It’s hard to say whether Neil Mohan, the current YouTube CEO, is responsible for the decline of the platform, or if it would’ve happened anyway. But I do feel the platform has declined, and for one very specific reason.

It’s just too competitive for innovative content to reliably surface to the top anymore.

Why would that be Mohan’s fault? Did he cause the global pandemic that led everyone (myself included) to start a new YouTube channel?

Obviously not but, according to many creator,s YouTube has been reducing how much it pays them, despite dramatically increasing its revenue. It’s not enough to make a video that gets seen by a lot of people. You need to make a lot of videos that get seen by a lot of people.

Anyway, all of this is really just backstory to my big observation.

Nobody talks in paragraphs on YouTube anymore.

Once upon a time, everything was a video essay. Everything was carefully scripted. And, increasingly, shot in imaginative ways.

Now that just takes too long, and creators have to make many more videos to make the money they were making a few years ago.

So it’s just people in rooms in their house, often in front of green screens, talking to camera. The more established YouTubers may do more sophisticated, carefully-scripted videos but they tend to make more money on their second channel, in which they do a live stream (often on Twitch) which gets cut up into many shorter clip videos.

Basically, we’ve moved from essays to conversations. Conversations with video podcast co-hosts. Conversations with the live stream chat. Hot takes and off-the-cuff comments.

And it’s still the case that the creators with the most expertise in their field tend to get the most followers – but the algorithm is pressuring them to constantly talk spontaneously, and have something new to say each day, and there just doesn’t seem to be room for anything other than reacting to the news (which in practice is the actions of a small group of politicians, companies and entertainers).

So where have the thoughtful essays gone?

There are still scripted podcasts that can reach a large audience. But I think this kind of considered argument work has moved to website blogs, ironically, and especially email newsletters.

Part of me is happy with this result, as it’s much easier to create! The barrier to entry is low: you don’t need to be a filmmaker.

But part of me is already morning extraordinarily vibrant intellectual culture of YouTube maybe seven or eight years ago.

In my 20s I used to wonder what it would be like to live in an age of great intellectual discussion and discovery. The coffee houses of England in the 1600s. The salons of Paris in the 1700s.

Then, one day, I realised I was in the middle of an era that dwarfed both of them. It was YouTube. It was vast. It was global. And it was where everybody was.

Sadly, not anymore.