[ben_w]

That claim of environmental impact is just incorrect when it comes to the junk content.

The bad ones are barely watched; sitting on a hard drive after getting transcoded isn't an environmental disaster.

You could try to argue that popular culture is fundamentally bad; people have been saying that about TV when I was a kid, dance music before that, novels in the 1800s, Christmas in Puritan New England, and the Olympics in ancient Rome.

The people tend to disagree.

[9dev]

That isn’t true, even just accounting for people expecting the same speed and quality for fringe videos, delivered to mobile devices in any corner of the world, requires mountains of technology.

It’s not that popular culture is bad, it’s that a wasteful way of living isn’t sustainable, and it’s beginning to erode the foundations of our lives.

[ben_w]

Sounds like you're shifting the goalposts from "youtube is bad" to "the internet is bad" in the first paragraph, and then in the second paragraph to "everything after the start of the first industrial revolution is also sus".