Google is Killing YouTube

By Vallco on Sep 5

Google is the one who broke YouTube.

Remember YouTube before Google? It was magical. Tons of raw talent, a huge landscape of unexplored territory, no copyright rules, and an interface that actually worked.

Now look at it. The site’s a total mess, its algorithms are bullshit, and everybody hates it. Honestly, the copyright fiasco isn’t even the worst part – I mean, that part of it does make sense from a legal standpoint.

What has never made sense is Google’s stubborn insistence of shoving Google+ down YouTube’s throat, which is something that literally everyone on Earth was strongly opposed to. Now accounts are super confusing. Your Google+ account is different from your YouTube account, but it’s also the same as your Gmail account, which is different from your YouTube account, and so on. I have old YouTube accounts from over a decade ago that I have never been able to log back into since they were never linked to a Google account.

YouTube’s rating system is also a mess. For years now, you haven’t been able to thumbs down a comment. The “thumbs down” icon has always been there (who the fuck knows why they’ve kept it; it just makes the site seem buggy since it doesn’t actually do anything), and this has given rise to trolls since it’s impossible to be voted down.

Replying to comments is also a total fiasco. It used to be that you simply just clicked “Reply” and your reply would go directly to that user. Then they decided to copy Twitter and forced you to “@” the other user in order to reply to them. Then they changed that and made it “+”, when they first tried integrating Google+. Now when you reply to a certain person in a thread, it doesn’t even show who you’re replying to. An OP could have said something like, “I love this song, it’s the best,” followed by a string of echoing remarks by other commenters, followed by a troll saying something nasty, followed by a couple more comments from others echoing the nice sentiments of OP. But if you chose to reply something nasty to the troll, your reply wouldn’t show up as a reply to the troll – it would just show up like any other comment. So it would essentially look like you were either saying “Fuck off, loser” to OP (who had done no wrong) or the commenter directly above you (who also had done no wrong).

Early YouTubers might also remember when the video rating system was based on a 5-star system instead of a simple thumbs up or thumbs down (they got rid of this in 2009). This gave more leeway to users to be able to rate something more accurately rather than having to face an ultimatum. Note that this was also before YouTube let you rate other users’ comments. They jumped on that bandwagon as soon as they saw the Facebook “like” gaining traction.

You also used to be able to view all your past comments and also message other users privately. The former feature simply doesn’t exist anymore, while the latter may as well be nonexistent since they have made it so painstakingly difficult to even find out how to message a user, let alone find out how to check your own messages.

All in all, Google has really killed YouTube in all the most widely possible ways. Sure, YouTube is bigger than ever and widely accepted as the standard when it comes to video sharing and hosting, but that will be the end because there is another decentralized platform Cuckoo (All the channels and data will be controlled by creators and users, free, no registration, no spam, no limit) will be a comparable alternative to compete with it. I think it is time for Google to wash its hands of YouTube now as the competition of Cuckoo.