I have zero proof but for a long time now youtube has just felt vaguely psyopped to me. The avalanche of far-right and manosphere content with zero pushback, the automated removal of even the most decorous pro-palestinian or leftist speech while seething bigotry somehow gets through, the opaque proprietary algorithms that run the site without accountability or oversight. We already know that most of these sites actively collaborate with US intelligence, we know about the NSA backdoors. It just feels off to me. Maybe I'm coping
this post was submitted on 16 May 2025
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chapotraphouse
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No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
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Steve Bannon dumped a huge chunk of change into YouTube to fuel Gamergate. He talked about radicalizing young men through the internet way back in like 2009. The Kochs followed his example, pumping more traditional media personalities (Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, etc.) full of cash on YouTube, Facebook, and other social media sites.
It's no coincidence YouTube was mostly cat videos, video game compilations, music, and sketch comedy for a long-ass time, then there were hundreds of rightwing grifters practically overnight doing 4 hour rants about Zoey Quinn.
It's not a psyop. It's kids. The dirty secret is that the majority of ad money is spent practically advertising to children because they're online the most. Tate is a perfect example of this, just views and ad revenue driven mostly by little boys.
Most podcasts today hide their Patreon or premium numbers because it would be very easy to track outliers that have tons of free subs vs paid subs -- because an excess of free subs means the audience is children.
YouTube became the biggest Podcast Platform because on all of the other ones there are various payment barriers.
well shit, that's disturbing and makes a lot of sense
tbh, considering the sheer number of podcast apps and shit, i don't see a chart with just apple, spotify, and youtube to be all that definitive
I mostly posted it because it's interesting what a legacy media site has to say about their modern competition even though they avoid that word like the plague. It's a very lazy article.
Charts are imperfect measuring sticks, susceptible to manipulation, lacking in transparency and calibrated more as snapshots of current popularity rather than overall popularity.
And it also serves as a sort of ad for Tony Hinchcliffe. The American media is such shit.
to be clear i wasn't complaining about the post, just the article itself
I only trust Deezer
Pretty sad when not even Chapo is getting close to any of this.
My sister scoffed when I said TrueAnon was a political podcast the other week.
what does she think politics is lol
When they openly declare that they're news/politics and don't make jokes.
It's all chuds all the way down bay-bee.
h3 is that high? yikes
Meidas Touch is litterally a DNC super pac.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeidasTouch
Previously, the MeidasTouch name was used by its founders for a liberal American political action committee formed in March 2020 with the purpose of stopping the reelection of Donald Trump in the 2020 United States presidential election. The SuperPAC aligned with the Democratic Party in the 2020 United States presidential election, the 2020–21 United States Senate election in Georgia, and the 2020–21 United States Senate special election in Georgia.
The PAC changed its name to Democracy Defense Action in 2023. The MeidasTouch name continues to be used by the MeidasTouch Network, the news organization.
Meidas
At Bluesky I use words like that to filter out posts. They have a Bluesky fan base. Some clowns even use it in their names like Meidas Fan. It's so pathetic.
Their dad, Kenny, was P Diddy's lawyer. Apparently the three Meiselas brothers went to the "white parties"
Kill Tony is Tony Hinchcliffe's podcast.
You may remember Tony Hinchcliffe as the stand-up comedian who, last fall, maligned the island of Puerto Rico in an inflammatory set during a rally in New York for the Trump presidential campaign. Despite the criticism for those comments, Mr. Hinchcliffe landed a Netflix deal in March for three specials based on his long-running live comedy podcast, “Kill Tony.”
That show is ranked modestly at No. 51 on Spotify and No. 178 on Apple Podcasts’ top charts, which track the most popular podcasts in the United States based on a combination of various factors: streams, downloads, subscribers and other mystery metrics. Yet a new chart, released Thursday, offers new hints about Mr. Hinchcliffe’s mass appeal. For the first time, YouTube has published its ranking of top podcasts in the United States, offering a fresh perspective on a sprawling landscape.
I've never heard of him before. Sounds like a derivative from Andy Kaufman