YouTube (and the Internet as a whole) was much better when people were creating content as a hobby instead of a "job"

Back in the day you would go to YouTube and watch videos made by people who had a hobby or a Hobbie; they would make videos of their cats, or their opinions, or whatever else and share it with the world. <br><br>They didn't do it for the money or the fame, they didn't expect to quit their day jobs and become full time YouTubers, they just did it for fun and as a way to share things with the world. <br><br>In return we got a massive library of free content that we could watch for hours on end whenever and however we wanted. This took a huge amount of pressure off our bank balances and didn't require us to pay for TV channels we didn't watch either. <br><br>Then YouTube decided to pay the content creators for their content and they paid according to the number of views they had, the number of clicks on their adds and so forth. <br><br>While this may not have seemed like a bad thing at the time, and a lot of YouTubers will probably argue that it wasn't, we as the consumer have been squeezed out by the YouTubers need to make money. <br><br>Firstly they started to make Clickbait, this was a way to make their videos more noticeable and is the reason why it seems like Jareds Kitchen has a new "secret recipe" every other week. <br><br>Secondly they started to shove the adds down our throats, you'd get a 30 second advert for a 3 minute video and have to skip through another 5 seconds of the same advert before you could close the window. The adds started popping up during the videos too, so you'd get half way through a video and be interrupted by adds. <br><br>In recent years it's got even worse, firstly the unskippable add is making a come back. This is an add that you HAVE to watch and you can't skip it. It's usually only 15 seconds long but they can sometimes go on for 2 minutes. <br><br>Then there's the adds for the creator's own goods and services. Every other video is now an advert for the YouTubers book, or his course, or his merchandise, or his other social media platforms or his website or his this and his that. <br><br>Now on top of ALL of the above they're also demanding that you pay them through other means. Patreon is a big one, where they'll ask you to pay them to make content that we can all watch for free, because you're "really a fan of the content they make and they deserve to be paid". <br><br>They do this while also working full time jobs, having full time careers and making "full time content" that is geared towards getting us to pay them money outside of adds. The creator will ask you to turn off your add blocker, or to shift your shift your patronage to another platform where they feel they get better pay. <br><br>YouTube has become money orientated and greed fuelled and you will see channels who are making 6 figure sums asking for more money from their viewers, at the same time as asking you to click on their adds so that they can get even more money. <br><br>The internet is the same, websites that used to be a pastime now have adds that won't leave you alone. Chambers is a great example of this, I'm on the app and on the browser right now and there is an unskippable add on the browser superimposed over the content, while the app has an unskippable add at the top that stops you from scrolling through the feeds. <br><br>This greed is part of the reason why people don't bring their phones to the table at dinner, why we spend hours a day on social media and generally why we spend way too much time on the internet. <br><br>I miss the past