I Am Sad to Report that YouTube Documentaries Are Generally Unreliable
May in 2022 was a turning point for me with regard to how I apprehend content on YouTube and on the Internet more broadly.
I used to be subscribed to a YouTube channel called RealLifeLore, which makes short documentaries about subjects various and sundry. But despite being subscribed (and it's not easy to get me to click that Subscribe button), I found myself often underwhelmed at the end of his videos, with this sort of unsavory feeling...like being really hungry and eating nothing but an inadequate amount of low-quality food. The hunger goes away but you're not full, and instead your stomach is just kind of disappointed in you.
Why? If you had asked me previously, I don't know if I would have been able to put my finger on it. I know what a "good" documentary looks like, but it can be tricky to explain why a bad one is bad.
Then, in May of 2022, RealLifeLore did a video about California's high-speed rail project, calling it a failure. This happened to be a topic that I already had a decent amount of knowledge about, and I found myself noticing as I watched that the video that not only was his analysis really shoddy, but he was saying things that just weren't true.
I was kind of grossed out at the failure of quality, and I ended up unsubscribing from his channel. That wasn't simply the last straw for me; it was a whole extra bale of straw. I don't want to throw away twenty and thirty minutes of my time on documentaries that can't be trusted.
His video was bad enough, and god enough pushback, that he took it down and reuploaded a new version, but I never watched it. I'm done with that channel.
But it was also an eye-opener for me:
Something has changed on YouTube in the past few years. It used to be that documentary content was produced mainly by people who were passionate about the things they were documenting. And when the production values on these kinds of effort are good, they come with a sort of implicit trust. "Half an A Press" is an outstanding documentary," for example, and very easy to trust owing to the pointlessness and difficulty of trying to create such a work without already knowing about the subject matter.
But in more recent years, documentary channels have arisen whose purpose is not to document the world per se but to maintain a production schedule of content and earn a steady income for the channel creator(s). So we get people making documentaries about things they didn't previously know a lot about.
That is not inherently bad! Being an outsider to the subject matter is a big part of the world of professional documentarian work and of the neighboring short-form world of journalism. But in the 20th century, documentaries typically had robust quality control. In the modern world of YouTube, with low barriers to access, small production teams, no guarantee of quality control, and a proliferation of creators, you need to make critical judgments about which content creators are trustworthy or not, and on which subjects. (As many creators, for various reasons, are better at documenting some subjects and not so great at others.)
For me, RealLifeLore passed my test enough for me to subscribe to his channel, which like I said is not easy. And when he turned out to be incompetent, I found myself reevaluating my judgment criteria. I realized I had been relying heavily on production values (graphics, editing, sound, etc.) and narrative tonality (the way the narrator speaks and thereby the relationship they create between themselves and the subject matter). RealLifeLore has good production values and what I consider a professional narrative tonality. Yet it isn't a good source for documentaries.
Since then I have found myself noticing two things on YouTube:
First, once I was looking for it more actively, I began to see how flimsy the content of many YouTube documentary channels is. I would go so far as to say that most of the documentarians on YouTube aren't worthy of being called documentarians: They are content creators who are essentially writing video essays as if for a college class. The ones who stand out and attract audiences are very good at appearing to be professional and authoritative (through things like production values and narrative tonality), but most of them aren't actually professional and authoritative. High-quality research of a subject you aren't already an expert in is incredibly difficult, laborious, and time-consuming. And this is at odds with the algorithmic pressures by YouTube for creators to be posting content regularly.
Second, we have reached an Orwellian point where, effectively, the fakes are as convincing as the genuines. You yourself as the consumer have to already know something about the subject matter to be in a position to judge whether a documentary is any good. Content creators have mastered the form of high-quality documentaries, and the form is our only way to evaluate the substance without already knowing the substance.
What these two things mean is that, generally speaking, you can't trust anything you see-either on YouTube or anywhere on social media-that purports to be factually authoritative. That mechanism of implicit trust is broken. So you have to heavily scrutinize the content instead, which transforms the role of the audience from one of curious citizen to that of active auditor-which is often a bridge too far as it transplants the consumption of documentary content from the realm of leisure into the realm of work. I enjoy watching documentaries for fun, to indulge my curiosity, relax, and take it easy for a while. I don't want to have to be fact-checking everything I'm seeing.
I'm sure that some of this is becoming apparent to me in recent years only because I have been looking for it more closely. But I also think that much of this phenomenon is a real trend, and that the integrity of YouTube documentary content has been eroded in inverse proportion to the mastery of the documentary form by incompetent or deceitful content creators.
The proliferation and popularization of low-quality documentary content has serious repercussions for our society, which is already struggling with a large unreality movement on the right. I am concerned that most people simply do not possess the faculties to discern what information is good and what isn't. Already I have bemoaned the fact that society doesn't possess good news media scrutiny capabilities, wrongly embracing poor or disinformational news sources while failing to recognize the quality and integrity of good sources. Even some very smart people have this problem.
Our society in general-for decades actually, but especially since the rise of right-wing propaganda and (separately) the rise of social media-seems to be sinking deeper into a modern technological world of untruth, unreality, and circus funhouse mirrors. We are in danger of becoming as beguiled and deceived as any generations of old.
More and more it appears that, to actually know about something, you are going to have to interact with it in the real world personally. Maybe this sounds like a "Well, duh" sentiment to you, but I would say that it isn't: Authoritative, factually-driven media really uplifted our society for decades. No one is going to become an expert of everything, but curious and proud people could consume media on many different topics and at least acquaint themselves with the fundamentals. Now we are losing that, and the result is a retreat in our level of comprehension as a society.
There are still good documentarians on YouTube. Let us not lose sight of the fact that, amid a whirlwind of misinformation, genuine scholarship is always still a thing that people can do. But I am left with no choice but to conclude that the good documentary creators are the exception to the norm, now. And leads to my general guidance for anyone who cares to consider it: Don't trust anything you see on YouTube unless you can, of your own means, evaluate both the claims and the creator.
And I hate to say that, because it means that the documentary scene on YouTube has become an ugly, upside-down caricature of what it should be. YouTube has financially incentivized misinformation and made outright deceit much more financially viable. And this won't change without regulation, but good luck developing effective regulations without killing the bottom-up dynamic of independent content creation. It's going to be very hard, and no one (as far as I know) is even trying to do it yet.
MEANWHILE, a sardonic palate-cleanser: Over in low-effort content world, the proliferation of bulk content continues unabated! I happened upon a YouTube short talking about mixing and then unmixing colors. Then at one point the text-to-speech bot narrator correctly pronounces the word "laminar" (as in "laminar flow"). But a graphic pops up on the screen saying "Leminar Flow." And to round out the trio, the short's video title mentions "Luminar Flow."
🙄🙄🙄
I used to be subscribed to a YouTube channel called RealLifeLore, which makes short documentaries about subjects various and sundry. But despite being subscribed (and it's not easy to get me to click that Subscribe button), I found myself often underwhelmed at the end of his videos, with this sort of unsavory feeling...like being really hungry and eating nothing but an inadequate amount of low-quality food. The hunger goes away but you're not full, and instead your stomach is just kind of disappointed in you.
Why? If you had asked me previously, I don't know if I would have been able to put my finger on it. I know what a "good" documentary looks like, but it can be tricky to explain why a bad one is bad.
Then, in May of 2022, RealLifeLore did a video about California's high-speed rail project, calling it a failure. This happened to be a topic that I already had a decent amount of knowledge about, and I found myself noticing as I watched that the video that not only was his analysis really shoddy, but he was saying things that just weren't true.
I was kind of grossed out at the failure of quality, and I ended up unsubscribing from his channel. That wasn't simply the last straw for me; it was a whole extra bale of straw. I don't want to throw away twenty and thirty minutes of my time on documentaries that can't be trusted.
His video was bad enough, and god enough pushback, that he took it down and reuploaded a new version, but I never watched it. I'm done with that channel.
But it was also an eye-opener for me:
Something has changed on YouTube in the past few years. It used to be that documentary content was produced mainly by people who were passionate about the things they were documenting. And when the production values on these kinds of effort are good, they come with a sort of implicit trust. "Half an A Press" is an outstanding documentary," for example, and very easy to trust owing to the pointlessness and difficulty of trying to create such a work without already knowing about the subject matter.
But in more recent years, documentary channels have arisen whose purpose is not to document the world per se but to maintain a production schedule of content and earn a steady income for the channel creator(s). So we get people making documentaries about things they didn't previously know a lot about.
That is not inherently bad! Being an outsider to the subject matter is a big part of the world of professional documentarian work and of the neighboring short-form world of journalism. But in the 20th century, documentaries typically had robust quality control. In the modern world of YouTube, with low barriers to access, small production teams, no guarantee of quality control, and a proliferation of creators, you need to make critical judgments about which content creators are trustworthy or not, and on which subjects. (As many creators, for various reasons, are better at documenting some subjects and not so great at others.)
For me, RealLifeLore passed my test enough for me to subscribe to his channel, which like I said is not easy. And when he turned out to be incompetent, I found myself reevaluating my judgment criteria. I realized I had been relying heavily on production values (graphics, editing, sound, etc.) and narrative tonality (the way the narrator speaks and thereby the relationship they create between themselves and the subject matter). RealLifeLore has good production values and what I consider a professional narrative tonality. Yet it isn't a good source for documentaries.
Since then I have found myself noticing two things on YouTube:
First, once I was looking for it more actively, I began to see how flimsy the content of many YouTube documentary channels is. I would go so far as to say that most of the documentarians on YouTube aren't worthy of being called documentarians: They are content creators who are essentially writing video essays as if for a college class. The ones who stand out and attract audiences are very good at appearing to be professional and authoritative (through things like production values and narrative tonality), but most of them aren't actually professional and authoritative. High-quality research of a subject you aren't already an expert in is incredibly difficult, laborious, and time-consuming. And this is at odds with the algorithmic pressures by YouTube for creators to be posting content regularly.
Second, we have reached an Orwellian point where, effectively, the fakes are as convincing as the genuines. You yourself as the consumer have to already know something about the subject matter to be in a position to judge whether a documentary is any good. Content creators have mastered the form of high-quality documentaries, and the form is our only way to evaluate the substance without already knowing the substance.
What these two things mean is that, generally speaking, you can't trust anything you see-either on YouTube or anywhere on social media-that purports to be factually authoritative. That mechanism of implicit trust is broken. So you have to heavily scrutinize the content instead, which transforms the role of the audience from one of curious citizen to that of active auditor-which is often a bridge too far as it transplants the consumption of documentary content from the realm of leisure into the realm of work. I enjoy watching documentaries for fun, to indulge my curiosity, relax, and take it easy for a while. I don't want to have to be fact-checking everything I'm seeing.
I'm sure that some of this is becoming apparent to me in recent years only because I have been looking for it more closely. But I also think that much of this phenomenon is a real trend, and that the integrity of YouTube documentary content has been eroded in inverse proportion to the mastery of the documentary form by incompetent or deceitful content creators.
The proliferation and popularization of low-quality documentary content has serious repercussions for our society, which is already struggling with a large unreality movement on the right. I am concerned that most people simply do not possess the faculties to discern what information is good and what isn't. Already I have bemoaned the fact that society doesn't possess good news media scrutiny capabilities, wrongly embracing poor or disinformational news sources while failing to recognize the quality and integrity of good sources. Even some very smart people have this problem.
Our society in general-for decades actually, but especially since the rise of right-wing propaganda and (separately) the rise of social media-seems to be sinking deeper into a modern technological world of untruth, unreality, and circus funhouse mirrors. We are in danger of becoming as beguiled and deceived as any generations of old.
More and more it appears that, to actually know about something, you are going to have to interact with it in the real world personally. Maybe this sounds like a "Well, duh" sentiment to you, but I would say that it isn't: Authoritative, factually-driven media really uplifted our society for decades. No one is going to become an expert of everything, but curious and proud people could consume media on many different topics and at least acquaint themselves with the fundamentals. Now we are losing that, and the result is a retreat in our level of comprehension as a society.
There are still good documentarians on YouTube. Let us not lose sight of the fact that, amid a whirlwind of misinformation, genuine scholarship is always still a thing that people can do. But I am left with no choice but to conclude that the good documentary creators are the exception to the norm, now. And leads to my general guidance for anyone who cares to consider it: Don't trust anything you see on YouTube unless you can, of your own means, evaluate both the claims and the creator.
And I hate to say that, because it means that the documentary scene on YouTube has become an ugly, upside-down caricature of what it should be. YouTube has financially incentivized misinformation and made outright deceit much more financially viable. And this won't change without regulation, but good luck developing effective regulations without killing the bottom-up dynamic of independent content creation. It's going to be very hard, and no one (as far as I know) is even trying to do it yet.
MEANWHILE, a sardonic palate-cleanser: Over in low-effort content world, the proliferation of bulk content continues unabated! I happened upon a YouTube short talking about mixing and then unmixing colors. Then at one point the text-to-speech bot narrator correctly pronounces the word "laminar" (as in "laminar flow"). But a graphic pops up on the screen saying "Leminar Flow." And to round out the trio, the short's video title mentions "Luminar Flow."
🙄🙄🙄