YouTube is Dying and Google is Not Your Friend
THIS relatively short article concerns a topic which was discussed in IRC in recent days. It was mainly about YouTube and what it is becoming (punishing people who skip ads, throttling down third parties, embracing grotesquely excessive censorship and so on). We have good reasons to believe YouTube is still not profitable (revenue is not profit) and Google has no solid/viable business plan for charging that, albeit it keeps trying. The latest PR stunt (for shareholders' patience) is that many people opted in to a "subscription", but it is free of charge ("trial") so that's just utterly meaningless, especially with some dark patterns thrown into the mix (people press "OK" to keep watching things with fewer interruptions).
Google still controls ChromeOS and Android, but over time those become more freedom-hostile, so it's better to walk away and use "proper" GNU/Linux.
Google is not your friend. I used to have a colleague who insisted that it was; and he kept pushing to outsource operations of my employer at the time, sometimes even clients' systems. How awful. █
