YouTube and the end of "internet culture"
Last week YouTube officially announced that the trending page is going away, to be replaced with separate trending pages just for music, podcasts, and movie trailers. It's the end of "internet culture".
Let's back up. In the early days of YouTube—two decades ago—the homepage had a "Featured Videos" box that was curated by YouTube staff. Here's what that looked like in August of 2005:
Millions of people browsed the YouTube homepage every day, and all of them saw the same list of recommendations. This meant everyone browsing YouTube tended to end up watching the same things. This helps explain why basically everyone active on the internet pre 2010 has memories of videos like Charlie Bit My Finger, Charlie the Unicorn, and non-Charlie videos like Evolution of Dance.
Some version of this box existed on the homepage until 2010, at which point it was replaced by an automated system that showed the most popular videos on the site. There was also a box that recommended videos based on your own viewing history. By 2015, those personalized recommendations replaced the popular videos on the homepage, but you could still see what was popular on the "Trending" page. Now Google is deleting that page entirely.
By deleting the Trending page, Google is effectively making it impossible for the average user to get an idea at a glance of what the broader culture is watching on the site. This is the culmination of a long process in which "the internet" fractured into many different versions of itself. My YouTube homepage looks nothing like yours, or anyone else's.
I bring up all of this history because I think it marks the final nail in the coffin for "internet culture" as a distinct concept. I highly recommend scrolling through the YouTube screenshots on Version Museum, because you can see the breakdown happen as you scroll. The early screenshots work as museum pieces, showing you how the site looked for everyone in 2005. By the 2010s the screenshots reveal the individual viewing habits of the people who took them, which in turn reveals how there really isn’t any one "internet" to archive.
Once upon a time the term "internet culture" was used to distinguish it from the broader American and global culture. The idea was that the average internet user was different than the average person—that people who spend a lot of time online are different than the majority of the population, and, importantly, have certain characteristics in common (a certain sense of humor, say, or a penchant for retro video game references).
That's not how it works today. To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, there is no such thing as The Internet—there are only individual timelines. We are all browsing a personal version of the internet. YouTube removing the Trending page is just the latest in a long line of changes that cements this version of the web—one where all of us have increasingly little in common, and no way to find out what most other people are experiencing.
Stuff I Wrote
This Is the Best Public Transit App I've Ever Used Lifehacker I've loved this app for ages but finally wrote about it.
Hot Corners Is the Best macOS Feature You're Not Using Lifehacker Not a new feature but one that's easy to forget about.
Stuff You Should Read
Developing an internal tool for our puzzle editor The NYT Open Team/Medium A fascinating, technical look at how the team that makes Connections puzzles avoids repeating themselves.
Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists Adrian Holovaty The bot was telling people a feature existed, which meant new customers were disappointed when they couldn't use it, which meant the team had to add the feature.
