> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://ninja-pigeon.pikapod.net/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The website that changed our lives - and additional thoughts on content moderation - URL: https://ninja-pigeon.pikapod.net/the-website-that-changed-our-lives-and-additional-thoughts-on-content-moderation/ - Published: 2026-02-11T09:23:57.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-24T11:08:16.000Z - Author: zhuoyanakl - Tags: media and politics, technology, #Migrated-1787569658619, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-08-24 11:07 YouTube. The website that changed our lives was YouTube. I'll explain. People of my generation (early-Gen Z) will relate to this and a little earlier or later may not. ![](https://ninja-pigeon.pikapod.net/content/images/2026/08/cleanshot-2026-02-07-at-19-28-32-2x.png) I've just finished the book *Like, Comment, Subscribe: How YouTube Drives Google's Dominance and Controls Our Culture* by Bloomberg journalist Mark Bergen. In it, he lays out the rise of one of, if not the greatest, cultural forces of the 21st century Internet. It has me reflecting not only on the impacts of this website on society, but on me personally, and my peers who grew up on what was once the wild west of online video. Enough of us had unrestrained internet access through the 2010s, where this one lossmaking website had as much influence as the TV2 afternoon kids block. *Sidenote: NZ has always been behind the times on TV channels, so "basic cable" culture doesn't exist here in the same way it did in the US, where kids channels took off in the late-1980s. I wonder how that affects nostalgia for properties like Disney Channel or Nickelodeon, which were locked behind a satellite and an expensive Sky subscription for most people*. *It wasn't very widely accessible even as compared to the UK's Sky or Australia's Foxtel*. I'm happy to have grown up in this era of the Internet. When you could watch a YouTuber and also Carly Shay and Sam Puckett, when culture fundamentally didn't orbit around internet dynamics 24 hours a day, and where real-life culture and meme-y internet culture weren't the same thing (Yes I liked iCarly too). *Sidenote: iCarly itself is such a funny representation of what television producers \*thought\* Internet culture would become - Quinton Reviews' 10-hour rewatches of this show are fun.* YouTube was established enough to be a daily habit for so many of us, but where it still felt like this separate, slightly chaotic space separate from "real life" and mainstream pop culture. And - so many of my passing interests, passions, pre-fixations and hobbies can be traced back to what was happening on YouTube in the early to mid to late 2010s. Gadgets, new technology, old technology, weird niches, being an early adopter, being curious about the world, Thomas The Tank toys, politics, Minecraft videos, the scepticism community, branding, design, my agnostic atheism, a healthy dose of scepticism for mainstream media, 9/11 conspiracy videos before they were pulled off the site, Internet drama, journalism, TV idents, Jon Stewart, television news graphics, tech(!). They all by and large can be traced back to blogs and YouTube videos and tweets and a kid left with too much time on the internet with no restrictions. Part of my exposure to so much so early I think has helped me grapple with the things I think about now in a critical and useful way. There's a lot of moments in Bergen's book where people within the YouTube machine and Google machine grapple with what it means to control a platform that comes to closest to collecting every passing bit of visual ephemera that people film and produce, and then subsequently having the captive attention of almost anyone with a fast enough internet connection. YouTube has and will continue to be chaotic, unstructured, and uh \*frequently\* problematic, but incredibly formative in ways that traditional institutions never could have been. It certainly was for me when it created these strange paths through information that let you build connections across interests and niches. **Now what?** For Kiwi kids, YouTube made us less isolated. Growing up in New Zealand once meant being perpetually six months to two years behind on everything. Online video and online culture collapsed the gap almost completely. I was watching the same videos as kids in New York or London, usually on the same day they were uploaded. For the first time, we were participating in the same cultural moments at the same time as everyone else. An anecdote of this with me was staying up to install Casey Neistat's short lived Beme social media app in 2015\. As it turns out, I didn't have as interesting a life as he did. But now we seem to be yawing to an opposite place. My brother speaks with an American-ish accent that I can only attribute to his even greater amounts of screen time and online video. [He's not alone in this](https://northandsouth.co.nz/2022/02/25/new-zealand-accent-changing-why-children-sound-american/?ref=ninja-pigeon.pikapod.net). Spending your life on YouTube makes you familiar with American politics, American consumer culture, American references that meant nothing here. I knew about Target and Walmart and Taco Bell years before any of them existed in New Zealand. I'm not sure this was entirely good. I'm glad I grew up when I did - after online video was invented but before it effectively became everything. There was something useful about experiencing it as a separate space, a weird corner of the internet that existed alongside normal life rather than replacing it. Kids now don't have that separation. For them, YouTube isn't an alternative to traditional media - it's just media. I don't know if that's better or worse. But it's definitely different. ## What it means now YouTube is now just part of the infrastructure of culture. It's not an alternative - it's where culture happens. It's replaced a lot of what would've been television viewing for anyone under 30 and is working on replacing it for everyone else. Bergen's book makes clear that nobody at YouTube or Google really planned for this. They built a video hosting site and it accidentally became a cultural hegemony. The people running it have been improvising the whole time, trying to manage something that grew far beyond what they designed it to do. The clearest example of that is in moderation. That was also one of my biggest takeaways from the book. After all, much of the book was a recount to me. I lived through the biggest moments - Pewdiepie, the Adpocalypse, Elsagate, etc. Much of the drama on these online platforms comes from what is and isn't allowed. Bergen's book was released in 2022 during (what was at the time) the lows of Trump and MAGA relevancy and while the Biden White House had seemingly restored some norms of US political sanity at the executive and regulatory level. In other words, the book ends on a note of optimism that things are (maybe?) getting better. In 2020, Covid-19 gave many governments a good excuse to overpower concerns about speech regulation and to take direct coercive action against online platforms to quell wrong health information - opening up a can of worms for content moderators. Then following the January 6 riots at the Capitol, Donald Trump - who was at that point still the most powerful person in the free world - was banned from virtually every online platform for spreading election fraud lies. This was perhaps the peak of Facebook, Twitter and Google attempting to portray themselves as contentious upstanding actors when it came to content moderation, and having regard for reducing the apparent harms of misinformation. The Wikipedia page for *The Oversight Board,* Meta's supreme court of content moderation, established in 2020, still claims it "makes consequential precedent-setting content moderation decisions on Facebook and Instagram, in a form of 'platform self-governance'." This is all no longer the case. Five years later - little remains. Twitter is now owned by Elon Musk, a self-annointed "free speech absolutist" who gets mad at you if [you use the word cis](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/06/30/cisgender-twitter-musk-suspension/?ref=ninja-pigeon.pikapod.net). Meta reviewed its position following the Biden presidency and changed its north star. It may have always struggled to police hate speech and dangerous lies on its platform, but now it was being clear that [it didn't care and you shouldn't either](https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-mark-zuckerberg-announces-major-changes-to-metas-content-moderation-policies-and-operations/?ref=ninja-pigeon.pikapod.net) about fixing it. The explosion of generative text-to-image models means police dispatchers can no longer trust that photos they see weren't generated by a 11 year old with too much time on their hands. ![](https://ninja-pigeon.pikapod.net/content/images/2026/08/cleanshot-2026-02-11-at-22-23-22-2x.png) All of this is to say that the story of content moderation and the story of the sustainability of these platforms are still a story being written, and one where drastic shifts are still possible in the technological and political environment. This blog post has meandered a bit, but that's sort of my thoughts on the subject in general.