Top 10 Worst Things About YouTube

1. Advertisements

   

   When creators can't swear in the first 15 seconds of a video but advertisers can literally advertise thirst traps, scams, and political propaganda, it is just disturbing. For scale, I've literally gotten an anime ad that had a cat girl tied up and chained to a corner of a wall with a hand holding a feather. YouTube also allows 15-second unskippable ads to appear in double ads and allows some ads to not have the stop seeing this ad button. This is especially annoying when the ad in question is both constantly shoved down your throat and violating the ToS.

   Advertisers are pretty much several social classes higher up in the YouTube hierarchy than moderators at this point.

2. The COPPA Update

   

   I hate YouTube Kids because it is childish. However, you must be 13 or older to have a channel. Therefore, you will get terminated if you create a channel while too young.

   Literally any movie clip from a PG-rated movie or show gets affected by this as well. The fact that YouTube Kids is anything but kid-friendly, and YouTube is actively trying to make the main site family-friendly, is both ironic and disturbing.

   Guys, YouTube Kids exists. So, why do they need to censor when we have age verification?

3. Copyright Strikes

   

   Just about anyone can claim any video or strike any channel they want. One time, one of TheFatRat's videos got falsely claimed by some random individual. For some time, the claimer got all the revenue before YouTube miraculously took off the claim, but the claimer had already gotten the money. The fact that the claim was even accepted is just sad.

   Recently, Nikocado Avocado has been going around copyright striking many channels for fair use content (presumably) revolving around him. One of the victims, who was a meme creator, got straight-up terminated as well. It's honestly scary that you can have your entire YouTube career destroyed in an instant by anyone with the nerve to abuse the copyright system. I don't know how YouTube is getting away with false copyright neglect, since I doubt it's legal to let people abuse copyright freely and gain from it.

4. Removal of the Dislike Count

   

   Hey, at least nobody gets bullied by dislikes anymore, eh? (sarcasm)

   There's a reason we have dislikes. They can be used to judge whether a video is worth watching or not, so removing them makes it impossible to gauge a video's quality at a glance. Even Jawed Karim, one of the original creators of YouTube, opposed this decision. This is why I hate censorship. Even if you say something hateful, at least you have the freedom of speech protecting you. But now, in 2021, apparently only speech that "benefits" (insert bad group here, like SJWs) is allowed, and it's terrifying as heck.

   They claim it's to help small creators, but we know it's to protect corporations. The fact that YouTube is making this a universal change that can't be toggled on or off is infuriating. If it were toggleable, we'd at least know which videos are suspicious by seeing if the dislike counter is hidden or not. Now, you have to either rely on the comments (which can easily be controlled by the uploader) or watch the video and decide for yourself if it's fake or not.

   The only people who actually like this change are scammers, fake tutorial makers, misinformation spreaders, corporations, the people at YouTube themselves, and Susan Wojcicki stans (assuming they even exist in the first place).

5. Copyright

   

6. Clickbait

   

   Don't forget the clickbait video titles! That's just a waste of time. You see a certain title of a video, you click on it, and the whole video is not related to the title.

   When you see the thumbnail but something is not shown in it. Money-hungry people try to steal clips and add them to their videos.

   I want to punch whoever uses clickbait in the face.

7. Demonetization

   

8. The Comedy is Gone

   

9. YouTubers Becoming Bad People

   Normally, I'd just say the old talent is departing and new talent is stepping in, but that's not the case here. The old talent is departing, but I'm not seeing any new talent.

   So many of the big-name channels that we all loved, like Smosh, have just fallen from grace and turned into garbage. There are almost no good channels anymore.

   PewDiePie doesn't deserve subs. He is racist.

10. Susan Wojcicki

    

    Spoiler alert: she got fired, and she never came back, ever. #GoodRiddance #SusanWojcicki

The Newcomers
11. ?

    YouTube Shorts

    

    This is by far the worst new feature.

    Not only is every single vertical video less than 1 minute long automatically labeled as a short (including videos uploaded long before Shorts even existed), but every time you try to watch a short, you get taken to a horrible viewer with almost no settings, no rewind or skip-ahead options, and no timeline scroll.

    After the video is done playing, whatever video is next is played automatically without any warning, and the videos are never related to whatever video you were watching before.

    I am deciding whether or not it's a good idea because I just view as it as YouTube banking on the Tik Tok craze, the site where dignity goes to die. (Yep, Tik Tok is full of kids and adults making fools of themselves, dangerous challenges that would be a miracle if the person survived, and LOTS OF CRINGE) But I can say one thing, YouTube shorts can help with animation students and aspiring animators, if you have 1-3 second animation reel that you want to the world to see, YouTube shorts is the place, it may not look like Disney or may look stupid but you are learning the skill that your lifelong career will be on and you want people to see, heck, maybe animation studio will see it and have you come onboard. Animation studios are now scouring the internet for talent, like did you know the creator of Helluva Boss got deal with Netflix? It's true, that was all because of the internet. So, to me, that's the only good thing that YouTube shorts brought, animators showing their work to the world.

12. ?

    Ads that are in a Different Language

    Today I had an ad on YouTube that was in a different language. It drove me nuts.

The Contenders

13. Buffering

    

14. Reliance on Shock Value

15. Swearing

    One of the main reasons I had to install a bad word filter was so I wouldn't have to deal with foul-mouthed comments, community posts, and video titles and descriptions. Now, if only there was a way the filter could work on videos and thumbnails.

    Swearing is the worst. When people swear too much, it drives me nuts.

16. 9-12 Year Olds Having Accounts

    I'm probably getting a lot of hate, but I think anyone below the age of 12 shouldn't have a social media account, unless parental controls are included.

    Not actually bad, but some of them don't respect opinions, which ruins the comment sections quickly.

    Let me tell you about things you can get now and things you have to wait for. This is one of those things you have to wait for. Just use it anonymously.

17. Bad YouTubers

    That's who we all have now, and we're getting more of them. Even the best ones are turning into bad YouTubers.

18. Videos that Contain No Inappropriate Content Get Age Restricted

19. YouTube Kids Cartoons

    

    There are videos of living bugs and worms inside people's stomachs (along with a disturbing thumbnail) and blood (not just a tiny amount of blood as in when you scrape yourself, but full-on blood) in these videos. Whoever thought this was "kid-friendly" must have had a pretty messed up childhood.

    This one is just horrible. Many people have made videos about this problem. And what does YouTube do? Shadow-bans them.

    Generative AI makes them more realistic and gory now.

20. Plagiarism

    This has plagiarism because top channels in different languages copy English channels by translating.

21. Hateful Comments

    I have a friend who's almost 16 years old. She has a gaming channel on YouTube, and one day, she was telling me that she was getting some hateful comments such as, "You think you are so cool when you are not?" and, "Why do you record in the basement? Don't you have a bedroom of your own?" and also, "You're 14 and you are too young to have your own gaming channel on YouTube." I then told her that those things they are saying are not true.

    I was a victim of hateful comments myself. I wasn't trying to be mean to someone on YouTube when I told them what I felt about how they were acting, clearly saying "not to be mean" before my response. The person then tried to argue with me as if I insulted or embarrassed them. (Then again, I couldn't tell the person's gender because they had an anime profile picture.)

22. Stupid Challenges

    

    Challenges, in general, are stupid and pointless. I ain't afraid to say that these are some of the worst things that spawned from us humans.

    They had so many, like the Tide Pod challenge, Ice Bucket challenge, etc.

23. The Channels Aren't Good Anymore

    Smosh is a good example of a good channel gone bad.

24. Videos Getting Blocked Worldwide

    Imagine having a video get blocked in more countries than there are on Earth.

25. "First" Comments

    Wow! You're first! You earn nothing at all!

    What's that? You tapped on a notification and sent a comment faster? You deserve my children!

    Woah bro! Did you just comment FIRST one second after the video got released? HOLY NUTSACKS! Take my money! All of it!

    Or, you could just comment something related to the video, which is more tolerable.

    That is true. How the heck is first a real comment? You're wasting 1 second of your life looking at first.

    Congratulations to the ten people who were first on the most recent video on YouTube!

26. Google Buying YouTube in 2006

    YouTube is dead. Letting Google buy it was a mistake.

27. Misleading Thumbnails

    

    Thumbnails can trick you. You expect to see the thumbnail, but in the whole video, it's ahh.

    I had one once that showed a car running over a watermelon, and it wasn't in the video. I was disappointed.