My YouTube Recap is boring!
If you're going to make a Spotify Wrapped clone, at least make it interesting.
Today’s issue of PHONE TIME includes: my YouTube Recap made me sad, Partiful’s new “Cards” feature, and here’s what the Old Farmer’s Almanac website looked like in 1996.
Earlier this month, YouTube rolled out a new “Recap” feature, in a similar stories format as Spotify Wrapped.
“You’ll get a set of up to 12 different cards that spotlight your top channels, interests, and even the evolution of your viewing habits, or which personality type you fall into based on the videos you loved to watch!” product manager Manthra Panchapakesan wrote in a company blog post.
I clicked through mine. While I admittedly don’t care much about Spotify Wrapped or any of the other year-in-review knockoffs that have come out in the past few years, I thought my YouTube Recap fell particularly flat.
The recap starts with an overview of your top interests and channels. It then gives three summarizing adjectives based on your activity. Mine were “cultured,” “observant,” and “tech-savvy.” It then gives you a personality type—mine was “The Connector”—and a “YouTube award.”
Bored? I was too. The generic copy felt like a combination of LinkedIn buzzwords and horoscopes that make you think, “Yeah, I guess that sounds like me.” My watched content apparently shows “an interest in connecting with others,” which I’m not sure is a distinctive personality trait as much as a universal human desire.
YouTube also recently unlisted all of its past YouTube Rewind videos. You can still view them from the links, but they no longer appear in search results or on the YouTube channel. In a statement to Mashable, a spokesperson said “As our 20th birthday year comes to a close, we’ve decided to blow out our Rewind candles. It was a great tradition, but we have new ways to close out the year in style.” The statement linked to a 2021 post on YouTube’s X account, stating “We no longer feel that a single video YouTube creates can reflect the full breadth of our creator community” and adding that the baton would be passed to creators. It also linked to an end-of-year trend report.
The decision to unlist videos that were such key chroniclers of YouTube’s history, up until the poor reception of the 2018 and 2019 Rewinds, is confusing and even sad to me. The fact that the viewer-oriented Rewinds have been replaced with yearly trend reports tailored to marketers or for press coverage, rather than the larger YouTube community, is further salt in the wound.
As YouTube pointed to in the 2021 X post, it becomes harder to encapsulate a year on the platform as the community has grown overtime and fractured into endless communities, each with their own central characters and events. But the replacing of something that was, although imperfect, full of actual people, with an easily digestible but sterile recap is a reminder of how human expertise and craft—and all the resources and time that they require—have been boxed out in many internet spaces.
Elsewhere online
I loved this obituary for Farmers’ Almanac by Greta Rainbow in Study Hall.
“A reading experience defined by cramped serif text and a flip-flop between esoteric content and brick-and-mortar business ads is trippy compared to the reigning analytical prediction mode of the moment—that is, bot-generated feed waste,” Rainbow writes.
The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which is a different thing, is still going strong! Here’s what the website looked like in 1996.
I think all webpages should have an advice of the day feature. / Via the Wayback Machine The Oscars will move to YouTube starting in 2029, which is news I will forget about for at least two and a half years.
I’m always interested in tech companies’ investments into offline life (which then gets posted online). Earlier this month Partiful hosted a retro holiday photo session at The Flower Shop NYC. The event was to celebrate the launch of Cards, a feature for sending small digital cards.
