Good morning. It’s the awkward time between holidays when you either 1) develop a weird, three-day hobby like macrame or 2) start rummaging around your childhood bedroom.

If you’re looking for a boredom killer, may we suggest a music theory intro video and a session on the Mario Paint Music Composer?

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

For years, YouTube’s Trending page functioned like a cultural town square. Though we could count on certain players at certain times—Yoga with Adrienne in January, MrBeast and Unspeakable videos throughout the year—Trending gave us a shared reference point. It offered a sense that millions of people were watching the same things at roughly the same time. 

That era is officially over. This year, YouTube removed the Trending page in favor of subject-specific charts for topics like gaming and sports.

What does that mean for the future of the platform? “The days of going and subscribing to a creator’s page and following what they do—YouTube wants to de-incentivize that,” Ryan Broderick, founder of newsletter Garbage Day, told us. 

The move away from Trending, Broderick suggested, is part of YouTube shifting away from cultural curation and toward algorithmic recommendation. Worth noting: YouTube also removed its yearly recap videos this year. Broderick said YouTube wants users to “open it up like you would Netflix and watch,” positioning itself as both a TikTok competitor and a streaming service.

But YouTube’s recommendation strategy could come at a cultural cost. “To have a culture, you need to have collective experiences,” said journalist Taylor Lorenz. “Once an app gets big enough, and it’s algorithmic—that’s the difference too—monoculture dies.” 

For some creators, monoculture hasn’t died—it’s just moved. NYC-based business creator Taylor Bell says short-form platforms now set the tempo. “Even as a die-hard YouTube viewer, there’s something about the short-form content [on Reels] that lets things pick up quicker on trends,” Bell said, noting that Instagram feels more centralized because “everyone is on there.”

Meanwhile, YouTube itself is no longer emphasizing widespread trends. “I’ve never really used charts on YouTube,” Bell added. “It’s always been subscriptions and then the rabbit holes I go down.”

The result is a new cultural map: fewer shared destinations, more individual paths. YouTube still hosts culture, but it no longer curates it. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, who was just named TIME’s CEO of the year, recently said that YouTube is acting as a stage. It’s the place for people to upload their own content that YouTube (unlike Netflix) doesn’t pay for.

As YouTube leans more heavily into niche content categories, we may lose monoculture and shared experiences. But creators find there’s a lot to be gained too. 

“We want more niche creators, we want people to feel more represented. We don't want 10 people at the top controlling the apps, but it is the end of an era.” Lorenz said.