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Google doesn't need YouTube to exist in its current form to have a large viewership. It can just as easily turn YouTube into a controlled TV-like platform where content is primarily created by incumbent professionals with little room for anything else. They'll still get incredible viewership. That's where the mainstream lives after all. Smaller content creators aren't particularly profitable or popular, so why bother if all they do is invite the press and people like you to slap them around for having them. I'd say it's already going in that direction. And from a brand perspective? The linked article in this thread is a global, mainstream news publication burning Google & YouTube's brand by associating them with pedophiles. Marginally more expensive? Try hundreds of millions a year to employ the thousands of workers to properly vet the 80k+ hours of video content uploaded every single day, with countless more comments. Then get slapped around by the press anyway because those workers aren't paid enough, and they aren't given quite enough mental care because they're still a bit screwed up after watching garbage 8 hours a day, and by the way they shouldn't be watching garbage 8 hours a day because that's awful for a human being to do that, they should do it at a nice 8 hours/week but they should still get paid a lot more because they're doing god's work and market rate wages aren't enough for them. So what's your plan? Google realizes that hey, they don't need to operate a free global platform for content creators of all sizes at a P&L loss, they can do what everyone else does and make a lot of money, get a lot of mainstream viewership, avoid PR blows like this one...then you get to proclaim victory because youtube.com still exists? Oh right, if Google stops operating a free global platform for content creators everywhere at a loss, someone else will do it. Like Facebook, which suffers from the exact same issues, is working towards the same AI approach as YouTube, and got slapped by the press after hiring human moderators anyway? Like Amazon, which acquired Twitch and almost immediately applied an AI-based automatic content moderator even more inaccurate and punishing than YouTube's? Like Microsoft, which...uhh what? I'll let you come up with reasons why Microsoft is somehow an appropriate competitor. I can only describe your comments as wishful thinking. We live in a capitalist democracy, we operate under its rules. You're free to suggest that we as a society choose a different system, but good luck with that. Until that changes, I promise: megacorporations don't blink, they just look away. I think it would be a tremendous loss if one of the most competent members of our society looked away from the project of a free, global video platform for content creators of all sizes, stripes, and beliefs. |