It was a better platform when it was its own company back in the day.

That's so long ago I honestly can't see that being true. It used to be a funny home video hosting platform in those days. The quality of content you can get on youtube these days is incredible.

▲

hirvi74 a day ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	Gigachad a day ago \| parent [-]
		The LLM scripts has been a plague but I don't think that's Google pushing it, it's youtubers optimizing to create the most minutes of video as quickly as possible. Paying for views is both why we have high quality content, and why the site is so gamed.

▲

jolmg a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Really? I don't remember it from back then, but right now must be better in terms of the content available, the player (not the shorts one; that's awful), automatically generated subtitles with transcripts that can be searched, automated translation, dubbing, etc.

	▲	hirvi74 a day ago \| parent [-]
		I would enjoy automatically generated subtitles more if they weren't wrong about 10% of the time. I constantly get something like "Today, we are going to discuss which model is better at programming. Is it an tropic's latest model, Cloud Fable? Or is it, Open AI's Chat G pity?" It's as though Google hired my dyslexic ass to write the subtitles. It trips me up even more because I can't tell if I misread something or the chat messed up sometimes. I cannot comment on translation or dubbing. English is the only language I can somewhat understand.