YouTube Will Probably be Next to Die
Not too long ago Susan Wojcicki's and Troper's 19-year-old son, Marco Troper, died (drug overdose). Wojcicki has just died from lung cancer, according to her partner*. Since she left YouTube the platform has been getting very rapidly worse and worse and worse... and worse. Too early to talk about it? Maybe.
She did a decent job at YouTube. I want to pay a tribute of sorts. Now is the best time.
YouTube will continue to get worse and worse. When 'founders' or long-reigning people are removed this is what happens in tech (unlike politics)...
For that alone her leadership is missed. It seems like she knew how not to totally ruin the site (she understood the key stakeholders), which was basically inherited by her when the employer (Google) bought it in spite of a lack of business model and many legal liabilities.
It would be nice to pay a short tribute to Wojcicki, despite YouTube being proprietary and Google being a very evil company.
I know little or nothing about Wojcicki as a person and this wouldn't be right (a place or time) to make guesses.
Here is an obituary. Last summer I did a long series (with videos too) of what had gone wrong with YouTube (especially when she left).
In Google's (now Alphabet's) latest report the performance of YouTube was very disappointing, so they must be (still) losing loads of money. Upsetting creators and viewers even more won't help, e.g. forcing them to have ads that creators and viewers aren't even paid for.
The 'Wojcicki era' of YouTube helped GNU/Linux users discard WM* (Windows Media) files that had littered the Web, then got rid of Adobe Flash, then spread VP8/9. There are some net positives.
Thanks, Susan! Rest in power. █
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* It must have been mental torture having to bury one's teenage (perhaps addicted and otherwise healthy) child whilst at the same time battling what seemed like terminal cancer at a relatively young age. This, like the death of Steve Jobs, is also a reminder that money isn't everything and everybody's life can turn out to be short without prior notice or with relatively short notice. Find a job that you like and does not stress you. Without life, there's no job and without life, there's no money either. Fame is immaterial and people forget other people very fast, especially when they can no longer do anything new; that's due to limitations of human attention and memory.