YouTube Created a Generation of Young Stars. Now They Are Getting Burned Out
It sounds like we&#x27;ve combined the intermittent reinforcement dopamine machine with financial insecurity and created a monster.<p>&gt;  PewDiePie, who was the first individual creator to hit 100 million subscribers, said in a video that he was taking a break<p>On the one hand, it&#x27;s amazing that one person can produce a show which reaches what previously you&#x27;d have needed a multinational TV organisation for. On the other hand, doing it alone makes it a lonely business with a higher risk of drifting off in a bad direction with nobody to correct you.<p>&gt; YouTubers say they are afraid to take time off, out of fear it will hurt how their videos are highlighted on the site, which uses an algorithm to determine which ones to recommend. While the algorithm is a mystery<p>This is why so much of the &quot;is youtube good or bad&quot; question is misled by looking inside the videos. The really important action of youtube, the thing which prevents people leaving it, is (a) the recommendation and (b) the funding .. both of which are completely opaque to those whose careers depend on them. They&#x27;re left with chaining themselves to a video camera to appease their machine god.