An interesting perspective on "user generated content all being the same" is the research "Time-lapse Mining from Internet Photos" where time-lapse videos are reconstructed from the variations in the pictures of the same scenery being extracted to show the actual changes made over time. Even if changes in content may seem minute, it still does communicate samples of the underlying information distribution and its changes over time.

https://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/timelapse/