YouTube is… Weird

The parts of YouTube that are beyond my comprehension

By: Meghan Tibbits

I cannot even begin to calculate the amount of time I have wasted watching YouTube videos. When I am on my death bed, slowly decaying, I will be sitting in front of a computer screen, watching a video of somebody blowing chunks because they drank an entire gallon of milk.

Courtesy of jm3

Although I readily admit to the fact that YouTube is almost never the most productive thing I could be doing, I like to think that there is sometimes a point to it. YouTube can be very educational (i.e. maybe you should think twice before chugging a gallon of milk).

Of course we cannot forget that YouTube as a company is a major success. As of 2010, the video-sharing website was named the third most popular site in the world and its earnings are climbing up to the $1 billion dollar mark.

Recently, however, I stumbled across some parts of YouTube that I simply do not understand. And I don’t mean that they’re creepy or off putting or anything, I just mean that they actually do not make any sense whatsoever. There is no reason for these videos to exist.

Like, okay, I found this video called “The Best Fireplace Video”

But I also found this other video by the same channel called “My Second Best Fireplace Video”

All I can think about while watching these is that the person who put them up thought enough about them to deem that one is the “Best” and the other is the “Second Best”, and how maybe the “Second Best” used to be the “Best” but then it got shunted aside to make way for the true champion of fireplace videos. I was also wondering if anyone clicks the “Second Best” instead of the “Best” just to root for the underdog. I don’t know.

There are also a bunch of videos of people filming their washing machine cycles. Yeah, I’m dead serious.

These are the videos that make the least sense to me. Some of them are a FULL HOUR LONG. There are so many of them. Nothing interesting happens. It is literally just a washing machine running for the entire hour. Do people actually sit there and watch the whole video? Why don’t they just watch their own washing machines? Is there something profound and metaphorically resonant here that I’m just not getting? Frankly, these are the types of questions that keep me up at night.

The final side of YouTube I would like to share with you, dear readers, competes very closely with the washing machine videos for the title of ‘Wow that is One Minute of my Life I Can Never Get Back’. I won’t embed the videos for this category because I feel like it might be in bad taste or something, but if you really want to watch them you can click here.

Did you watch it? YEAH, I KNOW. PEOPLE ACTUALLY TAKE VIDEOS OF THEIR CATS GOING NUMBER TWO AND POST THEM ONLINE. DID YOU SEE THE VIEW COUNT? I KNOW, OVER 14 MILLION! YEAH, I DON’T KNOW. WHAT IS HUMANITY? I DON’T KNOW.

On that note, I think it might be time for me to get off of YouTube and possibly do something with my life. If anyone can think of any good reasons why these videos exist, please let me know, as I am truly at a loss.

Meghan Tibbits is a carbon-based human writer who uses fairly simple systems of communication to acquire and distribute knowledge.