As YouTube has gotten bigger, the broader and less high-minded appetites of the public have elbowed out the softer, gentler content of old. “YouTube used to be a place where the weirdos and the outcasts would go to find comfort and find their community,” says Joey Graceffa, a veteran creator who now stars in YouTube Premium’s Escape the Night. “Now…it’s almost like the popular kids kind of infiltrated our secret hideout.”

He meant, I think, the kind of big, noisy, brash Vine-to-YouTube émigrés who have come to define the latter site’s roughly third epoch. There are so many clearly staged prank videos and “look at my fancy cars” flexing videos now that it’s easy to forget that YouTube celebrity began with earnest kids on the edge of their beds. This new class of creators has infected YouTube with a witless braggadocio that has, on occasion, given way to real offense, such as the video Logan Paul posted after encountering the scene of a suicide. The mix of the (maybe) accidentally obscene and the silly has become a hallmark of the current YouTube. Paul got a lot of views, but they came with the revulsion of millions—especially when the story went mainstream. The outside world was suddenly paying attention, and it didn’t like what it saw.

While a lot of YouTube content is fun and eminently consumable, a lot of it is flimsy—at best. Sifting through all the pranks and rambling “story times,” the boyfriend challenges in which no one’s actually dating each other and the endless stream of person-tries-food videos, YouTube looks pretty weak next to the output of most traditional media. The laziness of many of YouTube’s biggest stars makes a viewer feel frustrated and helpless about the future of entertainment.

“We don’t get to decide what’s quality,” says Chris Wittine, an agent at CAA who represents popular creators. That was a chilling sentiment to absorb amid the clamor of the Hilton Anaheim, where the biggest talent was cordoned away from the masses and the riot of the convention. Wittine and many others insisted to me that the line between video content and TV or movies is ever blurring. That seems like more of a talking point than a reality when one compares YouTube to, say, Netflix’s output. But there is an undeniable sense of it as a soon-to-be totalizing force.

Eyeballs—and Burnout—at Scale

Ashlee Margolis runs The A List, a marketing company that connects brands with social media influencers. We spoke in her sprawling Beverly Hills showroom, skylighted and stuffed with products—shoes, dresses, bespoke cannabis paraphernalia—that creators will tout to their legions of followers.

“Some clients don’t want YouTubers,” Margolis says. “But we have slowly been convincing them: Trust us, the eyeballs are huge here if you want to convert to sales. If your demographic is the millennials, then this is where you have to be.” Therein may lie the answer to any existential pondering of this whole enterprise—like so much else that’s preceded it, the utility of YouTube can be boiled down to what it’s able to sell. Many top-tier creators are becoming extraordinarily wealthy under the gaze of all of those eyeballs. (Some buy Lamborghinis. Others just let their new, nicer homes hang in the background, a subtle acknowledgment of what digital fame has afforded them.)