Family vloggers are famous, and it's kind of our fault

Open YouTube in Pakistan on any given week and look at what is trending. A good part of it is content you would swear nobody you know actually respects. Low-effort videos, manufactured fights, a thumbnail built to make you click against your own better judgement. You don't like it. Your friends say they don't like it. Everyone you talk to rolls their eyes at it. And yet the numbers sitting underneath it are enormous, millions of views, millions of subscribers. So somebody, somewhere, is watching all of it. That gap, between what we all claim to want and what actually wins, is the whole puzzle worth sitting with.

Take the biggest family vloggers as the example, because they make it concrete. Some of Pakistan's most-followed creators have carried the same accusations for years. First that they make low-value, family-vlog content. Then that some moved on to promoting questionable betting apps. And lately the controversies around a few of them have only grown uglier. How much truth is in any of it, only time will tell, and the specific scandals are not really the point here.

The point is the arithmetic sitting under it. If this content is genuinely disliked, by you, by me, by almost everyone we know, then where are its millions of views coming from? You cannot answer that by getting angrier at the creators. You have to look, calmly and without pointing fingers, at the machine that keeps lifting this content to the top, and ask what that machine is actually reading off us. Because it turns out it is reading us fairly accurately, and that is the uncomfortable part of the answer.

The algorithm was never the villain. It's a mirror.

Start by seeing what a platform like YouTube is actually built to do. It is free to use, which should already tell you something, because if you are not paying, then the thing being sold has to be you. More precisely, your attention. The longer you stay and the more you watch, the more of your attention there is to sell to advertisers, and that is where all the money is made. So every part of the system is quietly tuned toward a single job, holding on to your attention for as long as it possibly can.

And the fastest way to grab a human being's attention is not information. It is emotion. Curiosity, fear, greed. Something that makes you need to know, or worry you will miss out, or feel the tug of an easy win. Watch your own hand the next time it moves toward a thumbnail. There is almost always a small hook of curiosity in it, a gap you want closed, and you click to close it. That is not a defect in you. It is ordinary human psychology, and the entire system is built on top of it.

One of the biggest creators in the world once put it in a single line. The more he studied the algorithm, he said, the more he ended up understanding human psychology. Read it the right way and it stops sounding like a boast. The algorithm is not some outside force that has decided to feed you garbage. It has no taste of its own. It simply watches what you actually stop for, what you actually finish, what you actually come back to, and it hands you more of exactly that. It amplifies what is already there in you. It is a mirror held up to your own attention, nothing more.

You can test it on yourself. If you enjoy conflict in real life, the arguments, the drama, watching two people go at each other, then the moment you go online you will drift toward that same content, and the feed will happily give you more of it. Think about why the big reality shows run for years. There is a fight in almost every episode, someone shouting, someone storming off, and people cannot look away, because a lot of us quietly enjoy watching other people's fights. The show is not corrupting anyone. It is serving something that was already sitting there.

Which means your trending page is not really a list of videos. It is a reading of where we are as a qaum. If you open it and it is full of spats and shock and cheap provocation, that is not the algorithm insulting you. That is the algorithm reporting back, fairly honestly, what we collectively keep choosing to watch. The machine did not invent our appetite. It only made our own habits visible at scale, and then handed them back.

Picture two stalls in a bazaar

Here is the clearest way I have found to see how this happens. Imagine a bazaar with two stalls standing side by side. At the first, a man is shouting at the top of his voice, calling out the latest scandal, waving his arms, doing whatever it takes to pull the crowd toward him. At the second, another man sits quietly, selling books, selling the sort of thoughtful thing that would genuinely do you some good if you stopped and picked it up. Both are trying to make a living. Only one of them is playing for your attention.

You already know which stall the crowd drifts toward. Not because the books are worse, but because the first man captured the attention first, and attention is the currency being fought over. Now watch what the other sellers do. They see the shouting man pulling the whole crowd, and one by one they start shouting too, because that is plainly what works. Nobody called a meeting. Nobody sat down and agreed on a plan. The whole bazaar just drifts, stall by stall, toward noise, because noise is what the crowd rewarded. The internet works in almost exactly this way.

So the honest conclusion is an uncomfortable one. The algorithm does not make this content famous. We do. It rises because our attention keeps rewarding it, and the creators, watching what gets rewarded, drift toward making more of it, the same way the stall-holders drifted toward shouting. Which quietly flips the question you started with. The real question was never why is the algorithm like this. It is why are we like this. And that one is harder to sit with, because the answer points back in our own direction.

You can watch the same drift settle over a whole audience. Someone builds a following on shallow, mocking content, the kind that pulls down anyone who talks about doing better. People who already share that outlook find him, gather around him, and over time a large crowd forms that carries the same low outlook. Not because anyone designed it that way, but because like quietly gathers like. The mindset at the top and the mindset in the crowd slowly come to match. It grew on its own, which is exactly why the fix cannot be aimed only at the creators.

This "bad" content is a stage, not a disease

Here the argument has to turn, because it would be easy to walk away thinking the answer is simply to condemn all of it and everyone who makes it. That is where I want to be careful, because low-value content is doing something inside the system that is easy to miss. This is not a problem unique to Pakistan either.

India passed through the exact same phase. The West passed through it long before that. Everywhere, people arrive on these platforms and first reach for the easy, low-value stuff, get entertained, engage with it again and again, and only then, gradually, grow out of it and start reaching for something with more in it.

Think of it as the entry phase of a society's digital life. When people first come online, they reach for whatever is easiest to digest, content that asks nothing of them, that they can laugh at and understand instantly. It is the same shape as a child's education. You start a child on nursery rhymes, not because the rhymes are the goal, but because a child cannot open a mathematics book on day one. The rhymes are what get the child into the room at all. Slowly, that same child moves on to science, to harder books, to real ideas.

A person's digital evolution runs the same way. Easy content first, then slowly, podcasts, longer arguments, articles, the things that take real effort to absorb. Hand someone high-value content on their very first day online and they would not understand it and could not sit with it. They would feel bored or lost, and click away within seconds. So the low-value phase is what keeps them on the platform long enough to eventually tire of it, and go looking for something that actually grows them. The junk is the on-ramp. Without it, most people would never have arrived at all.

That is the tension worth holding rather than tidying away. This content genuinely is low value, and you personally are meant to outgrow it and move on. And at the same time the ecosystem genuinely needs it, as the doorway that brings people in at all. Both are true at the same moment. The honest position is not to defend the content, and not to wish it out of existence either, but to see it for what it is, a stage almost everyone has to pass through on the way to something better.

You can watch this play out in real time right next door. When a huge entertainment YouTuber first blew up in India, he came with pure entertainment, and huge numbers of people engaged, and his subscriber count climbed and climbed. But as that audience matured and began wanting something more substantial, value-driven creators grew right alongside them, the ones making explainers, business breakdowns, real ideas.

Their audiences and the demand for their work keep climbing, because the public kept maturing and started asking for that kind of content. Once a demand like that appears, someone always arrives to fill it, and it is at that exact moment that a society's real evolution begins.

Nothing changes until you change first

So the chain becomes clear, and every link in it matters. As long as you do not work on yourself, do not learn, do not sharpen your own mindset, you will keep demanding easy junk whenever you go online, and your trending page will keep filling with the people who make it, because that is what the masses are asking for.

Change that first link, though, and the whole chain shifts behind it. When you change, your mind changes. When your mind changes, the algorithm reading you changes. When the algorithm changes, the creators chasing it change. And when the creators change, the content flowing to the whole country changes with them.

It is a full circle, and if even one point in it is skipped, the ecosystem cannot improve. That is also why blaming the creators, satisfying as it feels, changes nothing at all. They are the last link in the chain, not the first. Stand at the bottom of it hating them and the content stays exactly where it is. The only link you genuinely control is the first one, yourself, and it happens to be the one that everything downstream depends on.

Even the way you hate it is a vote

This is where a small, counter-intuitive thing matters. When you march into the comment section of some low-value video to tell the creator exactly what you think of him, you feel like you are fighting the content. You are actually feeding it. The algorithm cannot read the anger in your words. All it sees is engagement, a person commenting, time being spent, and it reads that as a signal that this video is worth pushing to more people. Your hate is a vote, and it gets counted in the video's favour.

This quietly answers the puzzle we started with. If nobody likes this content, where do the millions of views come from? A good part of them come from the people who say they cannot stand it, watching to be outraged and commenting to complain. Hate-watching is still watching. The disgust is still participation. Some of that enormous number is us, the ones rolling our eyes while our thumbs keep clicking.

So the move is to starve it instead of feeding it. Ignore that content completely, its comment section and its existence both, and put your engagement where you actually want the ecosystem to go. Find the creators making genuinely useful, educational work, the ones adding something real to your life, and like, comment, share, send their videos to friends and ask them what they made of it. That is how you tell the machine, in the only language it understands, that this is the content worth lifting.

There is a real obstacle to this among the creators themselves, and it is worth naming plainly. There is a lot of jealousy in the space. One creator makes a genuinely good educational video, and instead of support, another will spend two hours building a roast of it. Oddly, even that has its place in the evolution, because the friction pushes the first creator to sharpen up.

But the bigger picture is the one to hold on to. Set their quarrels with each other aside and support the ones doing good work, so they are encouraged to make more of it, and the algorithm gets fed more of exactly what you want it to spread.

None of this means you should feel guilty

If you have followed this far and recognised yourself in it, that you do watch this kind of content, do not turn it into self-blame. There is no shame owed here. It is a completely natural process, the one that every single person moves through, low-value content first and higher-value content slowly after. You were never the exception, and you were never supposed to be. Recognising the stage you are standing in is the useful part. Beating yourself up over it is not, and it changes nothing anyway.

What replaces the guilt is a quieter habit, self-reflection. Sit with a few honest questions. What am I actually getting out of this content? When I close the app, what is my mind doing with what it just took in, and what is the real effect of all of it on my life? If the honest answer is that the effect is negative, then that is your own signal to stop reaching for it and start reaching for something better instead. None of that shift happens until you sit down and ask, because the questions are what make the problem visible in the first place.

And once you can see your own gaps, the single thing that changes your life is self-improvement and self-learning. Nobody can teach you as much as you can teach yourself. Something handed to you by someone else, you carry like a burden and put down the moment you can. But when the desire to learn is your own, when there is a genuine fire behind it, the learning sticks, and you can sustain it over the long haul. That difference, between being taught something and choosing to learn it, is most of the difference in the end.

You will feel the shift happen almost physically. You start reaching for better content, and at first it is hard going. You watch a video and do not follow it. Next day, another, still lost. Third day, the same. Then on the fourth day, something clicks, and it opens up, and suddenly you want more of it, and you go looking on your own. And once that happens, you rarely drift back to what you were watching before, because the taste itself has changed. But none of it is overnight. The algorithm will not turn on its own. It turns only after you do, in that order.

Why the junk had to be there

So hold the broad picture, because it settles the thing we were arguing about at the start. If a high-value creator arrives in a place where the demand for their work does not yet exist, they leave quickly and their content goes unseen, because the audience was not ready to want it. But if the low-value creators are there first, people come for them, watch, get bored, mature, and slowly start demanding something better. And the creator who arrives at that moment, into a hunger that is finally there, hands the whole ecosystem an enormous lift. The stage everyone wanted to skip was the thing that built the demand.

That is the part worth carrying out of all of it. The content filling your trending page was never handed down to you by some outside force with an agenda of its own. It is a reflection of the attention we collectively keep giving, and a reflection only changes when the thing standing in front of the mirror changes. So the shift was never going to start with the creators, or the algorithm, or the screen. It starts, quietly and first, with what you choose to watch.