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Sunday, January 6, 2013

YouTube Is Becoming The New MySpace


You Tube is becoming the New MySpace.

Remember MySpace? Remember when it was a place for friends.

Now it’s a place for trolls, attention whores and assorted losers. And bands. Lots and lots of bands. Bands no one listens to. Bands no one cares about.

Because they’re on MySpace.

Way back in 2008 I had a MySpace page. It was the primary way I used to promote my books. It was a place where I met a lot of cool people.  I found a lot of writer, model and actor friends there. People who used to come by and read my blogs and I’d go and read theirs. I loved all the content and I loved sharing ideas with like-minded people.

Now no one gives a shit about MySpace.

Why? After NewsCorp bought MySpace back in 2009, it became a nightmare to use. The MySpace 2.0 update that was forced on everyone made the site load like molasses. People couldn’t use the e-mail because it kept crashing. Pages wouldn’t load. The site kept crashing ALL THE TIME.

Worse, all good thought-provoking content was driven away by trolls and attention whores. Over the course of a year MySpace quickly went from being the destination for social media to a black hole of slow loading custom pages with 5 MB photos of kids and cats, 10 MB pictures with songs attached to them, 100 MB videos and spam accounts from trolls. Not to mention the dozens of bogus accounts from attention whores who wanted you to see their tits and asses or see them crawling around in ill-fitting lingerie.

MySpace went from a fun place to hang out and meet new people to a cesspool filled with junk content. It was like all the shit from every site ever designed by amateurs on Homestead and Angelfire over the past decade was dumped into one place.

Notice the similarities between Corporate run MySpace in 2009 and Google owned YouTube Today?

If you’re an internet veteran like I am you do.

Notice how YouTube has been through three useless upgrades that have made the site harder to use than before. The third recent update of You Tube’s interface PC Users in December 20l2 (If you have a Mac it hasn’t happened yet) has made the site a pain in the ass to use for new and casual visitors.

And Notice how the trolls and attention whores have taken over You Tube. Four years ago, You Tube was a place for thought provoking content and intellectual discussion of religion, politics and other social issues.

Now it’s a place filled with crap content similar to the horrible websites filled with slow-loading junk content that made Angelfire and Homestead unwelcome places.

Worse, it’s more and more a place for attention whores like booty shaking, coons, singing on the toilet hoodrats fighting or Black women singing about chicken.

Stuff I don’t need to wait to buffer. I can watch that kind of ignorance outside of my window for free.

Four years ago YouTube was a place where people could make statements about themselves and the lives that they led. In between the music videos, movies, and TV shows like Batman: Brave and the Bold, Transformers: Animated, The Avengers Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and Daria I learned about weight loss, science, computer repair, art, and a host of subjects.
Now I sadly watch as it devolves into a cesspool of junk content that says nothing about nothing.

If you shout people will hear you. But if you don’t have anything to say when you’re shouting, no one will listen to what you have to say.

All junk content does is shout at people without saying anything substantive to them. It’s nothing more than noise for noises’ sake.

And in a virtual world like the information superhighway It’s content that drives a websites’ traffic. Most people have no interest in watching dumbed down content produced by imbeciles. The easiest way to drive away web traffic from site like YouTube is to have it filled with puerile content that wastes peoples time. The kind of content that shouts at people and says nothing at all to anyone.

People go where they can find good content. And if the information in that content isn’t quality, they have no reason to come there. Their time is too precious to waste watching stupid content.

If YouTube continues on this road it’s on it’s destined to join MySpace, Angelfire, and Homestead on the social media scrap heap. No one wants to get on the information superhighway to take a trip to a flea market filled with tacky sundry items. They go down that road for specialized information that will help them move forward in their lives and improve the quality of their lives.

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