What do you think of these YouTube channels that narrate purportedly true stories?

[Homo Insapiens]

What do you think of these YouTube channels that narrate purportedly true stories and of the stories themselves of course?

YouTube channels like “Let’s Read”, “Creepypasta”, “Corpsehusband”, “What Lurks Between”, “What Lurks Beneath”, “What Lurks Above”, “Unearthing Stories”, “Darkness Prevails”, etc. there’s lots of them now, they seem to be their own genre and market now. Most of them are creepy stories, a few are funny. Most of them seem to take place in America in modern times, a few of them are set outside of America and a few are set in previous decades from people’s memories as well as case studies.

What is the history of these kinds of stories, narrators and YouTube channels? While people have always loved sharing and listening to purportedly true stories, I’ve haven’t noticed these kinds of channels before the previous decade, but that could just be me.

What do you think of these kinds of stories and channels?
What do the best of your critical thinking skills tell you about how honest and accurate these stories are likely to be?

[NSXD60]

That's entertainment, but these included, many other channels of all genres use click-bait to attract you, and at the end they omit the illusionary bait. Lying bastards!

[Voskos]

Imagine listening to a 2-hour long fake Youtube story about an American Indian Ghost scaring people with loud nightclub music . You realize you might be an idiot after all.

[sean]

Narrated horror channels were fairly popular on YouTube back in the day (2013 to 2015/2016 was really the "Gold Rush" era for this stuff), now the genre fell out of favour so hard in the viewer compartment.

"Creepypastas" just stopped being mainstream years ago, they no longer receive the same level of viewers as they used to, YouTube started policing narrators and making sure they compensate the authors or at the very least get proper permission, I'm sure that took out a good chunk of the narrators.

But I think the stories have just gotten worse. For people who want spooky content that blurs the line between real and fiction there are better options than listening to narrations that by now everyone knows are 100% fiction.

Not to mention, as you age, you start to see through the bullshit much faster. Its hard to even entertain most spooky trends after the first week because, well it's obviously bored Internet nerds making stuff up and pretending it's real. This is why when the 13 year olds start making content its a death sentence for the trend.

They don't really get made anymore. The ONLY thing left is Reddit stories from /LetsNotMeet or something - where teenage girls claim they almost got raped by a stalker because they saw an ugly man in public - that is the plot to literally 99% of all stories now.

Every "Let's Read" or "Creepy Pasta" channel on YouTube are just these stories now. And the entire sphere of online horror starts turning into an embarrassing set of regurgitated imagery and tropes just like mainstream horror cinema before it.

If you look on Google trends and see creepypasta search levels, its been consistently searched at moderate rates. And there's been a massive and mysterious rise in ASMR crap on every major streaming site the last 3-4 years.

Even the front page of Twitch is filled with whores tonguing ear-shaped microphones with tens of thousands of onlookers. Most are just low effort thots scratching their nails and licking their lips for 15 minutes hoping for some sponsorship to come along. Who actually watches this shit? lel

[Borealis]

No one has ever pretended creepypastas were real stories. Its well known that they are made up. They're just scary stories. The quality has indeed dropped massively. I remember actually being scared shitless when I first started reading them many years ago and now I rarely ever stumble across one that is even interesting, let alone creepy or frightening. Every time I try to listen to them I just tune out-they are meandering and totally bland. Not to mention, the titles of these stories are so cringe nowadays. An example "I found a mysterious object in my friend's garage and now I'm not sure what to do with my life". Who the fuck is enticed into reading something that seems like it was written by a 10 year old?