As long as kittens exist… there will be content.
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Perhaps “forced” in the sense of “Google owns the means of distribution” because if you make content, where are you going to put it besides youtube?
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I dunno… nearly all of the youtubers I follow upload at most once a week, and many are once a month. It depends on the person, of course, and what they are doing. Are you playing video games? That can be done fairly often. Putting out short animations? Thats usually more monthly. Well researched political, historical, scientific, or pop culture informative/funny content? About once a week.
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It sounds like they’re actually doing the best out of the system. It’s those trying to create something of worth that have the hardest time.
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It is exploitation. It’s really not much better than working ‘for exposure’. You have to know and own the ability to reach your audience, and having millions of followers on a platform like You Tube is fickle. However, rather than spending the time pushing more and more content down YouTube’s bad monetization pipeline, a young creator’s time is better spent setting up some venue where they can more directly engage and market to their audience. Patreon seems to be a great way to do that. It’s just like someone with a hit single on the radio, you can’t expect to coast off of that forever, yet there are a ton of '80s acts who still produce and sell out shows because they have found ways to reach their true fans.
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YOU may understand that. Does Elle, or Rubén or Bobby?
Cuz it sounds like you’re blaming these kids for getting involved in an abusive work environment. Maybe you should rethink where your sympathy lies.
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Sure, I get the meaning, and I also think using loaded words like ‘forced’ draws the eye away from an otherwise valid point.
I do feel for young tubers for whom this is a first gig and who haven’t yet learned the life lesson that anything given can be taken away. ‘Not fair’ is a schoolyard chant, not a debating point. Their sandbox, their rules. Anyone who bought into “Be your own boss!” was buying into a lie, because there’s still a boss up there…
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Did you read the article? These kids don’t have anything else other than their YouTube channels.
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Did you just…did you actually compare posting YouTube videos to nicotine addiction? 
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I did. That’s my point. Putting all your eggs in someone else’s basket is not a good strategy, especially when “someone else” is a cold and heartless corporation that’s always looking for ways to pay you less.
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From what I gather, the gamers mostly just use YouTube as a secondary outlet for their Twitch streams.
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True, but the annoying part is where people build up their channel organically, quit their day job to go full time, and then either the numbers tank or the videos get demonetized and you have no reason why. It is kinda like the risk of freelance - which I don’t want to have to do again.
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No, I compared it to smoking. Nicotine, along with all the other chemicals in tobacco that potentiate nicotine addiction is easily explained using chemistry. Smoking OTOH has tons of wide-ranging sociological components.
Or perhaps the government lied about the aesthetic of smoking. https://www.csun.edu/science/health/tobacco/index.html
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That right there is where they made their mistake. I’m all for people giving up the rat race to do creative things, but an income stream based mainly in one’s popularity is precarious even without betting everything on a single third party that changes the definition of “popular” on a regular basis.
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The issue is that unlike many of us who have bosses or coworkers who tell us to take time off, no one is telling YouTubers to chill out.
The solution therefore is to give YouTuber creators a boss, but not a real boss. Because a real, not ideal, boss would tell them to suck it up and work harder and stop complaining, not tell them to take time off.
Actually having a boss–who tells you to do things that are work, not fun – tends to inoculate one against thinking the employment world is always going to be peachy.
Self-employment from day one in a dream world? That’s a recipe for disappointment.
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Eh - its basically the same things as doing freelance work. There is risk/reward involved. If you have a set audience and consistent numbers I dare say it is fairly reasonable to make it a full time gig. If ones popularity wanes, it should be a measured decrease, fairly consistent. What I have gathered is a lot of people are seeing erratic numbers. And like I said, they will get something demonetized, they file the forms to get it monetized, it becomes monetized again, but usually a videos mass hits will be right after it goes up.
So I can understand the frustration where things are inconsistent through no fault of their own. Many have Patreon accounts so that they will know they will get X support per video.
Of course if it gets too unstable, then people will have to migrate back to day jobs.
I know too when I was doing more ebusiness websites that when google changed algorithms, it could kill traffic to certain niche smaller sites. 
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See here for a rant that covers multiple related issues:
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o_0 That’s new. Surprised youtube is taking their money.
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Sadly, as an avid watcher of youtube*, mainly gaming / tech / science channels, I’m increasingly seeing these problems pop up.
It’s a near universal complaint that youtube’s algorithm is a huge problem and i’ve seen many channels bend over backwards, often in expense of quality, to appease it.
It really does need relaxing soon before it kills itself by burning out their content creators.
And then there’s channels like Cody’s Lab, where he annoyed some flat-earthers and is under near constant harassment ever since by them trying to get his channel banned by any means possible.
Youtube has severe problems that need fixing soon…
*I don’t watch TV, youtube is the closest i have to TV viewing
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Aside from the destruction of some of the best online video* content available, with it being replaced with vast amounts of easy-to-produce volumes of shovelware-type content?
Yes, you are missing the downside, by a near epic level.
You may not like what you’ve seen, but as with most online services, search better.
*This is akin to the people that disparage twitter and facebook to be universal negatives… Even though both platforms can cover a range of excellence to abject horror depending on which accounts you follow.
Managed well, they can be extremely good.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, how about focussing on improving things rather than burning the entire place down, hmm?
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