Hello internet!

Welcome to Film Theory, where we're part of the problem.

So, have you guys seen Mr. Beast's latest video? At this point, that's kind of a legitimate question.

Because despite being the number one channel and all of his videos raking in hundreds of millions of views,

there's a non-zero chance that, no, you haven't seen it. How about Ryan Trahan?

Airac. Mr. Who's the Boss? These guys are consistently some of the most watched creators on the platform right now.

Drawn in millions of views with each upload.

Are they showing up on your homepage?

For a big chunk of you, I guess the answer is no.

And I know this because I do actively watch their stuff.

And they're not showing up for me. For some reason, their videos just aren't ones that YouTube's algorithms are recommending to me.

But you've noticed this, right? YouTube is different this year. Recommendations feel different.

Older videos are cropping up, there's more shorts everywhere, smaller creators are getting more visibility, and the things that you're being recommended are more tied to what you've searched for or watched recently.

I mean, I watched the Hot Ones interview with musician Dave Grohl and YouTube thinks I'm obsessed with drumming.

I'm getting recommended drummer covers and drummer reviews and drummer lore.

Did you even know that there was drummer lore?

Cause let me tell ya, there is!

Basically what's going on here is that this year has seen some massive changes on the platform, which merits a whole separate conversation unto itself, but the long and short of it is that my YouTube doesn't look like your YouTube anymore.

You know what really proved this one to me? Skibbitty Toilet. Seriously.

True story, I was recently talking to a big room of Google's higher-ups and I asked him if they'd ever seen a Skibbitty toilet video.

You know, that insanely popular series of viral shorts that's gotten over 35 million subscribers

and 12 billion views on their platform in the last five months alone, not a single person

...