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YouTube is why film criticism sucks now.

Most movie “criticism” on YouTube is objectively terrible. I wouldn’t care so much, because people being wrong on the internet is an age-old problem and we should not have to get worried and upset every time it happens.

Unfortunately, it is no longer just randos being wrong (or obnoxious, or creepy) on their own sites. They are being wrong on platforms that puts their fingers on the scales for their own reasons. Those reasons are all about engagement (so that they can collect data and sell ads) and the platforms are—at best—indifferent to whether the content they are surfacing and promoting is good or bad.

So now, because YouTube has its own incentives to push contentious, obnoxious, outrageous stuff, the vast majority of videos on the platform that purport to be film criticism are interchangeable 20-something white guys who either can’t understand that the more is more to talking about movies than reciting their plots, or who have some political axe to grind about Hollywood’s agenda. They are all terrible and they are all copying one another, trying to churn out as much of this crap as possible in attempt to grow their audiences.

And because of the scale of YouTube—and the slow-and-then-fast death of the journalism business—this sort of junk is what a whole lot of people now think film criticism is.

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