Comment by flipgimble

The content on YouTube should qualify it to be preserved as a treasure of humanity. Think of all the college lectures, conference proceedings, sporting events, citizen journalism, podcasts that are the backbone of new communities and cultural revolutions. It is the modern version of public access TV and expresses a close to compelte spectrum of human interests.

At the same time Google Product Managers (or whatever euphemism for middle management they use at Google) are dumbfoundingly short shighted and myopic. They canibalize and destroy the value of the website to make some engagement or ad numbers go up, persumably in a short term play for promotion. When the consequences of their efforts to enshittify become apparent, they are long gone to another FAANG or moved up to executive level where severance packages mean they suffer no consequences. Its a shame there is no incentive to make the best product for the long term usefullness.

and I've paid full subscription price for a couple of years now to avoid the ads, and I can barely stand what it has evolved into. My screen is 80% games, shorts, "ads" and categories I didn't ask for.