Seriously, I hate YouTube. Not the videos, but more of the stupid idiots on it. One of the top subscribed channels is a teenager (it might not be one though) who thinks it’s funny to speak in a high pitched video like a six year old. If you think kids who obviously haven’t been taking enough Ritalin for the day are not quite on the edge of completely stupidity, there’s always What The Buck. A grown man who talks about gossip for the day, that’s cool, right? You’d never have to read TMZ again! Wait, what is it with him and teen stars?

Let’s not go there.

YouTube is like the Special Olympics. Only the dumbasses need apply. Since its creation in 2005, the creators wanted to have a site to share videos and expand tastes. What tastes, exactly? If not the videos, half the comments on ANY video are trollish, spammy, or plain stupid. You’d think the entire community was run by 12 year olds on Dexedrine and/or suffering from a case of narcissism. We end up with videos and channels that are so popular, but you find out that the channels suck, and the subscribers are complete retards anyway.

What happened to user-generated content from the old days? Now everyone online is either lurking or being a total dumbass. 4chan is unbelievably popular, Twitter is now overrun by jerks who don’t know what it was originally about (thanks a lot, mainstream media). If you want artistic videos that refined people are into, you go to Vimeo. If you want to look at good photography, skip deviantART (only emo teens go there anyway) and hit Flickr, or heck, for even more awesomeness, go to any Smugmug page. You’ll love it.

Unfortunately, Andrew Keen was right. His prophecies about how Web 2.0 was going to be a liability and would inevitably become a total failure was correct. I used to pass his stories off as nonsense, but the more I look at the videos on YouTube, past the music videos and the game videos and the rare video that doesn’t suck, you end up in a core. A core dominated by losers. His talk may be too elitist for us normal folk, but you get the idea. Web 2.0, founded by the idea of community, has been taken for granted. The normal, mainstream media like CNN and the New York Times have been pushed out in favor of substandard… content. But then again, since anyone with a computer, camera, phone, can use the Internet and its wonderful Web 2.0 stuff, we see a lot of it. So instead of having good quality content from few, we instead decide to consume bad to mediocre quality media from pretty much anyone who is connected to the Internet.

User-generated content in the future, if it continues this path, will be filled with doom and madness. Imagine the remake to The Day the Earth Stood Still. Then imagine it even worse (and shaky camera, to compensate for amateur budgets). Then imagine that same video all over the Web. YouTube will be even worse than it is now, and there will be thousands of people who will enjoy it. Blogs will either be spam or just really terrible. Twitter will have no more smart people on it, basically giving it to the people who find the trend #thingsaftersex extremely riveting. The last remaining places on the Internet with people who are even a little bit smart will be herded into the more specialized sites, such as Slashdot, Flickr, Vimeo, and… some other places. Porn will be only amateur BDSM on the Internet, meaning Hustler will actually make money again.

So how can we fix this? Basically, we can’t. The best thing that can happen is if more sites started charging. No, not like how newspapers charge you to read an article online. But if user-generated content dependent sites charge maybe a nominal fee to weed out the kids. Like MetaFilter charges $5 to get rid of the spammers, trolls, and the kids. After all, trolls don’t usually do their thing when they have to pay for it. And besides, YouTube could definitely use the pruning. Blogs should be kept around, but whoever writes yet another post about their adorable cat will be shot and hung on the side of a bridge. But most sites will never do this, claming it will mean a drop in users. Now, if this means a drop of people who find both Fred and huffing paint interesting, I think that’s a risk worth taking right there. But of course, they need to have big numbers to show advertisers.

Pretty much that’s the only way to do it. You can’t really do much else to weed out the people who you don’t like online. The best thing you can do is suck it up and live with it, knowing deep down you are better than Fred, Michael Buckley, Kevjumba, iJustine, Chris Pirillo, and your neighbor online. Who knows? You could make a video about it anyway.

Part one in a series of articles that may or may not get me into a magazine gig.