And this time it's not only driven by larger media organizations, but also by random people who now have a chance to propagate their views from decreased barriers to entry.
I believe it wasn't only journalistic gatekeeping that prevented this for so long, but simply a lack of affordance for willing parties to do those things. High-speed Internet has made everything so much easier.
My feelings about the rise of streaming video are also conflicted. It has given us high-quality longform content on topics that hadn't been covered before, but all those other people's passions and hobbies take up way too much time if you as a consumer become deeply invested in them (not even counting the conspiracy genre and its implications). It's easy to do partially because YouTube facilitates that, but I think in the end people want to consume all this information in the end, for some definition of "want". And dozens of 6-hour streams of the latest game or another will keep being uploaded every day.
And there's this other thing that I keep coming back to. Someone I know was really into this engineer creating fake Apple product boxes that recorded thieves stealing them and being glitterbombed. They found it hilarious, but I was sort of confounded. It was the conversion of a few people's bad choices into entertainment and ad revenue, coated over with the intellectual sheen of detailed makerspace engineering diagrams and wit mixed with a moral high ground. Though what the thieves did was not right, there was something smug and passive aggressive about the entire thing that rubbed me the wrong way. And this was presented as just a humble guy with engineering experience creating his content and getting people interested in STEM. Anyone has the capability to do this sort of thing now, not just a media machine with questionable motives. It's just regular, driven people with questionable motives now.