> I'm definitely looking at it from rose colored glasses
It's not rose tinted glasses, it's just a poor comparison.
The absolute vast majority of these videos have double digit if not any views. You're seeking them out, using a little quirk of naming and the poster's DGAFism. There is no pretense of promotion to a large audience or virality. Anything spoonfed you on a Tiktok or Instagram feed could not be more different. The default Youtube experience is the same as mass Tiktok. Moreover you can find plenty of similar material like this on Instagram and Tiktok if you go looking for it, that is after all what most people are using it for, bumming around with their friends. The algorithm isn't going to spoonfeed this to you, and obviously Youtube never did either.
I believe Reddit in particular actually has gotten much more optimized in the past 15 years. I don't think this is rose colored glasses, the content really is much more engaging and addictive, with more short form videos and content that can be understood immediately at a glance.
This may be so, but I don’t know how it counters the fact that there is more essentially unwatched and obscure content produced on these platforms than ever.
And it's not like this particular content was once popular in the "good old days", the view counts are literally 0 in some cases.
It's not rose tinted glasses, it's just a poor comparison.
The absolute vast majority of these videos have double digit if not any views. You're seeking them out, using a little quirk of naming and the poster's DGAFism. There is no pretense of promotion to a large audience or virality. Anything spoonfed you on a Tiktok or Instagram feed could not be more different. The default Youtube experience is the same as mass Tiktok. Moreover you can find plenty of similar material like this on Instagram and Tiktok if you go looking for it, that is after all what most people are using it for, bumming around with their friends. The algorithm isn't going to spoonfeed this to you, and obviously Youtube never did either.