I recently watched a YouTuber who definitely wasnāt around for most of the 90s or early 2000s car era casually declare that a DCT M3 gearbox is ābasically rubbish.ā š¤£
The stuff these youngsters say for clicks is wild.
Thereās a difference between reviewing something for views and actually living with it. When youāve owned it, driven it daily, felt it in traffic, on a cold start, on a hard pullā¦ thatās when your opinion carries weight.
Experience isnāt downloaded. Itās accumulated.
Agreed. It is dead internet theory with extra steps coupled with the "attention economy" cesspools that the world has devolved into.
It seems to be a circular thing where YouTubers are farming the faux-intellectual base on Reddit which is the hivemind/echo chamber hub of the world at this point and has caught everyone that left Facebook and Twitter/X... while unironically believing it is above being just another media/social media type level of manipulation happening to them and consuming the facebook/twitter content anyway, just on their 'superior' platform
.
Many MANY of these people on youtube or posting comments (or even speccing cars) trawled reddit and parrot the same things you've read there and rolled your eyes about. If not, they have consulted LLMs trained on Reddit/Bimmerpost/Rennlist/various JDM groups etc in order to find out what everyone thinks to get the "best" possible outcome for themselves. In this context, "Best" is not what they like... it's what will give them the dopamine hit from everyone else liking it, even if they can't stand driving the thing or looking at the thing themselves
. This is the other side of that coin, which happened alot with the G8x. It was not enough that someone liked or bought it. They had to convince everyone else to also like it. Why? I don't know. If you say something like "not for me" or "as long as you like it, that's great", it gets taken as an insult (even if meant genuinely).
The biggest downside is that people don't think it's OK to just like something sometimes (despite it having a bad reputation or being polarising etc). I mean "just like" something "Because" - no justifying "why" to the nameless masses for fake internet points. The other big loss is nuance. It is apparently not OK to respect something (like the G90) but not like it or like it but have some criticisims. You must love it or hate it. Perfection or Junk - no in between.
Reading some of these posts or threads it is very VERY obvious that none of the people commenting with the most extreme opinions have even driven enough cars to know what they are about, let alone whether they actually can form an opinion on them or not
It has all become quite meta - you see the same tropes that guys want to hear to feed the delusions or preconceptions. It's most obvious when someone mentions "analogue", "purity", any kind of similar buzzword on a car that very obviously is not any of those things. It's become tough to watch any of these guys recently because of it. One of my mates and I had Doug Demuro's new vid about influential cars on in the garage while we were doing something with the cars, and both agreed the time had come to turn him off (as with Tavarish, Samcrac and a hundred other drama farmers/clickbaiters) - hats off to them for finding the infinite money/sponsorship button though... Unfortunately this is true across virtually any category of youtube now from PC building to gaming to mobile devices & even arts & crafts.
People have not realised is that while reddit and youtube are good sources of high level information, they are part of a machine designed to sell you shit and to create engagement by creating conflict, amplifiying certain voices and drowning out others SELECTIVELY creating the impression that your view is the right one while the other guy is receiving the other lens and you are both (in the real world) mad at each other. Apple vs. android, microsoft vs. apple, DJI vs. Insta360, nvidia vs. AMD, AMD vs. Intel, Ryobi vs. DeWalt, EV vs ICE, German vs. JDM.... it doesnt end. Content creators know that stirring the hate by putting an Enzo against a chinese shitbox in a very very specific circumstance is going to get views so they do it. There is even a local guy (Glen on Cars) that does this baiting type content structure with what looks like 100m drags with golfs/audis/Ms etc, and unfortunately everyone falls for it every time. Attention economy and all that...
Reddit today is different to what it was 15 years ago. So is YouTube. Unfortunately, this spills over into the real world because people are almost hypnotised into thinking these are far bigger issues than they actually are.
All the LLMs have unfortunately been trained on these same kinds of info as the source so you need to also take that with a grain of salt. They are also trained to reinforce that you are 'correct' in order to (SURPRISE) keep you engaged LOL. Ultimately none of these are as good a source of technical info as we had from actual technical documentation (now in short supply) and informally via communities... and those sources are disappearing QUICKLY (look at bimmerpost not being available recently - we lost the Alfa 4C wiki recently when someone lost access to his one drive account and not everything is restored)
They have some crazy advice too. I say these are investor spec, but they can also be "redditor/youtuber/speculator" spec cars in boring colours and absolute threadbare (no audio, cloth seats) specs that "the internet" says you should want (for purity of course
), just don't move in the real world. Case in point the cars sitting at Porsche unsold for 2 years with no 1st owners even (and more where the owners quite obviously couldn't deal and swapped them for better options).
