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If true, the implications for innovation seem fairly terrifying.

Hard to say. People certainly seem pretty motivated (and better equipped than 10-20 years ago) to create content for money. It just feels like there is less whimsical, fun expenditure of effort.

A lot of what is being created is fairly derivative though, it's often more like a grift than an act of innovation. Actually coming up with something new damn near requires a fair bit of cognitive surplus.

Yeah, Kevin Munger's book skillfully dissects what he calls "The YouTube Apparatus" [0]

The creators aren't really tuning their output based on consumer feedback, they're actually optimizing for the platform's metrics, so it's the (algorithmic) machine incentivizing humans to essentially feed it money.

[0] https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/in-the-belly-of-the-mrbea...

Yeah I've explored similar ideas before as well:

https://www.marginalia.nu/log/98_youtube-crabs/

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