I have just under a million views on my YouTube site. At first I covered material regarding the lives of interesting people in the San Francisco underground (eg lgbt, alt culture, arts, activists). I covered what motivated them, their path in life, attitudes - things that most people can relate to. It was really hard getting any kind of decent view count and engagement (something that is required to keep going).

On one of my shows I Interviewed the Editor of the Bay Guardian (one of the most prominent liberal papers on the west coast) to talk about how tech money was eroding SF culture, something people were talking about constantly. On the same show I had a porn star and producer from kink.com (the largest BDSM website in the world)….and he was previously a Mormon. The Bay Guardian vids got a total of 40 views and not a single comment. The porn star got tens of thousands of views and dozens of comments.

So I started doing more sex/kink related vids and our view count shot up. I was then able to pull in a few celebrities and a larger audience. Sex related vids now account for approx 90% of our view count, even though we still did the other material - which was largely ignored.

The interesting bit are these two stats:
1) View count
2) How many people watch the full video (or close to the full video), regardless of the view count.

View count was driven by how trashy the video was - how many people shared it, commented on it and how the YouTube algorithm promoted it in the feeds

But for the non-kink/sex videos, most watched the full video (btw many stopped watching when the credits started rolling, so we know they were actually watching) What does this say? Seems like that there is a certain percentage of people who want quality content, but this is drowned out by those seeking trash. Nothing wrong with trash…sometimes. But when it dominates the social media landscape what does that do to us?

I’ve seen multiple accounts that Tik Tok in the US is dominated trash where as the equivalent in China is dominated by inspirational stories (eg children working hard to learn a craft like performing classical piano). Some of that might be government programming, but that can’t all be bad.

So much of our problems in the US is that democracy is breaking down due to lack of empathy, compromise, attention, etc. The Chinese leadership are surely laughing their asses off about us.