the respective YouTuber's face on the thumbnail of the video, and more.
Another type of Clickbait involves having simple thumbnails with large text and an image/drawing of something representing the topic of the video. The trend of having large - usually colored - text on thumbnails was originally popularized by Game Theory who has been doing it for many years. Yet the domino that set everything in motion would be MorePegasus - a drama channel - when he covered the MrBeast drama of 2024. MorePegasus' style of clickbait would spread as more and more YouTubers began copying it.
Explained in ___ Minutes
Find a list of Explained in ___ Minutes videos here
The "Explained in ___ Minutes" video format is a format of video where different subjects are covered in a simplistic manner. This format is popular amongst many YouTubers for being easy to create and not being risky to post. The format was originally created by Redeemed Zoomer, and further popularized by The Paint Explainer. Videos like this are usually created with AI and may contain inaccuracies
Discord DM Thumbnails
TBA
Content Farms
A Content Farm is a type of YouTube channel that focuses on pumping out as many videos as possible - usually targeted towards kids - to make as much money as they can. These types of channels usually focus on trendy topics and video games popular with Gen Alpha.
There are different tiers of content farms:
Tier 0 - AI Slop
Tier 1 - Mainstream content farms
Tier 2 - Imitation channels
Tier 3 - Fake drama channels
YouTube horror content
Find the main article on YouTube horror content, ARGs and Analog Horror here.
Horror content on YouTube can vary vastly, going from well put horror series to clickbait 3AM videos.
The rise of Reaction Channels
A Reaction Channel is a YouTube channel which steals other people's content, react to it, and repost it on their channel. This type of content is one of the most popular types with cheap money-driven personalities given its easy premise and the rules of "fair use". TBD