YouTube Is Getting Way Worse And Also Way Better - WAN Show September 25, 2026

Linus Sebastian (0:00)

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Linus Torvalds (0:21)

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Everybody and welcome to The WAN Show. It's been an enormous week. Like, it's not Techtober yet. So why is there so much tech?

Luke Lafrenière (0:41)

Tech-tember.

Linus Torvalds (0:43)

Dude, made at YouTube 20- or made on YouTube 2026 was insane. There's a bunch of new features coming, both for creators as well as for audience members. Some of which make me very excited and others of which make me concerned for the future of the platform. We got a good healthy mix of both of them. Also, Meta.

How was Meta the highlight of the week with, I mean, a little charm that has a cute little spy mascot on it? We're going to talk about Muse. What else we got going on?

Luke Lafrenière (1:19)

Raspberry Pi is locking their firmware capacities in, locking their RAM capacities in firmware, so you can't upgrade them anymore. And if you buy GTA 6 The Collector's Edition, you don't get GTA 6

Linus Torvalds (1:54)

The show is brought to you today by Corsair, an AMD, along with TP-Link and Seasonic. In addition to them, there's our Rat Partner dbrand, our laptop partner Dell, who, I guess I should probably move this so you can...

I'll put it here. You know, that kind of works, right? Oh, now it's so inconspicuous. As well as our chair partner, Razer. All right, let's jump right into the headline topic this week, which is all of the stuff announced at Made on YouTube 2026

Four creators, why don't we start with the... I misread this as controversial, but why not both? Their conversational AI editor in shorts and the YouTube Create app, which lets creators use suggested or custom prompts to generate a first draft of their videos. From there, the idea is that they make manual edits or just keep chatting with the AI to reorder frames, trim clips, or even sync their edit to the beat of their background music. Do we want to comment on these things as we go, or should I just get it all out of the way and we'll discuss it at the end?

Luke Lafrenière (3:12)

I think comment as we go.

Linus Torvalds (3:14)

Okay, I hate it. Yeah.

I thought the whole idea is create, and remember when they re-branded YouTubers to creators, to get away from that Icky I influencer word? Are we really creators if we're just letting an AI edit our videos for us? I realize that this has probably super strong old man yells at Cloud Energy right now, but back in my day...

Luke Lafrenière (3:44)

No, I think a lot of the old man are just scrolling Facebook AI generated videos. So maybe not.

I think they're too busy. I don't think they're yelling at Clouds anymore.

Linus Torvalds (3:56)

Or if they are yelling at Clouds, they're shaped like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger duking it out or whatever. Yeah, sure.

Linus Sebastian (4:03)

Yeah. Yeah.

Linus Torvalds (4:06)

Okay. Well, if I'm... I...

YouTube Studio is also being pumped with a lot of new ways to give creators better insights and tools to apply to both their new and their back catalog of videos, including feedback on a draft's pacing, structure and storytelling. This is in addition to new insights into past video performance to help creators spot their outlier hits in hopes of replicating them.

this is another one of those things that between these two... Actually, I'm gonna do the next one first, and then I'll... and then I'll talk about all three of them. When it's time to package the video, creators will also soon be able to generate thumbnails that match their channel style, or let dynamic thumbnails show the best of three options to different audience segments. Okay, I'll do one more. Another announced feature is letting creators test up to three different cuts of a video to see which hook performs the best, or which one has the best pacing and retention. There's so much to unpack here.

Luke Lafrenière (5:20)

I think we gotta pause and talk.

Linus Torvalds (5:21)

I think we're gonna pause and talk. Yeah, I need a minute.

Luke Lafrenière (5:28)

Now we could prompt YouTube's AI to figure out what you should have done instead of going silent for a minute.

Linus Torvalds (5:35)

That wouldn't be real, Luke.