>>213594043
>2016-2019
Video essay production line. Very suddenly in 2016, I felt a shift away from video games and toward meta commentary videos, analytical stuff, reaction videos, whether about video games, TV shows, movies, or other YouTube videos. That last one dealt heavily in "YouTube drama" which was part of this era. It was novel for a time, but quickly became even worse than what came before in my eyes. Definitely the most soulless era and I'm glad it's largely over.
>2020-2022
TikTok era. Another shift I've noticed, around the start of the pandemic and simultaneous popularity spike of TikTok, YouTube started prioritizing videos under 60 seconds. In a weird way, this harkens back to the earliest era of the site, where people just pick up a camera (in this case phone) and film anything. Of course, the problem is that now zoomers dominate the site and so the material sucks. It's somehow slightly better than the last period though.
>2023-2024
The "everything at once" era. The on-demand era. The critical mass, saturation point era. This is maybe the hardest of all to define, but we've clearly shifted once again from the TikTok era, where short videos were specifically prioritized. Now, not only does every kind of video with every kind of subject matter exist, there's a whole niche or network for it with its own meta. Sub-60-second videos still do very well, but so do videos that are eight hours long. This kind of started in the TikTok era, but we also seem to have stripped away all performativity, à la the overbearing "YouTuber" personality of 2009-2015 and the air of thinking you're part of something very important, part and parcel of the "Meta" era. Now, everyone desperately tries to come off as unscripted, casual, authentic, and "just like you," while actually being more calculated than ever. It's hard to say if this is better or worse than other eras, for the same reason it's hard to sum up its actual contents. MrBeast is the quintessence of this era.
