Sublime

the first VidCon, Wong watched in admiration as dozens of aspiring YouTubers raced around the hotel with handheld cameras, filming one another. In 2012, VidCon moved to Anaheim, near Disneyland, and Wong saw swarms of attendees all start to hold cameras at arm’s length, pointed back at themselves. •

When you think about YouTube or TikTok or any of these platforms, the creators who have risen on these platforms, it’s very unlikely they would have risen through traditional channels. If they said, “Give me money to go make a movie, it’s going to be 90 minutes of me jumping into slime,” that probably wouldn’t have worked. But then they can start a

Walk’s two staffers were moved to work on YouTube monetization. Later, looking back, Walk would call this decision “YouTube’s original sin.”

Old-timers felt YouTube had lost some of its original character and charm. “We kind of became the Walmart of video,” recalled Chris Zacharias, a developer who left in 2010.

YouTube made everyone broadcasters.

“Yego’s rise was enabled by YouTube. Yet since its founding, popular consensus has been that the video service is making people dumber. Indeed, modern video media may shorten attention spans and distract from longer-form means of communication, such as written articles or books. But critically overlooked is its unlocking a form of mass-scale tacit