Your rant is well justified. You hit on the biggest problem in the world: The whole world is broken to the core.
Yeah, I see bad things for the future. I have mentored many young people in my life. I actually ran a facility for over a decade that was focused on mentoring young people and teaching them real-life skills. It was kind of like a dude ranch. They learned all the basic skills, like cooking, financial budgeting, gardening, meat processing, repair skills (electrical, plumbing, mechanical, etc), health and nutrition, and many other basic life skills. But this newest generation seems to have no interest in learning anything like this. There is a national trend of younger people not even wanting to drive their own car, for example.
The issue is, I believe, they see no value in learning these things because, what they see valued the most in society is, for lack of a better term, silliness. Every day they see young people getting rich and famous for acting stupid and being unwise. They see people like Bella Poarch (Face Girl) that has become rich and famous doing nothing but making funny faces. They see people like Rhet and Link (Good Mythical Morning) become icons doing nothing but acting like idiots while doing a stupid food taste testing show. And the list of examples is almost endless.
We live in a society that worships gobbledegook and silliness and gives it the highest value, so why should they care about learning anything wise or practically, when you can become rich by literally doing stupid things and falling down and hurting yourself.
Don't get me wrong, I do not begrudge people becoming successful, regardless of what they do, but I think there is a serious imbalance of priorities as a society. It is like a said in my last post. I have never once seen YT even mention its DIY creators. YT constantly mentions and its soft content creators, and that is fine, but what about all creators that produce educational content that actually helps people? What about them? Honestly, if it was not for that type of content, I would never watch a single YT video.
It makes no sense to me from a logical standpoint. It seems like YT wants to promote the type of content that only teenagers would be interested in. (take the Shorts Fund for example:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPKT1sBQJm8
). Teenagers have no money to spend, and what they want to buy does not really cost that much. YT makes money from ads. Why target a demographic that has no money?
On my main channel (which is a DIY channel) my demographic of 95% male from the ages of 25 to 60. That channel earns an average of $8 per every 1000 views, with some videos making as much as $12 per 1000 views. It is not uncommon for me to see Toyota, Chevy, and Ford ads running on my videos. You really can't get better paying ads than those. What those ads tell me is that the Ad Mall has valued my content space as being worthy of the best ads.
Now, I have had a lot of discussions with gaming channel creators, and when I tell them about the ads that run on my content and the amount I earn per thousand views, their jaws drop in disbelief. Many of them feel great to earn $1 per 1000 views. This tells me that the Ad Mall does not value gaming channel ad space nearly as high as it does DIY channel content. So, logically speaking, you would want to drive traffic towards your best ad space, not your least valuable ad space.
The way my mind works, I view YT as a highway system and creators as billboard builders. Each video is a billboard on which YT can place ads to make money. YT controls the flow of traffic through search results and recommendations. It makes logical sense that they would want the traffic to go down the roads that have the highest paying ads on them. Shorts are not that road. Shorts make absolutely nothing in comparison to long-form content. Teen targeted content makes very little in comparison to content that targets a more mature audience that has stable jobs and the capability to buy big-ticket items.
I am just saying that this is how my brain works, not that I am right about everything I said. It is just what makes logical sense to me. What does not make logical sense to me is YT's obsession with Shorts and teen demographic targeted content and why they constantly are scalping views from the more valuable channels to drive that traffic towards the least valuable channels. Things that don't make sense to me, bother me. I am sure there is a rational explanation for why they are doing this, but I have never found anyone who knows what it is and can provide a well reasoned logical explanation for it.