The popular video-sharing website YouTube has been famous for its cat videos since it’s launch in 2005, but YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has apparently had enough of the feline tapes.
“I swear to God, I will personally ban for life anyone who uploads another [expletive] cat video,” she said in a Facebook post on YouTube’s company page. “I’m so sick of seeing my beloved website filled up with nothing but dumbass cats doing dumbass things! All you loser introverts need to go outside and make human friends for once!”
Wojcicki also shared an internal review of YouTube’s content that shows there have been approximately 81,941,760 videos shared on the site, of which, a full 82% are of cats doing various things. This means there are approximately 67,192,243 cat videos on YouTube.
“I am so sick of cats,” Wojcicki said. At this point we’re practically lying by calling it YouTube instead of CatTube. I cannot be more serious that from here on out there will be no more cat videos allowed, and I have put together a moderator task force to begin deleting cat videos by the tens of millions. Once approximately ninety-seven percent of the cat videos have been deleted, we will update YouTube’s grand logarithm to include a special bit of code we have designed that is capable of recognizing cats in uploaded videos and will immediately flag them for removal.”
Wojcicki’s Facebook post immediately went viral, and it remains to be seen how this new directive will affect YouTube’s user base.
“Honestly, it might be a problem,” said Sean Schaeger, a popular blogger and self-described curator of YouTube cat videos. “I mean, you saw the internal review, right? YouTube is eighty-two-percent cats. You can’t just force the YouTube community to stop using the site how they want to use it and expect that everything will be the same.”
Since Wojcicki’s threat was published on Facebook, the number of new YouTube accounts has virtually frozen. It may be likely that another video-sharing social media website springs up to capitalize on the sudden availability of cat lovers’ videos.
“Cats have always been integral to Internet culture,” said social media journalist Rachel Murray, who has written several books about the Digital Age. “People who spend a lot of time on the Internet also tend to stay inside at home a lot, and cats are relatively low maintenance pets in terms of exercise. For people who don’t have very active social lives cats are the perfect company, so it’s no wonder that Internet culture, and YouTube culture in particular, have gone hand in hand with a love for them.”
When asked what kind of cat videos Wojcicki hates the most during a press conference that followed the announcement, Wojcicki could not pick just one.
“I hate videos of cats stalking things,” she said. “I hate videos of cats just looking at the camera. I hate videos of cats wearing hats, or gloves, or shoes, or any other clothing. I hate videos of people setting their cats on their dogs. I hate videos of cats falling off of things. I hate videos of cats licking themselves. I hate videos of cats looking out the window. I have literally never seen a video of a cat that didn’t make me immediately regret watching it.”
The official ban on cat videos begins tomorrow at noon.
(Photo courtesy of London looks.)
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