Slowly yet steadily my Youtube recommendations have got an enormous amount of youtubers «selling» productivity and self-development content. Each of them started really well and interesting, but as their audiences grew their content strategy transformed into a quite simple clickbait story.
To my opinion, it’s important to not get hooked into all of that. Here’s why.
When I’m watching one of such videos it actually does sound pretty inspiring, trustworthy and valuable. So it’s not surprising why these creators get so popular in a very short period of time. The tricky part here is that their messages are often super trivial and high-level, therefore the videos are easy and fun to watch. In the meantime, the essence of the videos is then getting compensated by neat production with clickbait headlines and thumbnails. As a result, I’m always tempted to click a link fast and feel like I’m not simply wasting my time on Youtube but rather attending a self-development session, as short and non-sense it may be.
Nevertheless, whatever the positioning, it doesn’t necessarily mean that all of such content is pointless. Some parts can actually be life-changing for lots of people. The problem with self-development-oriented stuff on the Internet is that we actually don’t have time to dig through tons of shit looking for tiny useful and valuable things. And that’s quite a bummer. It means though that a proper information diet has to be put in place in order to keep a clear state of mind and have the necessary sharpness of thinking. Otherwise, it is going to be easy to get ourselves drowning in a low-value digital noise.
My personal rule of thumb is now the following: if a content sounds clickbait-y, it’s safer to skip it. The stuff with some real value will find you anyway through personal recommendatios of people you know and whose opinion you value.