Buddy, I'm gonna be straight with you.
There was a brief period of YouTube history where it was highly profitable to push content aimed at teenagers. The ads that got ran overtop were targeted based on fake signup information (birthdate April 20th 1969...) rather than interests and behavior. You could pick up a decent-sized audience with great retention and hours watched per week, then get great CPM conversions overtop. $$$!
Needless to say people clued in and it led to a bit of a gold rush. A million unironic video game review channels and let's play series trying to replicate the magic formula. Some even (briefly) succeeded! Of course the resulting supply-demand shift combined with incremental improvements in behavioral ad targeting and (more importantly) advertiser ROI visibility thoroughly cannibalized and de-funded the niche.
Where does this leave the milquetoast late 20s male content creator? They can still try and build communities in some small, obscure niche. They can still make friends. They can still do things that bring them and the few nerds with identical interests joy. But the formula where you push hours and hours of content in some offbeat niche hoping it takes off and becomes the next big thing? Where you don't find friends but curate an
audience large enough to drive ad revenue?
Dead. Utterly and irreversibly dead.
What's tough is the gig economy intentionally doesn't provide visibility for everyone to understand this. That's where we get people spamming their content everywhere they can without understanding why. That's where we get young fathers hiding from their families by pretending streaming's going to be their side hustle. That's where you get the closet furries trying to replicate the mass appeal of old successes but missing out on diehard fans by not living their true lives.
It is, as the kids say these days,
cringe. Or, from a sufficiently cynical Alastair Reynolds point of view, extremely cyberpunk.
Why is all this relevant for the moderation policies of an underwater Light Industry forum like this one?
If 2022 let's players trying to recapture the glory of ad revenues past are the uncool grandpas of the Internet, we're the dinosaurs and this forum is a comfy tar pit. A dozen dozen Eternal Septembers have passed since the Internet was small enough for forums like this to be the place anything's
happening. They're still around because they are an ultra-specialized communication medium that excels at specific types of communities.
Long form thought. Searchable records. Slow incremental discussion.
Like a glacier leaving a valley the mod making community leaves its record on the forum - but you can be sure the spiciest iteration that creates those mods happens in Discord or Twitter or chatrooms somewhere far away.
tl;dr Create a containment subforum for confused
content creators to dump write-only announcements that the actual user base will leave entirely unread. They're in the wrong place - or, perhaps, just in the wrong time.
