The crabification of content
Everyone on YouTube is slowly morphing into a crab.
There’s a biological phenomenon called carcinization: nature has independently evolved crab-like forms at least five separate times. Hermit crabs, king crabs, porcelain crabs — they’re not closely related, but they all converged on the same body plan. Evolution kept arriving at the same answer.
YouTube has been doing the same thing.
I’ve been watching YouTube fitness channels for years. At first, the creator didn’t matter — I just wanted to know how to do a proper pull-up. But somewhere along the way, I stopped searching for exercises and started following people.
A new class of YouTube creators had risen — Browney, Will Tennyson, a handful of others — combining fitness and lifestyle with genuinely entertaining personalities. It was refreshing, especially since there’s only so many “optimal bench press technique” videos I could watch.
What made them interesting was how different they all were. Browney had his calisthenics challenges and Dutch earnestness. Will Tennyson did grocery hauls and cooking segments with self-deprecating and innuendo-laden humor. They were both fitness YouTubers, but they were distinct personalities rather than interchangeable fitness instruction repositories.
But now, I’ve noticed a disturbing convergence. Both started as scrappy creators making content they genuinely seemed to enjoy. And then, slowly, something shifted. The thumbnails got more exaggerated. The editing got choppier. The videos started incorporating the same escalating structure: “I tried X for 7 days… then 30 days… then I challenged a PROFESSIONAL.”
This isn’t unique to the fitness YouTube circles. Scroll through any category on YouTube and you’ll see it — the same thumbnail faces, the same title patterns, the same video structures.
Everyone is becoming a crab.
Mimesis at scale
The ultimate YouTube crab is this man, Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast.
He has over 460 million subscribers — more than the entire population of the United States. The second-place channel, T-Series, trails by over 150 million. To put this in perspective: MrBeast gained more subscribers last month (6 million) than most successful YouTubers will accumulate in their entire careers.
YouTube, like all modern internet platforms, follows a power law distribution. MrBeast doesn’t just do well; he exists on a different plane of existence from everyone else on the platform. When the distribution is this skewed, there’s immense pressure to copy whoever’s at the top. The tail drops off so steeply that being slightly different feels like financial suicide.
Rene Girard popularized mimetic theory, arguing that humans don’t really know what we want, so we imitate each other. We look at successful people and assume their success signals what we should desire. The problem is that it’s exceedingly difficult to identify the specific factors that make someone successful.
Was MrBeast successful because of his video concepts? His editing style? His thumbnail strategy? His upload schedule? His willingness to give away money?
An aspiring creator can’t easily disentangle which factors actually matter, so they copy everything that MrBeast does.
Everyone is becoming a crab.
The trap
I want to be clear about something: While I absolutely detest the content he produces, I have enormous respect for MrBeast himself. He’s genuinely obsessed with becoming the best YouTuber in the world. He’s been grinding at this for over a decade. He studies video performance with the intensity of a hedge fund analyst studying market data. And crucially, it seems like he actually enjoys this. The optimization isn’t a betrayal of his creative vision; it is his creative vision.
What worries me isn’t MrBeast. It’s everyone else converging on his mode of creation without sharing his distinctive obsession.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: it has worked for other creators. As these creators transformed, their subscriber counts have exploded.
The algorithm rewarded the crab form — the exaggerated thumbnails, the escalating challenges, the MrBeast-style hooks — and they all grew faster than the others. It’s a race that only goes one direction.
You might think: what if I do this strategically? Use MrBeast techniques to build an audience, then pivot to the content I actually want to make.
This is a Faustian bargain. George Mack calls the result “subprime audiences.” You optimize so hard for growth that you attract an audience you don’t even like — creating content you don’t enjoy, for people you have nothing in common with. Your original fans notice. They’re the first to leave. This drops the average quality of who remains, so the next tier of engaged fans leaves too. The creator watches their real community evaporate and doubles down on what’s still generating views: more algorithm-friendly content, accelerating the transformation into a crab.
This is Moloch at work — the game-theoretic deity you sacrifice to, giving up what you actually want in exchange for winning the game. Goodhart’s Law captures the mechanism: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Here’s what makes it tragic: many of these creators have taste. They can see what’s happening to their content. Ira Glass once described “the gap” — the painful period where your taste exceeds your ability. But this is a different gap: your taste exceeds what the algorithm rewards. You know your old videos were better. You make the new ones anyway.
Short-term, it works. Long-term, you’ve traded an audience that valued you for an audience that values whatever the algorithm served them today.
They’ll leave the moment someone out-crabs you.
A different game
As I’ve watched some of my favorite creators become crabs, I also stumbled across another incredible YouTuber: Luke from the Outdoor Boys.
His videos are exactly what they sound like: solo winter survival camping in Alaska, adventures and fishing trips with his sons, reconstructing his homestead property with a newly purchased backhoe.
The production is straightforward: no dramatic cuts, no manufactured tension, none of that “you won’t BELIEVE what happens next!” garbage.
Luke is just a guy who loves being outdoors, sharing that with his family and whoever wants to watch. It’s incredibly interesting and genuine. And that genuineness has built an audience of people who actually care.
Luke’s trajectory epitomizes Kevin Kelly’s 1000 True Fans thesis. To survive as a creator, you don’t need millions of fans. You need a thousand people who genuinely connect with what you’re making — who would buy everything you produce, attend your events, support you directly. If each of them contributes $100 per year, that’s a livable income.
The math only works, though, if you’re making something worth being a true fan of. And if you have something incredible that you pour your heart and soul into, that you enjoy showing up to do day-after-day, sometimes those 1000 True Fans can turn into many, many more.
Luke Nichols is what YouTube was supposed to be: a place for people to share genuine passions with minimal “productionalization.” He’s one of the most refreshing presences I’ve come across on the platform. Over a decade, he built Outdoor Boys to almost 20 million subscribers. Then, in May of last year, he quit. Not because the channel was failing; it had been growing faster than ever.
He was taking a break because YouTube was consuming time he wanted to spend with his family, and the attention that came with success had started to adversely affect their ability to live their lives the way they wanted to.
There’s a famous anecdote about Joseph Heller at a billionaire’s party. Kurt Vonnegut pointed out that their host made more in a day than Heller had from all his books combined. Heller’s response: “Yes, but I have something he will never have — enough.”
And Luke, too, has enough.
Yet Luke has occasionally returned — uploading projects that were already in progress, guest-hosting a friend’s channel during a family crisis.
He’s the YouTube hero we need, but not the one we deserve right now. When the algorithm’s grip grows too tight, Luke Nichols will return from the Alaskan wilderness to remind us what we’re all supposed to be doing here.
The crabs are all competing with each other for the same algorithmic attention.
Others are playing a different game entirely.
What are you optimizing for?
So what does any of this mean for you?
Chances are, you’re not a YouTuber. But the crab dynamic isn’t unique to YouTube. It’s anywhere success is visible and imitation is easy: Twitter threads that all sound the same, LinkedIn posts that follow identical formulas, startup pitches that blur together, essays that read like they were written by the same person chasing the same audience. The algorithm might be different, but Moloch is the same.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: carcinization does work. Evolution keeps producing crabs because the crab form survives. The YouTube crab form works too — optimized for clicks, retention, the algorithmic attention economy. But optimization only makes sense relative to what you’re optimizing for. The crab is optimized for survival in tidal zones. It’s not optimized for flight, or for climbing trees, or for building civilizations.
You can optimize for the algorithm and accept the slow transformation into a crab. You’ll survive. The numbers will go up.
But survival isn’t flourishing. And winning a game you hate playing isn’t really winning.
Or you can choose your own game. Make the content you’d want to watch. Build for a thousand true fans instead of a million passive viewers. Accept that the numbers might be smaller but the connection will be real.
What are you optimizing for?
Thank you to Vivian Yu for the original reference that sparked this essay.