You can read Wikipedia and make a living

There are few people that influenced me like no other on the web. When I discovered Joel Spolsky, I read a couple posts, then went back in time and started reading his blog chronologically. There was 8 years worth of material for me to go through. I clicked on links and discovered Jeff Atwood along the way. Here again, I read the blog chronologically. Today, we get one post a year from them if we’re lucky. But then again, the world has moved away from blogs.

If you want to get the same caliber of information, YouTube is where it’s at. Here I have my trusted channels. Vsauce, despite not uploading for years at a time, has a trove of material that was built up over the years, making the channel timeless. When I wear my hobbyist hat, I watch DIY Perks and Ben Eater. These are channels you can rewatch whenever you want to work on a project. For entertainment, there’s Captain Disillusion. For history, Oversimplified. These are all channels that barely upload. But what they produce is timeless. Oh, and Tom Scott… and 3Blue1Brown.

All this to say, there are quality channels on YouTube that provide unparalleled sources of information. But at the same time, YouTube is a cesspool of regurgitated pink slime. Worse yet, it’s getting harder to distinguish well-researched videos from the cesspool. I was recently looking into The Line, the futuristic city being built in Saudi Arabia. I stumbled upon the channel Megaprojects by Simon Whistler. It provided some information, but I felt like it was missing something. Then I found another video by Patrick Boyle that was right up my alley.

Now, every time I open YouTube, I see a picture of Simon Whistler, but to my surprise, it’s a different channel. Simon looks like a knowledgeable, professional guy. If you listen to him passively, you fall into the trap of thinking you’re learning. But listen closer: his videos are barely surface level. In fact, look closer and you’ll see that Simon is a prolific uploader. For the variety of subjects he tackles, he couldn’t possibly upload at this rate. With multiple channels, this person almost seems to be an autonomous bot.

But no, he’s not a bot. If you look a bit closer, you’ll see that Simon is a voice actor. He does have a pretty good voice. He’s capitalizing on it by reading any material found on the internet. This isn’t to single out this one person, but it seems to be becoming a pattern. I stumbled upon a TikTok video that was basically a reading of a short post I made.

This isn’t really an issue for me. I’ve come to ignore the things I don’t like. But what I find terrifying is that this low-effort content seems to be extremely popular. My mother recently sent me a link to a video through WhatsApp, and it didn’t take me 10 seconds to dismiss it. But then I got curious and looked into the uploader.

It was an AI-generated video with an AI voice narrating it. The video she sent had blatantly false information. But looking at the channel itself on YouTube, it has 7 million subscribers and uploads multiple times a day—short videos (10–15 minutes) and a 2–3 hour video daily. The comment section, at least the few I checked, had real people. AI has allowed this content farmer to produce at a level never possible before. And 7 million people found it compelling enough to subscribe.

At this point, creating a video by narrating random Wikipedia articles and slapping AI-generated visuals on it is trivial. In fact, I did just that:

This is just noise on top of the original content. I copied the content farm page of wikipedia to generate the video. If I spent a little money, I could have used generative video.

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The internet today is a paradox. For every Vsauce or Ben Eater, people who pour months into crafting thoughtful, enduring work, there are a thousand content mills churning out algorithm-friendly slop. The problem isn’t just volume; it’s the erosion of trust. When AI can mimic expertise and charisma, and channels prioritize speed over depth, how do we separate signal from noise?

The answer isn’t nostalgia for blogs or demonizing platforms, but recalibrating our expectations. The most timeless content isn’t what’s viral today, but what you’ll return to tomorrow. The rest is static. And static fades.

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