Game Theory - Why YouTube Feels Boring

Episode Date: November 26, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he talks through the current meta of YouTube and why it all seems so boring now. *Credits:* Writers: Matthew Patrick, Stephanie Patrick, and Tom Robinson Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, JayskiBean, Pedro Freitas, Dom Sealion, Lace, and Shannon (Bomb0i) Sound Designer: Tyler Mascola

Oh, I've done it. I've created the ultimate online video. I watched every YouTube video, but, because I thought that Mr. Beast would do that very thing, I decided to do him one better. I watched every YouTube video and counted every pixel on every frame of every video. And guess what? I still thought that Jimmy might do that, so I decided to do him one better. I did it all in 24 hours, and I'll give away $100,000 to every viewer of that video. I've done it! I've done it! It's unbreakable! It's unbeatable. No one can ever outdo me. I've outbeasted the beast Hello internet, welcome to game theory, the superlative channel for overthinking all your favorite things on the internet

Today on Matt Pat talks about topics I'm thinking about instead of a game theory We're gonna be talking about phases. We all go through phases, right? We wear different stuff, we watch different things And on YouTube we make different content for the last three years YouTube has been going through what I'm calling the era of excess and I probably don't have to explain you exactly what I mean by that. You pretty much know it when you see it. The title has the word every in it every time. I tried every food from every state. I tried every impossible sport. Mythical has a format called We Tried Every where they try every flavor of a thing. The try guys have Keith eats the menu where he tries every item on a restaurant menu. Arak tries every drive-thru. Eddie Burbach goes to every Margaritaville. Matthew Beam goes to every Disneyland where Al-Farad rides every ride.

Drew Binski visited all 197 countries, while Markiplier just tries every flavor of toki. I mean, he actually just licked every flavor of takies. It's a bit disturbing there, Mark. Even more disturbing than your trailer for Iron Lung. Anyway, you see where I'm going with this. It's every trend that you see everywhere on the platform. Not to be overlooked, though, this phase also includes what I call the Nice Round Number Syndrome, which contains a big old number with the dollar sign in front,

and the numbers just keep getting bigger. While Mr. Beast has certainly been the one mainstreaming this recently, Nice round numbers. They've been making titles and thumbnails more clickable since 2012, when top tens and top five lists dominated the entire YouTube ecosystem. And once you know it, but clickable numbers become even more clickable once they're associated with money, leading to all your favorite giveaway and comparison videos. The numbers evolved from top tens to top hundreds to $200. And then we started adding zeros from there.

Many, many zeros. Now we have $1 stake versus $1,000 stake. $1 versus $100,000 computers. $1 houses versus $100 million houses. And of course, the all-time classic, I gave a random person on the street $100,000 for the clout. I mean, obviously there's some vague reason. But we all know what the underpinning of it is, right?

It's the cloud. We've seen $10,000 ice cream, the world's biggest pizza, and we've watched Casey Nystad recline his way through every expensive Emirati flight on the planet. It's great. Clearly we all love it and watch it, otherwise the algorithm wouldn't serve it up to you on a silver platter, but I'm here to tell you that there's a hidden cost to these videos, and no amount of death.

dollar signs and zeros is ever gonna do it justice. The interesting thing about excess videos is that they're not just about the superlative of something or trying something nicer than average. They're a constant, unwinnable game of escalation. We already ate the biggest burger at one restaurant, so, you know, then we had to escalate. We had to eat the biggest burger at every restaurant. But once you do that, where else do you go? Well, then you have to eat at every restaurant that ever serves a burger.

You get the idea. I'm sure if I asked you why we like this sort of content so much, there are some easy answers that come to mind. It's satisfying. to see things that are too expensive to buy for yourself. Maybe it's funny to see people try crazy stuff. All of that is very true, but there's also a lot more boiling under the surface of our excess addiction on YouTube. Understanding the psychology of why you're watching these videos might make you think twice about when to click on them and when to keep scrolling.

Today we're talking about where this era of excess comes from, where it's going, and why you should know, for your own mental health. It's probably no surprise to you that watching content on the internet, any content, even this sort of content, is doing all sorts of things to your brain. In a nutshell, consuming content online when you're scrolling on YouTube shorts, TikTok or Instagram, activates neuronal pathways in your brain that are commonly known as reward pathways. You scroll and ooh, a new thing to see. Scroll again and ooh, another new thing to see forever and ever endlessly to the end of time. And each time your brain gets a little happy response to seeing something novel, something funny, something beautiful or interesting,

all the things that we try to make our content look like online. These happy feelings come from your brain's dopamine reward pathway, and they're the same ones that get activated when someone hands you an ice cream Sunday or the feeling that you get when you beat a level in a video game. When it comes to consuming content, unfortunately we're going in with the deck stacked against us, starting with the literal brain inside our own heads. Biologically, our brains have been wired from the beginning to find rewarding experiences in life and then double down on those rewards because a few thousand ancestors ago, that was what was able to keep us alive. Now that reward-seeking behavior we all have baked into our neurons gets translated to a key weakness that can be exploited by everyone from game developers to marketing

companies and especially by social video platforms. Watching funny TikToks, satisfying aesthetic videos on Instagram and clever YouTube shorts, they're all micro-dosing dopamine into your brain all day long until you're suddenly feeling compelled to keep scrolling just to try and feel okay. There's been a lot of research done in this area and even if literally none of us are following the advice of limit your screen time, we at least know yeah, we probably should be doing that but no really, yeah, we probably should be doing that. The TLDR of all this is that the 4U page is given your brain exactly what it wants, which isn't always a good thing. The thing is, friendos, well, it's easy for all of us to collectively point to short-form video as the thing that's getting us hooked on all these platforms, the things that are shamelessly riding those dopamine waves. They're not the only ones that are given us that little boost to happy. The era of access on YouTube has given us the exact same action on these same reward pathways even with long-form videos. It's doing this in two main ways. First, the structure of the video usually sets you up for lots of little micro doses of dopamine rewards all the way throughout the video,

Starting with the opening seconds. Let's just take a classic example from Good Mythical Morning, I tried every flavor of Lays chips, where they have the setup of these videos down to a science. Probably why it's a whole series over on GMM. They start right off the bat by teasing what's in the video. This hooks you in the first few seconds in the exact same way that a TikTok does. 27 flavors of a Laze, but only one can be the best.

Let's talk about that. This is the exact same tactic that Mr. Beast uses in every one of his $1 versus $1 million videos. Or I guess now it's $100 million videos. This is a $100 million mega mansion. And this isn't me trying to single out any creators or point fingers. It's just a tactic used by everyone who's successful on the platform right now. Josh Weissman. Today we're going to be ranking and tasting every major fast food burger in America.

Air rack. You're looking at a collection of all the fastest man-made vehicles in history. Hope scope. I bought every Barbie Dreamhouse ever. Mr. Who is the boss? I have just bought every single Xbox console ever. Basically every major creator on the platform is zeroed in on this strategy. as a psychological tactic to get your attention on YouTube.

But that's not enough. After those catchy opening seconds, you break the video up into manageable chunks that are, oh, I don't know, someone around 60 to 90 seconds each, about the exact same as a TikTok, so people feel like they're getting a new reward for every minute that they stay tuned into the video. Take a look at that same GMM video to see what I mean.

45 seconds to one minute and 15 seconds goes by, they switch to a new flavor of chip, giving you just long enough for a satisfying crunch, some color commentary, a couple of jokes, bam! On to the next before you got bored. In Hope Scopes tour through the history of Barbie Dreamhouses. A video, that I personally loved, by the way, she switches between Dream Houses less than every two minutes.

ARAC is way more intense when ranking all the fast food restaurants, going through them at a pace of 10 to 30 seconds each. Mr. Beast's favorite way to do this is by completely switching up challenges every three minutes or so. His classic, I gave away an island of my 100 millionth subscriber video switches challenges every one minute and 30 seconds to 2 minutes and 45 seconds. While in his somewhat controversial, curing people's blindness video, the longest any individual patient gets in front of the camera is 50 seconds. I could go on and on and on with hundreds of examples of these videos across the platform,

each with tens, sometimes hundreds of millions of views, but it all boils down to this one thing. YouTube videos, my friends, have become high polished compilations, kind of like TikTok compilations or Vine compilations before them, whether or not you or even the people making them realize it. And it works. It works real well. But wait a minute, I hear you saying, telling me I'm throwing all my fellow creators under the bus.

How could I do that to all my friends? I'm just a YouTube turncoat. And hey, wait a minute. Didn't this video start out using these exact same tactics? Well, let me be clear. Creators, including little old theorists over here, work to make the best content possible for viewers and fans based on the rules of the platform they're working on.

You would never see a TikTok start with long, slow classical music and a black screen, right? Why? Well, because the platform doesn't serve that sort of content. People don't respond to slow TikToks with no... visuals. That would be insane. By the same token, YouTube creators have to live within the extremely rigid boundaries of the platform and the content that's getting recommended here. Yeah, big creators have videos that work very well. And also, it's not really their fault. Creators aren't implementing TikTok tactics like this because they're trying to trick you.

They're doing it because this content is what YouTube systems have told them is working. And in case it's still a secret, friends, YouTube has one goal and one goal only here in 2023, to look and feel a lot like TikTok. It's no coincidence that the excess phase of YouTube has happened at the same time as the rise of TikTok and the same time as YouTube launching its own TikTok killer as shorts. A lot of large creators understand that they're not competing with each other, they're competing with the product that YouTube really needs to win shorts. So at this point, this is the real picture of what making content on YouTube looks like. Creators have to make videos that are as exciting as a TikTok, but long enough to feed YouTube's recommendation system lots and lots of tasty watch minutes. And in case you're not aware of what's going on behind the curtain, these episodes take weeks or even months to create.

Often costing tens, if not even hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce, all while still needing to be brand safe. Young skewing, but not too young skewing. New and original while still feeling familiar enough for you to click on, and they might just make it onto someone's home page. Then again, YouTube might just give that space to shorts instead. Never fall down, never fail, never show fear. Never get out of line. It's too hard. It's too contradictory. So what's left after all that? Well, a lot of escalation. How do you get people's attention on YouTube now? Do something bigger.

more expensive, more flashy, more dangerous for as long as you possibly can in as many short, discreet chunks as you can. At the end of the day, this isn't about the creators that you're watching, it's about the platform that you're watching those creators on. But there's more to this fun little escalation circus. With more complicated and over-the-top production comes the need for more help. A lot more help. While videos on the platform are becoming more pigeon-holed into this escalation and excess genre, they also need a lot more manpower to pull them off. Rent and Link employ nearly 100 full-time employees. Smosh is over 30.

Mr. Beast is at least 100, and individual creators who look like they film alone, now have full-time teams of at least 10 to 15 people hunting the corners of the earth to find every impossible sport, Pop-Tarts flavor, and Macbook. The cost of these enormous teams lay on even more pressure for every episode to be an every episode, because it has to be a banger. Instead of stories, characters, or in-depth narratives that feel risky, access videos can be executed by any team who can build a bigger set, Visit more olive gardens or buy more weird shoes for you to try on without running into a lot of creative risks.

Right now, this is one of the only ways to effectively thread the needle. It's hard to blame people for leaning into the content that's successful. But you gotta admit, all of it feels a bit limited. There's not a lot of feeling under the surface there other than, whoa, amazing! With that little vine boom animation to make it seem like something more exciting happened on screen. Overall, it just makes the platform as a whole feel stagnant when everything carries the same tone. And whose fault is that? The platform.

With that in mind though, so far we've only talked about the ways that the era of excess is hijacking our brain and the programming schedule of your favorite creator. But what about you as a normal viewer? Turns out that the era of excess may be having a number of other unintended consequences for fans of YouTube, and these consequences aren't so easy to detox from. First, let's just talk about what's so appealing about excess content when we watch it. It's fun. It's neat to see people take things to the extreme, and for a lot of us, the era of excess is a form of escapism. Now, there's nothing wrong with a little escapism.

People have been using books, TV, movies, theater, video games, all kinds of media forever to escape their humdrum lives or in our case a world that often feels like it's about to burn down around us. A lot of time escapeism media portrays a life that's better, more magical, or often more wealthy than our own. It idealizes tiny problems, fancy clothes, fancy cars, extravagant vacations, or enormous houses. Any of those topics sound familiar? They should. They're literally everywhere in the era of excess here on YouTube. Visit the craziest hotels, eat the thousand dollar steak, try on the 20 new outfits that you can never afford and do it in every video across YouTube. There's actually a name for this kind of viewership, and if it sounds gross, well, it is. It's called wealth prong, and it's been around just as long as wealth itself has. If you're a boomer, your generation had lifestyles of the rich and famous, one of the most influential reality shows of all time before reality TV was even a thing. As the creator of the show described it, it allowed everyone to feel like someday they too could live a fancy lifestyle.

When you first conceived, did you have any idea that people would be as interested in how the other half lived. It's almost as if the whole thing has slipped into the vernacular of the dictionary because everybody is curious, but to an extent that we never dream. Here in America, everybody wants to be a winner. Everybody dreams of being very, very successful. And so for a moment, with our show, we showcase the winners, and then we let the people dream and say, yes, we too could live like that and be like that.

Moving into the 90s and 2000s, he had shows like MTV Cribs, Real housewives, and then the ultimate and wealth pran, keeping up with the Kardashians. With each of those shows on their own escalating journey to show off more wealth, more extravagance, and more aspirational living than the last. But where wealth pran used to be confined to just a couple of shows that aired a few times a week, now it's literally everywhere. Every time you log onto YouTube, there it is. A brand new video, or three, or seven.

All ready for you to consume to get that hit of dopamine, except that's not truly what happens. When you're surrounded by wealth prong all the time, Instead of feeling inspired by the beautiful lifestyles showcased online, viewers report feeling more discouraged about their own lifestyle. Because everywhere you look, it feels like there's someone who has it better than you. Someone who could afford to explore exotic islands, or buy 30 pairs of sneakers, all the while inflation continues to rise out here in the real world.

Everything is getting more expensive. And you're just out here wondering if you're going to be able to afford next month's rent. But if every video you see online is in every video, it can be hard to remember that fact. And it starts to normalize the idea that we should all be living in this excessive way, and so when we can't, we start to become disappointed and dissatisfied. And because dopamine is now tied to our viewing addiction, it leads us to watch another video to try and get that hit, to try and feel normal again, to try and see what this one is going to be like. And he just

wind up repeating the cycle again and again and again, ultimately making us feel worse off mentally. This is especially true for younger viewers, where studies have shown that those who spend more time on social media, including YouTube, reported higher levels of comparison and lower self-esteem as a result. It's especially dangerous when you consider that 25% of young people reported going to platforms like TikTok to get financial advice, which can then lead them to not only feeling worse, but actually spending more on things they don't need to try and achieve that lifestyle that they're constantly being shown they should have. So what then do we do? Well, half the battle is just knowing what we're watching in the first place.

When we see a video's cold open shouting at your face that you're about to see every of something, you need to recognize that that video's designed to trick your brain into thinking it's getting a prize. Spoiler alert, it's not. It's actually a TikTok compilation designed to give you a hit of dopamine every two minutes or less. And seeing a bigger dollar amount in the title, that's not going to lead you to feel better about yourself or the state of your bank account. Also, it's important to recognize that even though YouTubers seem to be all footloose and fancy free with their expensive stuff and far-flung vacations, what you're seeing isn't real. Behind those big videos are big expense checks.

And all the brand deal and ad revenue that pours in is getting poured right back out to the massive teams that are making these videos happen. Behind the fun is a lot of paperwork, production calendars, and more coordination than your typical Hollywood shoot. No one is truly living the way that you see in these videos. And whatever you see on screen was meticulously curated by a team that's bigger than however big you imagine them to be. Now, I can speculate about where the platform goes from here, the future of shorts, how far you can escalate before you hit a ceiling, what YouTube should be doing as a platform, but that's all episodes for another day. For now, knowledge is power, so consider yourself armed and ready to take on the next video that you watch. Just make sure that you're playing it and it's not playing you.

But hey, that's just a theory. A MapPat talks about topics that I'm thinking about instead of a game. Theory. Thanks for watching.