The elephant in the tube

Time, content and media: 20 years of YouTube and us

Apr 23, 2025

A little more than 20 years ago, Jawed Karim wanted to watch videos of two events that had just dominated global headlines:

Janet Jackson’s infamous Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction” (2004)
The catastrophic Indian Ocean tsunami (2004)

But he couldn’t find either online. Nothing. No easy clips. No shareable footage. No digital archive to feed his curiosity.

A few months later (and precisely 20 years ago), someone else posted a short video about elephants at the zoo. He looked into the camera and said, flatly: “The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks.”

That 18-second clip wasn’t just a trip to the zoo. It was the beginning of YouTube and a revolution of our online life, media consumption and creation.

Ok, this is definitely the short version. Yet, it makes the point.

Now, to be fair, YouTube wasn’t the first online video platform. Others like Metacafe and Vimeo were already floating around.

But in those early days, uploading a video online was about as straightforward as launching a weather satellite. Clunky codecs, weird download prompts, compatibility issues - the early internet was allergic to ease.

That’s why Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim - ex-PayPal employees - launched YouTube around a single, deceptively simple idea: Make it dead easy to upload and share videos.

They caught a wave of just-in-time technical changes:

Adobe Flash let videos play right in the browser — no downloads, no stress, no concern about the right codec. It just worked.
Embedding made it possible to spread videos across forums, blogs, and MySpace profiles. Every embedded clip was another stake in the ground.
Broadband had reached about 50% of U.S. households. And digital cameras were finally decent enough to shoot not-entirely-awful footage.

So YouTube launched, burned through money, got acquired by Google, and then — quietly, steadily — rewired our entire relationship with media over the past 20 years.

And so, people - and companies, too - began familiarising with this new platform. But YouTube wasn’t just another tool for watching media. It was something else entirely: a gateway to new habits, a catalyst that made it easy not only to watch videos but to create them, too.

It kicked off a quiet revolution - one that changed how we consume video online, and also reshaped our entire relationship with culture, news, and content at large.

So much so, in fact, that the slow, then sudden overtaking of television began years ago - and by now, it’s largely complete.

What YouTube has meant (and still means), how it’s rewired our sense of time, reprogrammed our media diet, and why it remains a singular force in the online ecosystem - all of that is what this edition of Artifacts is about.

The Story

The revolution YouTube triggered is right there in the name:

“You” puts the viewer (or creator) at the center — a nod to agency, to personal control over media. You are in charge of what you watch and what you could create.
“Tube” is a throwback to the cathode-ray TVs of yore, and the kind of content YouTube would gradually devour.

In other words, your own television or, at least, media channel.

the original YouTube iPhone icon : r/nostalgia — Apple got it right?

Besides the “Tube”, it’s the “You” that’s the real pivot of YouTube’s revolution — the part that touches at least two crucial domains: time and content.

On the time front, YouTube triggered the shift from scheduled programming to infinite scroll.

Before YouTube (and the broader internet-as-archive), media was ephemeral. TV aired and disappeared. News ran and vanished. Events were linear and irreversible. Now, we live in an endless present.

Put simply, we no longer need to sync our lives to catch a particular show — we watch at our convenience. It’s obvious now, but it was a major shift back then (we only had it with DVDs etc.)

Broadly speaking, YouTube has, thus, reorganised our relationship to time, attention, and even memory online.

Think of the “Save for Later” button - yes, the one we click before tossing content into a limbo we’ll likely never return to. Yet that button says it all: the schedule is no longer king, and our attention is now modular, flexible, and tailored to our whims.

Set aside the downsides for a second - this is a clear sign of what the internet at large has become: a searchable, external, prosthetic memory where everything is permanently accessible in hindsight.

So, yes, there’s a flood of stuff happening in real time (just scroll up and check how many hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute), but we know it’ll be there later. We’ve created a backlog of the now. Present Shock is a great read on this.

It’s an enormous opportunity - we can consume better, deeper, smarter - but also a breeding ground for procrastination and (digital) laziness.

Inevitably, the time element feeds into the content side.

YouTube empowered a shift from audience as passive consumer to audience as active creator. Want to join the conversation? Fire up your camera — your content can be online in minutes.

But even if we’re not up for being creators, we still have far more agency than we ever had with television. We’re no longer stuck watching what the networks serve up - we actively choose what we want to engage with, from an endless buffet of creators.

And that’s a big deal. It’s not just about indulging our interests; it’s about carving out niches, diving deep into weird and wonderful subcultures - as my friend Gio aptly put it while brainstorming this Artifacts.

We all know people who learned to cook on YouTube. Or code. Or fish. Or anything else you can think of.

That said, we should take the “actively” part with a pinch of salt.

YouTube’s recommender algorithm plays a huge role in shaping what we see - and, likely, what we end up caring about. Positively framed, it helps us with curiosity; less charitably, it nudges us into filter bubbles.

So yes, algorithmic inference drives discovery. But it doesn’t kill agency entirely - especially because the bond with creators tends to be stronger here than on most other platforms.

finally found out how to generate consistent pics!

And that’s precisely why, despite its TikTokification (Shorts and all), YouTube still stands apart.

It’s not a social network in the traditional sense - and probably doesn’t want to be.

For one, the ways we access it are far more diverse than with other platforms: not just smartphones, but laptops and, increasingly, televisions.

(According to YouTube, TV is now the primary device for watching YouTube in the United States, surpassing mobile!)

But it goes further than that. The engagement mechanics are softer. You don’t need an account to watch videos. And even those who do have accounts rarely post — instead, they use them to organise and curate their interests and favourite creators.

Not surprisingly, indeed, despite being among the most used platforms globally, the rate of active daily users is much lower than the others. We go there when we need, not to doomscrooll.

In complex terms, there’s virtually no social graph. But that’s not a bug - it’s a feature. We’re there more for the content than to socialise. And that can raise the bar on what we watch.

Finally, and this matters: unlike television, and unlike most social media, content on YouTube doesn’t vanish after a few hours. It lives on for years. It keeps circulating, being discovered, and being useful.

So yes, YouTube continues to chart its own course — not quite social media, but something well beyond television. It profits from transcending time, while staying a platform for quality content, created by the very people who use it.

Not too bad for what started with someone looking for some videos online and some cool elephants.