In February 2025, YouTube turned 20. The video site has gone through a lot over the past two decades, including an acquisition, an earnings glow-up, and multiple generations of star creators. In our 20 Years of YouTube series, we’ll examine the uploads, trends, and influencers that have defined the world’s favorite video site — one year at a time. Click here for a full archive of the series.
Welcome to 2025! If you’ve been following along with this series since the start, thanks for sticking with us as we’ve explored 20 years of YouTube history. We’ve made it to the present day, and things are looking weirder than ever.
Internet culture has become so fragmented that it’s impossible to encapsulate all of 2025 in a single video. Gone are the days when the whole world got down on Friday. Instead, while one audience watches Kai Cenat Mafiathon highlights, another is consuming video podcasts or old-school vlogs. And don’t even get me started on the AI slop.
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For this final column, there’s no one cultural touchstone to hone in on. Instead, I want to talk about a pair of channels — one from Japan and another from Italy — that have played off each other in a way that perfectly explains what YouTube is like in 2025. Let’s dive into the zany world of Bayashi and Lionfield.
Let’s start with the obvious: Both of these channels are so hot right now. Bayashi, a Japanese creator with more than 33 million subscribers on his flagship channel, has been a mainstay in our Global Top 50 ranking ever since the advent of YouTube Shorts. Lionfield, consisting of a pair of Italian creators, has earned its own chart-topping results thanks to a strong base of 15.6 million YouTube subscribers.
Bayashi and Lionfield came up separately, and they could likely continue to put up big numbers without each other’s help. Instead, the two hubs have developed a codependent relationship. It’s simple, really: Bayashi cooks grotesque takes on Italian food, and the Lionfield guys critique him for it.
That sounds like a simple collab between loving adversaries — like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, but for the digital age — but it has become a complex rivalry that has enriched both participants. We live in an era defined by rage bait, and Bayashi is a master of that domain. He is an expert troll who knows how to push buttons, but he also understands that a good piece of rage bait requires an honest effort. Bayashi clearly knows how to cook Italian food correctly, which makes it that much funnier when he doesn’t.
Bayashi’s fans love him for how silly he is, while many Lionfield subscribers tune in for the duo’s takedowns of dishes that are “not approved.” The more Bayashi flummoxes the food world, the more attention he gets, and the more indignant the Lionfield guys are, the more attention they get. As negative as their collab may seem, it’s a perfect match.
Throughout 2025, Bayashi and Lionfield have added twists to their cat-and-mouse game. Every time Bayashi satisfies one of Lionfield’s demands, he commits fresh Italian food sins for the Campoleone natives to scoff at. Lionfield thought they had gotten through to their Japanese companion when he heeded their advice and didn’t break his spaghetti before putting it in the pot. When he subsequently turned the dish into a spaghetti waterpark, Lionfield’s mood changed.
Even other members of YouTube’s food scene are getting in on the fun. Bayashi is a big enough troll on his own, but when Albert joins the party, the dishes get even nuttier.
If you’re a YouTube oldhead like me, and you’re used to the simple, helpful cooking tutorials produced by the likes of Laura Vitale and Chef John, Bayashi and Albert’s monstrosities feel counterproductive. No recipe can be realistically followed here, and there’s no way “cappuccino pasta” could turn into anything you’d want to serve in your home. The culinary arts only inform these videos as part of the joke. Bayashi only purchases the proper meat for his carbonara (guanciale) so that he can make a shocking swerve into unappetizing territory.
To put it bluntly, Bayashi’s uploads are comedy, not cooking videos. And for all of Lionfield’s hemming and hawing, they’re not much closer to being chefs themselves. The channels that offer standard Italian recipes play to much smaller audiences than the channels that mine rage bait for views. And even on the straightforward hubs, there are still elements of rage bait within the top-performing clips.
YouTube’s food category is hardly about food anymore (at least among its top channels), and that’s not the only category being warped by today’s short-form sensibilities. 12 years after YouTube did away with its response videos, its entire culture is converging, becoming a singularity of call-and-response content.
You can see that shift in the world of politics, where pundits farm rage so aggressively that YouTube doesn’t know what to do with them anymore. You can see it in gaming, where deceptive ads often feature poor gameplay, inspiring potential customers to one-up the competition. For creators like Anthony Fantano and Kareem Rahma, outlandish opinions get airtime because of their ability to inspire indignant replies.
Ultimately, this is all a product of YouTube’s algorithmic recommendations. Videos with significant viewership and watch time are more likely to show up in feeds, and people will stay tuned if they just have to see how Lionfield reacts to Bayashi’s latest pasta screw-up. After spending years analyzing the YouTube algorithm, maybe creators have solved it. They know what works, and that’s what they’re going to do, no matter the category they operate in.
So that’s how you end up with a Shorts feed filled with sloppy cooking, rage-inducing takes, astonishing AI slop, and hilariously wrong trivia answers. It’s certainly not the YouTube experience we started with 20 years ago, but what about 20 years from now? Will YouTube keep evolving, or is its current state its final form?
There are parts of YouTube that feel stagnant. MrBeast is on top year after year, famous creators keep repeating their most popular formats, and as we’ve already discussed, Shorts videos are looking similar to one another, regardless of categorical differences. It definitely feels like we are experiencing the “solved” version of YouTube, but if there’s one thing this 20-year journey has taught us, it’s to not bet against innovation. YouTube’s creator class rose up because it offered a different form of entertainment from what we watched before. There’s always a chance those groundbreakers will shake up the formula once again.
