I watch a lot of YouTube, and the more I watch the angrier I get. The creators who make the place worth visiting get the least protection, and a bot can take away their income overnight with nobody to call.
I love parts of YouTube and despise others, and the love side is strong, so the good gets its due before the complaints. YouTube hosts videos for free, which is a massive gift to creators, educators, businesses, and hobbyists. The infrastructure works on every device from phones to smart TVs with almost no downtime. The library is staggering: cooking channels, travel vlogs, educational deep dives, movie trailers, obscure hobbies. Something good always shows up.
That’s why the broken parts grate. A platform this good shouldn’t treat the people who build it this badly.
Think of YouTube as a brilliant city with a broken justice system.
The city is dazzling, full of things you can’t get anywhere else, so everyone moves there. An automated court enforces the rules. It assumes you’re guilty, hands your property to whoever accuses you, and offers no real appeal. You stay for the city and live in fear of the court. That tension is the whole experience.
Why is YouTube’s copyright system the biggest problem?
Because it’s automated, one-sided, and nearly impossible to fight.
Content ID was built to stop infringement, a reasonable goal. In practice it leans hard toward whoever files the claim. Innocent creators get taken down, lose income, and face a system that treats them as guilty until proven innocent. Channels get nuked without warning over bogus strikes. The burden of proof lands on the creator, backwards from how justice is supposed to work.
The scale makes it worse. YouTube has roughly 2.5 to 2.7 billion monthly logged-in users worldwide, so a small policy glitch hits millions.
This is a global problem. Creators who fight back meet a wall of automated responses and vanishing human support. When your livelihood depends on a platform that answers complaints with a bot, the frustration builds fast.
These are the people who keep the platform alive, and YouTube treats them as an afterthought, the same pattern that plagues Yelp’s review system.
The 2026 mass-striking wave
What was a slow grind became something else this year. Anime reaction channels started reporting copyright strikes in volumes nobody had seen before. One creator with a million subscribers documented more than 300 videos struck on a single channel. Another reported 13 strikes and 60 videos removed, with seven days before the channel would be deleted. A third described filing 600 appeals in one day.
Look at what got hit, because it had nothing to do with content. Creators found videos struck for reacting to still images, to a fan animation somebody else made, and to a trailer for a game published by a company with no connection to the claimant.
What the struck videos had in common was a word in the title. Put Naruto or Bleach in a title and the claim arrived, whatever was in the video.
That’s a keyword search wearing a copyright claim as a costume, and it works because nothing on YouTube’s side is checking. Three strikes deletes a channel. A creator hit with a hundred of them at once gets removed without anyone judging the claims, and the only thing between them and deletion is a counter-notification queue.
That detail is indefensible. A creator can lose years of work because a word in a title matched a list, and the company that built the matcher won’t put a human in front of the result.
YouTube’s own takedown form states that abuse of the tool results in termination of the filer’s channel. Creators who have been falsely struck, had the strike reversed on appeal, and then watched the filer continue operating for two years afterward can tell you what that sentence is worth. The consequence exists on paper and nowhere else.
The asymmetry is the whole story. Filing a false claim costs nothing and requires no evidence. Fight a bogus claim and you lose your income while the appeal sits, and then the same robot that approved the claim rejects your appeal. It’s rigged. Anyone can do this to anyone, at scale, today.
For writers the lesson transfers directly. On any platform that actions an accusation automatically and processes the defense automatically, your work exists at the pleasure of whoever’s willing to lie about it. It’s the same structure that lets a competitor bury a book with review manipulation on Amazon, and the same reason your own site is the only place your work is safe.
YouTube built the system to keep you watching, and keeping you watching has nothing to do with showing you anything good.
I’ve got over 150 interviews out there on podcasts and shows, and every one is duplicated on my own site, because I don’t trust YouTube not to delete them. Some really good interviews of mine are already gone, because somebody decided a channel needed to be deleted. I’ve been on the other side of that too. I once deleted my whole channel of about 2,000 videos, and I pissed off a lot of people who were linking to them.
What is wrong with the YouTube algorithm?
Work goes up, pay stays put, and the algorithm does whatever it likes. Figures invented.
It decides what you watch, and it feels like a science fiction plot where an impersonal machine runs your digital life. The algorithm pushes sensational and extreme content, traps viewers in bubbles of similar material, and makes it harder to find something new and worthwhile.
For creators, the problem is blindness. One algorithm tweak can tank a channel’s views overnight and wipe out ad revenue with no explanation. Nobody can build a strategy against a system they can’t see.
The algorithm does help some channels get discovered, and that trade-off keeps people on the platform. It also serves up mountains of AI-generated junk beside legitimate content.
Whether the exposure is worth the chaos is an open question. YouTube built the system to keep you watching, and keeping you watching has nothing to do with showing you anything good. I resent that more than the ads, because the ads at least admit what they are.
How bad is the AI slop invasion?
Bad enough that it’s the single biggest reason YouTube feels worse to use than it did two years ago. Search for almost anything and you wade through robotic voiceovers laid over stock footage, fake “Top 10” lists cranked out by bots, and entire channels built to farm views with no human creativity in them. Merriam-Webster named “slop” its 2025 Word of the Year for a reason: the stuff is everywhere.
The numbers are stark. A 2025 study by the video platform Kapwing examined 15,000 of YouTube’s most popular channels and found 278 that produce nothing but AI content. Those channels have racked up 63 billion views and an estimated $117 million in annual revenue.
When researchers built a fresh account to see what new users get, roughly one in five recommended videos was AI-generated. A third of those qualified as brainrot: content that teaches nothing, entertains less, and somehow keeps you watching.
Real creators who spend weeks researching, filming, and editing can’t compete with channels pumping out hundreds of videos a day for pennies. History channels, true crime creators, and educational producers have watched AI knockoffs bury their work in search results. One viral true crime series turned out to be entirely AI-generated. Even YouTube CEO Neal Mohan’s likeness got used in a deepfake phishing scam on his own platform.
The slop farms make me angrier than anything else on the platform. Somebody spends a month researching a history episode, a bot buries it under a pile of knockoffs within days, and YouTube pays the bot.
YouTube started fighting back in mid-2025 with monetization rules requiring content to be “significantly original and authentic.”
In January 2026 Mohan named reducing AI slop and detecting deepfakes as top priorities for the year. The platform now cuts the reach of low-effort AI videos and requires disclosure labels on synthetic content. Whether that stems the tide is an open question. It’s the same rising tide of machine-made filler drowning real work across the whole internet.
Is YouTube’s moderation censorship?
Under the banner of “Community Guidelines,” YouTube decides what survives.
Some call it moderation. Others call it censorship. The rules are vague, the enforcement is inconsistent, and the decisions are opaque. A joke that slides on one channel gets another creator penalized, and that kind of favoritism breeds distrust. Demonetization hangs over creators like a guillotine. Say the wrong word or cover the wrong topic and the video loses its revenue. That pushes creators toward self-censorship.
Advertiser-friendliness works as its own quiet censorship. A video that upsets advertisers loses income whatever its quality, so creators steer toward whatever keeps the ad money flowing. Many keep adapting anyway. That tells you how strong the pull of the platform is. They’re resilient in spite of the system. Demonetization is punishment without a hearing. A creator can’t plan a channel around rules nobody will define, so the smart ones play it safe, and the platform gets duller every year.
Why is YouTube’s advertising so bad now?
Advertising sits at the core of most “YouTube sucks” complaints, and as the platform has grown, ads have gone from a minor nuisance to an unwatchable nightmare.
Early YouTube had skippable pre-roll ads and rare mid-roll interruptions. Now viewers sit through several unskippable ads running 15, 30, or 60 seconds each, crammed in before, during, and after videos. Some videos hit you with two back-to-back unskippable ads before a single frame of content, then cut in again at the worst possible moment.
The experience has gone from “I can live with this” to “I want to throw my remote at the screen.”
YouTube has also cracked down on ad blockers, starting in late 2023 with detection, warning popups, playback delays, and restricted access. The message is watch the ads or pay up. Workarounds still exist. On Windows, uBlock Origin still strips ads in most browsers. For Fire TV users, SmartTube is a free, open-source app with an ad-free interface, SponsorBlock integration, and background playback built in. Neither costs a dime.
The paid escape is Premium at $13.99 a month or $139.99 a year.
Many find it steep, because ad-free viewing comes bundled with YouTube Music and features people don’t want. YouTube launched Premium Lite in 2025 at $7.99 a month. It strips ads from most long-form videos and drops music streaming, offline downloads, and background play, and it still leaves ads on Shorts and music.
I resent being asked to pay my way out of an experience the company made worse on purpose. Premium might be worth it to you. I’d still like to see YouTube fix the ad load before it sells me a way around it.
On top of it all, the revenue split feels disproportionately small for the creators who make the content worth watching, and arbitrary demonetization cuts off income for vague reasons with no clear explanation.
My take
YouTube earns most of the complaints people throw at it. Content ID sides with whoever files the claim, and the ad load has gone from tolerable to remote-throwing. I resent being asked to pay my way out of a problem the company made on purpose. On Windows, uBlock Origin still works, and SmartTube does the job on Fire TV. Try those before you hand over $13.99 a month. I’d keep my money until YouTube cleans up the ads it made worse.
What are the alternatives to YouTube for writers?
Competition is a click away, and none of it matches YouTube’s reach. That’s the trap. Vimeo is known for high-quality content and creator-friendly monetization. Dailymotion is less restrictive. Twitch delivers direct viewer interaction and a more intimate experience.
TikTok has become the default for short-form video and pulled younger audiences away. Each attracts different creators and viewers, and most people still treat YouTube as the default. Creators stay despite the frustrations, though the growing discontent could change that.
For writers, YouTube cuts both ways. It’s a powerful promotional tool for book trailers, author interviews, behind-the-scenes content, and snippets of upcoming work, with reach that can put your writing in front of millions. The platform is also noisy and competitive, and standing out takes real effort. It’s an excellent place to learn craft and publishing, if you can sift through mountains of videos for the reliable material. I’ve been a guest on probably 150 or 200 podcasts, and when I looked at the statistics, plenty of those episodes had 5 views or 50 because the hosts never promoted them. The shows help me make the content, I download the recordings and put them on my own site because I don’t trust YouTube. Nobody’s complained yet.
It gives you a new medium in video essays and vlogs, and production takes different skills and serious time. It builds community through comments and discussion. That takes time to manage and exposes you to trolls. And it pays through ad revenue, sponsorships, and Premium sharing, with unpredictable income and the demonetization threat always present.
| Use | Upside | Drawback |
|---|---|---|
| Promotion | Book trailers, author interviews, behind-the-scenes content and snippets, with reach into the millions | Noisy and competitive; standing out takes real effort |
| Learning | An excellent place to learn craft and publishing | You have to sift through mountains of videos for the reliable material |
| New medium | Video essays and vlogs | Production takes different skills and serious time |
| Community | Builds community through comments and discussion | Takes time to manage and exposes you to trolls |
| Income | Ad revenue, sponsorships and Premium sharing | Unpredictable income, with demonetization always a threat |
| Hosting | Reach for your interviews and videos | A bot can strike or delete your work; keep copies on your own site |
The deeper lesson is one I keep returning to. YouTube is one more rented platform, and depending on it puts your livelihood at the mercy of an algorithm and an automated court. Use it for reach and own your real home. That’s the argument behind why the owned website still matters. YouTube joins TikTok and Twitter/X in that lesson.
For the wider view, the social media hub covers it, and if you want a body of owned writing no platform can strike down, that’s the work I do. Love the city. Don’t trust the court with everything you own.
YouTube built its empire on other people’s work and treats those people like replaceable parts, and that’s the part I can’t forgive. I’ll keep watching, because the good stuff is too good to give up. If you’re a creator, build somewhere you own too, and treat your channel as a storefront you’re renting from a landlord who doesn’t answer the phone.
YouTube’s algorithm problems come from choices people made in rooms. Sins of the Internet is my book about how platforms decided human attention was a resource to be strip-mined.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Over 21 percent videos shown to new YouTube users are AI slop, study finds, The Standard (Hong Kong)
- Word of the Year 2025, Merriam-Webster
- More Than 1 Million YouTube Channels Are Using AI Tools Daily, and CEO Says Platform Is Actively Working to Curb AI Slop, Variety
