Who remembers when this was the most watched video on YouTube?
“The clip received 70 million views in under 8 months. At that time, it was rated on YouTube as: #1 Most Viewed All Time Video on YouTube.com.” - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judson_Laipply
“He uploaded the dance to YouTube on April 6th, 2006.” - https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/evolution-of-dance
As someone said in the comments, they really don’t make (promote) videos like this any more.
It’s just a beautiful video, someone performed something on stage, the crowd clearly loved it. It required real talent, and wasn’t just done to get Youtube views in a weekly/daily video posts trying only to drive engagement.
A shame that Youtube’s best days are long behind it. Yes the beast is bigger than ever and has so many more people, but it’s not quality rising to the top.
In defense of YouTube…
The thing is, you absolutely can still find stuff like that. The trick is to search for stuff you like, and train YouTube’s algorithm to find more stuff like it. I’ve got mine trained enough that my feed mostly consists of stuff I actually do want to watch.
Some of it is from “content creators,” yes (although nothing from the well-known ones), but a lot of it is just random things I happen to have an interest in.
Okay, that said, YouTube’s default feed can suck my hairy scrote. It’s astoundingly bad.
Well therein lies the problem. I don’t know what to search for.
And when I do think of something, most of the time I’ll get maybe 4 or 5 results for semi-related content that I’m not interested in, and then the remaining results are completely unrelated crap that the algorithm thinks I want to watch. I’ve heard that over 700,000 hours worth of video are uploaded every single day, but apparently I’m not allowed to actually search for them.
Instead we get the same old videos we’ve already seen in our feed. I’m so tired of fighting the system…
Yeah it took me a while too but but by carefully curating my subscriptions, likes, and comments I get what I like on youtube.
Most of YouTube used to be this type of thing.
A More Civilized Age.
Mr. Beast’s videos are pure brain rot.
I cannot stand them, everything about it is just awful.
Here’s a good article about him.
Videos like this still go “viral” but with hyper personalized algorithms today there are much more niche communities that things circulate in.
That’s the thing, it’s not viral if it’s personalized. “Viral” expands far outside of the niche. You might not like videos of baby or slice of life videos, but Charlie bit my finger was everywhere. Almost no one wanted Rick Astley, but everyone saw it. Even this, I don’t look up dance videos, but I Watched this whole thing. That’s where “Viral” is… The “this is popular even without being a fan of it.”
Now it seems the only videos that do that is shitty drama or clickbait crap.
it’s not a prank video?
I never watched youtube for these “viral” videos…
I qatch it for the creators who make content they (and I) really care about.
The funny/viral stuff is great too but its not the reason i use youtube at all.