YouTube is Awful. I'm Not Posting There Anymore.
I’ve made YouTube videos for almost ten years, but I can’t do it anymore. I can no longer tolerate the abhorrent things YouTube and Google have gotten up to in the last year.
They’ve never been great. But their decisions in the early days were more obnoxious and annoying than anything. Starting in late 2024, and especially in 2025, they’ve upped their game, or lowered it, becoming a fetid stink of a company on top of a putrid pile of awful tech bros and social media cancers.
Where do I even start?
Blocking Ad Blockers and Forcing More Ads Than Ever
In 2023, YouTube declared war on ad blockers. This may sound like a strange thing for a creator to complain about. Ads are where I make my money. But YouTube chose not to take prisoners, and they didn’t care about innocents getting caught in the crossfire. Not only did they disable videos for everyone using any ad blocking program, they also disabled videos for many people who didn’t use any. Suddenly, a lot of my viewers couldn’t watch my videos. In a move designed to make more money, I certainly lost some. As more people left YouTube or found other ways of blocking ads, emboldened by the site’s terrible behavior.
This move coincided with a big push into place more and longer ads into videos. Earlier this year, I got a message from YouTube telling me that they had enabled “Automatic Ad Place” on all of my videos, without my consent.
Creators have two ways of putting ads in videos–they can place them manually or automatically. If you choose the automatic option, YouTube will place about two or three ads every second. Placing them manually meant I could put one or two in the whole video, depending on how long it was. But in March 2025, YouTube automatically began placing ads in all my videos, newly uploaded ones AND old ones. You can turn these ads off, but only individually by editing the videos one by one. I spent hours going through my backlog of videos, one by one, removing ads I didn’t place.
But this only affects when the video stops to show ads. I have no say over how long the ads actually are, and very little say over what they show. I turned off political ads, gambling ads, alcohol ads, anything showing crappy mobile games. Whether they honored this, I have no idea. I also have no control over banner ads placed on the videos themselves, or any sponsored videos in the sidebar.
Forcing AI on Creators
Around the same time, YouTube started going all-in on AI. Creators saw this through the “Inspiration” tab in the Creator Studio, where we upload and edit videos. This section looks at your videos and gives you suggestions for what videos to make next based on what would be most popular. The recommendations are terrible, always giving me the same clickbait garbage like “10 Hottest Women in Games!” and “These Are The WORST Indie Games EVER!” I feel dirty just for typing those titles here.
Not only did they give you titles, this “feature” would also generate an entire script, voice over, and a thumbnail. LGR has an overview of this on his second channel if you’re interested.
Sure, I could just not use it, and I don’t. But this points to three other problems. The first is that YouTube is absolutely taking all of my videos and using them to train their AI without my consent. The second is that other creators have no problem using this. YouTube is now flooded with these zero-effort abominations that take traffic away from those who actually care about making a decent video. Thirdly, well, it turns out this genAI isn’t entirely optional.
New AI Age Check for Viewers
Throughout 2025, websites, apps, and services across the internet have had age verification schemes forced on them in the name of “protecting children.” Ironic, considering the current President of the United States is the biggest child molester in human history, and the most popular video game in the world is little more than an all-you-can-molest buffet for pedophiles. Most sites require users to upload a photo of their ID. YouTube requires this for creators, something I deeply regret ever doing.
But for users, that’s a harder sell. YouTube’s solution? AI, what else? YouTube will look at what videos you watch, and somehow determine your age based on that. Sounds stupid? That’s because it is. What kinds of videos people watch has little correlation with their age, and sure enough, people are already being blocked from certain videos based on this AI algorithm.
Unbanning Election Conspiracy Theorists and Anti-vaxxers
YouTube suspended Donald Trump’s account in January 2021 after his retroactively successful insurrection. This set off a wave of bans on far right-wing accounts for spreading election lies, which in turn forced YouTube to moderate other conspiracy theory channels, namely those pushing vaccine misinformation. Trump later sued, then got re-elected in 2024. And would you like at that! YouTube agreed to settle! And, purely by coincidence, trust me bro, they also announced they were unbanning election deniers and anti-vaxxers.
How many creators are allowed to come back we don’t know. But we do know that this applies to every single account previously banned. Every. Single. One. It took years to convince YouTube to do something about these horrible hate- and misinformation-spreading accounts, and with the snap of a finger, they’re all welcome back with open arms. You can bet most of them aren’t getting banned a second time, too.
This was the final straw for me. Any doubts I may have developed were put to rest by what came next.
$22 million Bribe to the Epstein Ballroom
Also as part of that settlement, YouTube agreed to pay Trump $24.5 million. $22 million of that is going towards Trump’s unapproved and unsupervised creation of the Epstein Ballroom, which likely saw lead and asbestos clouds choke DC, because the construction crew didn’t bother containing it.
The other $2.5 million will be donated to the American Conservative Union and conservative writer Naomi Wolf.
That is a bribe, as blatant a bribe as you can possibly get. Trump sues YouTube, he becomes President, YouTube gives him and his friends millions of dollars and welcomes those same people back on their platform, and suddenly the lawsuit goes away. We’re seeing the same thing with CBS, NBC, Target, Amazon, and many other corporations bowing down to Trump threats, giving millions of dollars to him and his friends for approvals of mergers, FCC licenses, and whatever else they want.
Using AI to Change Videos Without Telling Creators
In August 2025, two creators discovered YouTube was using AI to alter their videos without their consent, and without telling them. This might be even more horrific and terrifying than the bribe. You can read about it here or watch the video of the creators in question talking about it here.
The short version is that YouTube used AI to “enhance” the videos of Rick Beato and Rhett Shull. YouTube used an AI smoothing filter that made the videos look like they were AI generated, and didn’t tell Beato, Shull, or their viewers that they were doing it. They only admitted to it after the two made videos proving it happened, later claiming it was only a “limited test.”
Their excuses are irrelevant. They’ve opened Pandora’s box; they’ve told the world that they can and will edit videos after they’ve been uploaded, and will not tell creators or viewers. You can’t trust anything you see on the site anymore, even from creators who do not use AI. Sure, it’s “just” an AI smoother today, but tomorrow they could put an ad straight in the video, or remove something they don’t like. Speaking of...
Good Old Fashioned Censorship
YouTube channel CyberCPU Tech posted a couple of videos showing how to get around Windows requiring a Microsoft account, and how to get around Windows 11’s hardware requirements. Neither of these things is against Microsoft’s terms of service and they’re completely legal. Yet YouTube removed both videos anyway. CyberCPU wasn’t told why there were taken down at first, he had to contact YouTube, and only after days of waiting did he get a (clearly AI-generated) response saying that the videos were a violation “of Harmful or Dangerous Content” rule, which “prohibits content that encourages or promotes behavior that encourages dangerous or illegal activities that risk serious physical harm or death”. That barely makes grammatical sense, much less common sense.
Worse still, journalists Nikita Mazurov and Jonah Valdez reported that YouTube removed over 700 videos documenting Israeli war crimes and human rights violations in Palestine.
YouTube has a long history censoring videos, but this feels more surgical, more insidious than past instances. Usually they demonetize a video. This means that not only does that video not generate ad revenue, but the site’s algorithm also doesn’t promote it or even place it in the subscription feeds of those subscribed to that channel. It’s rare, or at least it was rare, that they’d outright remove a video they didn’t like. It took years of campaigning to get YouTube to take down conspiracy videos and anti-vaxxer misinformation. Yet these videos were removed within days or weeks of being uploaded.
New Header Attempting Comic Relief WOOOOOOOO!!!!!
I cannot in good conscious continue to use a platform that is going out of its way to be a Saturday morning cartoon villain.
In a just world, at best, simply none of this would have happened. At worst, creators would unite and sue YouTube, winning easily. But this isn’t a just world, is it? So YouTube gets to do whatever they want, and most creators will accept it because there is no viable alternative.
Not me. From now on, all my new videos will be posted exclusively to Peertube. There are no ads, so I don’t make any money from these videos. I’ve uploaded some of my old YouTube videos to my Peertube and removed those from the YouTube account. In the future, I’ll be transferring more of my videos over and when that’s done, the YouTube channel itself will be deleted.
My old channel, Triple Iris, already has many of its videos on Peertube. I’ll be transferring videos over the next couple of months, and that YouTube channel will also be deleted when the process is complete.
I left Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and WordPress and I was fine. Something tells me leaving YouTube won’t be any different.
