Though I generally agree with all of your bullet points, I will defend YT comments for a second. I follow some YTers that have a good community. I really hate calling it a “community” because it feels cult-y or something, but that’s what they call it. I follow a few people who talk about books and I have gotten a lot of my favorite reads from comments saying “X book is similar to the one you discuss but has better characterization” or something. I don’t really interact with the YT comment section, and I’m certainly not going to join a YTers discord, but sometimes it’s insightful. It’s hard with general book communities because you end up with a mix of people who think Twilight is peak literature and people who won’t read anything written after 1900. At least if we both listened to a 2 hour video essay comparing these two books I know their opinions align closely enough with mine and the YTer that I’m more likely to enjoy what they enjoy. I can’t tell you how often I would get a suggestion from a reddit book thread of if you like X try Y and the suggestion was maybe thematically similar but just a million times worse. Truly it’s like people think because two books are about space or a dog that you’ll like them both. It’d be like suggesting a book about Old McDonald to someone who enjoyed animal farm. Made me so unnecessarily upset that I stopped even bothering with Reddit suggestions. I still get upset thinking about the hours I wasted on truly awful books because of randos on Reddit.

Also, sometimes I’m unfamiliar with a video essay topic and depending on the YTer the comments are a good place to get clarity on points of confusion because I’m definitely not the only one with my questions.

Some people might’ve been doing this internet thing for 30+ years, but not everyone. It may be difficult for people to imagine, but plenty of people young and old are still without any computing device at home.

I have worked with and in proximity to a lot of people who didn’t have the same resources or access as I did, and it really isn’t realistic to expect everyone to be able to monitor every bad thing companies do. That’s a big part of why we have governments and regulations in the first place.

Really unfortunate when we start blaming victims for being less informed. Do people not have older friends or family members who don’t understand what the internet is anymore? I have a few people like that in my life and it makes me sad to hear that people think it’s ok if they’re being taken advantage of. Regardless of if it’s age related cognitive decline, or just a general disinterest in tech news, no one deserves to have their rights infringed upon because our government has bent the knee to a company.