In a recent video titled “If I Started a YouTube Channel in 2025, I Would Do This,” (Love 2023) American YouTuber Maya Love (457,000 subscribers as of March 26, 2025) unintentionally captures something essential about YouTube's role in youth culture today. First, Love’s channel neatly illustrates why YouTube remains so influential among younger users (ages 15–24). The platform offers an appealing promise: upload your videos, build a following, and maybe even make a living. Love’s aesthetic—consistent thumbnails with bold, uppercase titles and stylized, attention-grabbing photos—is by now instantly recognizable. It's no wonder becoming a ‘YouTuber’ is now a common aspiration, attractive to young people worldwide—whether in the Global North or South. Second, and perhaps more fascinatingly, Love’s video highlights another crucial, if overlooked, aspect of YouTube’s popularity. Since emerging from obscurity in the mid-2000s as a niche site, YouTube has evolved into a complex and peculiar hybrid: on one hand, it’s a community-driven digital space shaped by user creativity; on the other, it’s a commercially engineered platform, governed by algorithms, where data is currency (Snickars and Vonderau 2009). Yet it is precisely this tension—between community and commerciality—that makes YouTube a key facilitator of participatory culture in the digital age (Burgess and Green 2009). 

As YouTube turns 20 in 2025—a youthful milestone for a person, but a remarkably seasoned one for a digital platform—it’s striking to see how it has become a vast repository of practical, everyday knowledge. From the mundane, like fixing footnotes/endnotes separator lines in Microsoft Word (Edwards 2021), to more complex tasks such as filing a tax return using a third party software (Lee 2024), YouTube has quietly positioned itself as the go-to guide for life’s small and not-so-small challenges. There is something fascinatingly generous about many of these contributions. People invest time, energy, and effort into creating and sharing videos, even when there’s no immediate financial benefit. This willingness to share knowledge freely, and without clear reward, is something I call epistemic altruism.

Of course, we cannot and should not be naïve about the economics of YouTube. Like any Silicon Valley big tech platform, it incentivizes users to chase ad revenue by creating content the algorithm favors. Many creators are clearly motivated primarily by these monetary returns. Yet financial incentive alone doesn’t fully explain the platform’s abundance of tutorials and guides uploaded by users who lack any obvious commercial ambition. Consider, for instance, that obscure yet helpful video showing exactly how to fix those irritating footnote/endnote formatting issues in Word. Its creator isn’t a professional YouTuber, doesn’t regularly post slick, algorithm-optimized content, and likely isn’t monetizing at all. Instead, the video emerged from a common human scenario: someone struggling to solve a frustrating problem and then generously sharing the solution in case someone else out there needed help.

To borrow from the intro of the classic 1980s series The A-Team (NBC, 1983–1987): “If you have a problem, and no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team.” In 2025, this might be rephrased: “If you have a problem, and no one around you has the expertise, it’s likely someone on YouTube already solved it.” Often, to my surprise, even the most obscure problems find answers on YouTube—answers given freely, with little thought of monetization. This phenomenon, more than anything else, reveals the subtle but powerful force of epistemic altruism on the contemporary screen media landscape.

To be fair, epistemic altruism isn’t without its quirks. It occasionally produces videos that seem entirely devoid of instructional value. Take, for example, Indonesian YouTuber Cak Bogang and his channel ayo dolen. One of his most viral videos, “Tutorial Tidak Melakukan Apa Apa”/“A Tutorial for Doing Nothing” (Bogang 2019), has garnered more than 543,000 views since it was uploaded on October 6, 2019. In it, Bogang simply sits in a quiet corner, sipping coffee and gazing at the sky, accompanied by a deadpan voiceover that perfectly mimics the earnest style of an actual tutorial. We might interpret Bogang’s video as a postmodern parody, cleverly critiquing the explosion of tutorials on YouTube. Indeed, the success of his “Tutorial for Doing Nothing” inspired copycat videos, including similarly absurd tutorials made by teenagers on prosaic tasks—such as putting on slippers (Tutorial Selengek’an 2019) or, learning how to breathe air “for beginners” (JAS Official 2021). On one level, these spinoffs might simply represent creators attempting to capitalize on the tutorial trend to drive subscriber counts and viewer engagement. But on another level, they reflect something deeper: a humorous yet pointed reflection on epistemic altruism itself.

This reflexive turn in online video culture invites comparisons with earlier forms of media—particularly television, the original ‘tube’. Recall how Seinfeld famously presented itself as “a show about nothing.” Like Seinfeld, these satirical YouTube tutorials draw attention to the absurdity of everyday life. Yet, beyond entertainment, these videos from Indonesian YouTube content creators also embody more serious sociological themes. Specifically, they gesture toward the precarious economic realities facing young people in the Global South. Tutorials on ‘doing nothing’ resonate with experiences of pengangguran (unemployment) and the anxieties of youth forced to navigate life at society’s margins, implicitly critiquing the instability and pressures of the gig economy. 

When Frans de Waal published The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society back in 2009, Western societies were grappling with severe crises—the financial meltdown, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, to name just two. De Waal observed that in these dark moments, when institutions faltered and governments seemed coldly indifferent, ordinary people often stepped forward, driven by compassion. Empathy, he argued, was more fundamental—and perhaps more widespread—than our institutions typically acknowledged.

I’m generally skeptical of sweeping labels that aim to define an entire era—partly because they tend to originate from Western-centric viewpoints, overlooking the diverse realities of people in the Global South. But perhaps de Waal was onto something important, at least on a smaller, more human scale. Seen through this lens, YouTube might quietly be contributing to such an "age of empathy," despite all the noise and complications of the attention economy. Specifically, the concept epistemic altruism—the sharing of practical knowledge online, often without any obvious reward—might represent empathy at its most subtle and everyday. Certainly, most YouTube creators seek some kind of payoff—more views, more likes, more followers. But plenty do not. They simply want to solve a small frustration or help someone else facing the same problem. Another example is the Italian man who bought a Dyson hairdryer in the US, only to discover he couldn’t plug it in back home due to voltage differences. He didn’t monetize the fix, nor was he chasing subscribers; he simply uploaded a brief video showing an easy solution. Small acts like these, repeated millions of times across YouTube, suggest that epistemic altruism might indeed be nudging us, one video at a time, toward something resembling de Waal’s more empathetic society—quietly, imperfectly, but meaningfully.

My point is this: We cannot disregard YouTube’s affordances in facilitating the emergence and flourishing of epistemic altruism, driven by youth creativity and socio-economic precarity in our screen media-saturated society—even if it inevitably comes packaged with the good, the bad, and the ugly of the attention economy.

Introductory Notes to Our Theme Week

In this week’s theme of In Media Res, we explore and reflect the relationship between YouTube and youth in the Global North and South in various contexts and on different aspects of life for youth, twenty years after YouTube launched its ‘first video’ on April 23, 2005. In her contribution, Alessandra Seggi analyzes the music video for Logic’s 1-800-273-8255, which has garnered over 454 million views on YouTube. She argues that the video plays a vital role in destigmatizing suicidality and queer masculinity, fostering solidarity among viewers affected by suicide. Seggi contends that such emotionally resonant engagement would have been far less likely in the era of traditional mass media. Next, Frans Ari Prasetyo turns to the viral Blue Screen resistance video, a visual symbol of the ‘Indonesia Darurat’ protests. The video features a static blue screen labeled Peringatan Darurat (“Emergency Alert”), accompanied by audio that echoes state television broadcasts from the Suharto’s New Order era. Prasetyo argues that its minimalist irony and symbolic charge helped spark widespread youth-led protests in August 2024—the largest since the fall of Suharto in 1998. He shows how YouTube has become a vital tool for digital dissent in the Global South through the case of Indonesia, enabling new forms of collective resistance led by youth and strategically leveraging participatory media. Then, Sean Martin-Iverson explores the theme of “20 Years of YouTube and Youth” through the case of Manusia Buatan, a ‘Youth Crew’ band in Indonesia’s straight edge hardcore punk scene. He examines how the DIY ethos of YouTube continues to shape independent music communities, revealing how these scenes navigate the contradictions of platform capitalism. Martin-Iverson also points to the video’s scrappy aesthetic, which conveys a sense of “liveness” and authenticity—qualities that both reflect and challenge the stylized intimacy often seen in more aspirational uses of YouTube. Finally, Dag Yngvesson analyzes a satirical video by YouTuber @3wayasiska, a parody of Punxgoaran’s punk anthem “Sayur Kol” (‘Cabbage’), which originally references dog meat as an aphrodisiac. In the parody, camel meat takes its place, humorously “Islamicizing” the lyrics while critiquing the Arabization of local Islamic culture. Yngvesson uses the video to explore how parody and platform-native humor engage with questions of globalization, religion, and youth expression in the new screen media landscape. 

References 

Bogang, Cak. 2019. “Tutorial Tidak Melakukan Apa Apa.” YouTube. October 6, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4mwzh8HKuM&t=1s.

Burgess, Jean, and Joshua Green. 2009. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. 1st edition. Cambridge: Polity.

Edwards, Vicky. 2021. “Footnotes/Endnote Separator Line - Word 2010/2016.” YouTube. May 15, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDK4axHIvxQ&t=7s.

JAS Official. 2021. “Tutorial Cara Bernafas Bagi Pemula.” YouTube. March 5, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp5uhrdhsKI.

Lee, Becca. 2024. “2024 TurboTax Tutorial for Beginners | Complete Walk-Through | How To File Your Own Taxes.” YouTube. January 7, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrpDbrHoc1w.

Love, Maya. 2023. “If I Started a YouTube Channel in 2025, I Would Do This...” YouTube. December 22, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCDYiuaCDow.

Snickars, Pelle, and Patrick Vonderau. 2009. The YouTube Reader. Mediehistoriskt Arkiv 12. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden.

Tutorial Selengek’an. 2019. “Tutorial Memakai Sandal Jepit Buat Pemula.” YouTube. July 1, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdhYzq5c9Mc.