In this eye-opening documentary, Alex Winter presents a thoughtful, troubling look at YouTube, a site with humble origins that has gone on to change how we experience the world.
Anyone who has at least heard of YouTube's history is going to know everything that's in this documentary. The YouTube Effect basically covers the brief history of the platform, it's influence and impact, plus it briefly talks about the alt-right pipeline that was especially kicking around during Gamergate and 2016.
The first bit is definitely the strongest you have some popular Youtubers such as Anthony Padilla (one of the faces of Smosh), the parents of Ryan from Ryan's Toy Reviews, Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints) and a few others. It's nice to see their perspective of how the site has changed since then and their reactions to their careers being as big as they are now.
The first chunk of The Youtube Effect is the basic history of the site, a few of the controversies such as the whole Google+ YouTube comment situation and a few others. But then the documentary switches to talking about GamerGate, 2016, the alt-right and BLM, which there is nothing wrong discussing these topics it's that the documentary feels like it doesn't really care for these topics.
They are brought up, talked about for a few minutes and then quickly discarded. Plus the information the documentary leaves the viewer about these subjects is very surface level and something that the average person will already know, there's tons of videos on YouTube already about these topics that go in great detail about their origins, goals and what they are/were about.
As far as filmmaking goes this is fine enough, there isn't anything too crazy or to write home about but it's competently made and decent enough to look at, overall if you at least know what YouTube is you are not going to get much out of this one. It's not a bad documentary just a very forgettable one that really doesn't have a whole lot to it.
The YouTube Effect is available on all VOD platforms.
5/10 C
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