YouTube has become worse for me over the last few years both as a distraction (all on me) and becoming a hive of negativity, humble brags, encouraging people to waste money and fake theories. It was a real eye opener when I used it signed out for a week but worse than that my own suggestions are also polluted with these same videos and awful thumbnails.

YouTube’s algorithm for encouraging this kind of content has gotten out of hand and I don’t want to be part of it. As I’ve written before I’m glad I stopped growing my channel about 7 years ago now I’ve seen what content YouTube encourages you to create. The way to grow is to be extreme!

I thought that I have my subscriptions that I mostly enjoy and as long as I only use it on our TV watching only those things I think I’ll be ok but when the app defaults to recommend and the first thing I see is “how I blew £2000 at (insert store name here)” I’d had enough. The content I watch I can get in podcast form so I’ve just subscribed to the podcast feed in Overcast instead.

I’ve now deleted it off all of my iOS devices, unsubscribed to all channels and deleted my account from our LG TV.

Turns out a headline like this one would get me better traffic on YouTube than something I wanted to be more positive such as ‘How to set up Apple News’. A goal of mine has been to share more but based on my testing of YouTube their algorithm really does skew towards the negative and extreme. As someone that wants to put out positive helpful content in 2019 it seems that YouTube isn’t a place for me.

Here’s a little test, yes the viewing numbers are small but check out the view comparison. If you want to get any sort of traction (and don’t have a large community already) you’ll need to create negative or divisive content to get any sort of views. When I started a guitar channel back on 2008 it seemed that helpful content was all I needed to put out but that isn’t cutting it in this day and age of fake news.

It’s got me rethinking some 2019 goals of mine.

It might be a pessimistic view but please let me know what you think.

Took a while to get here from the states but I’ve had through the Otterbox Marvel series case. This is the Symmetry series of cases but with an Infinity War flavour, which I’m loving.

These cases are a little bulkier than an Apple silicone but offers much more protection.

The only slight downside to the bulk is it’s a little harder to use the swiping up gesture on the X series but the width for me makes typing easier.

If you’re into Marvel or like style of case I recommend picking one up before they are discontinued.

I even did a little video.

Quick LumaFusion experiment.

See the video.

Thanks to the suggestion from Andy over at The Dent for suggesting LumaFusion for video editing on the iPad. I’ve installed and started to play around in it. Intuitive so far so time to get into some video projects.

I’ve started creating video again, head over to my YouTube channel to check out my initial look at iOS 12.

Watch on YouTube