Okay, Google bought YouTube earlier than I remembered (2006). For some reason, I remembered the purchase being somewhere around 2009-2012.

So, if I may change my opinion, early YouTube was better, despite being owned by Google. I feel like the platform has been atrocious in the last decade or more. Constant clickbait, a new NordVPN or Raid Shadow Legends ad every 15 minutes, politics being injected into every other video, creators trying to game the algorithm to escape the rat race, the obnoxious algorithm itself, and now I am getting an absurd amount of LLM generated videos.

I would not dare claim there is not great content though. I am listening to a YouTube video as I type this. Though, I have been listening this particular creator since 2006, if that tells you anything.

Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel YouTube is just getting the slow squeeze of death -- like everything Google wraps its tentacles around.