Ads and subscription aside, any time there is a feature I like on YouTube, they remove it or change it. More often than not when they add a new feature, it makes the experience worse for me.

I understand they need to make money. I’m willing to sit through ads or pay a subscription for that. But the ads are constantly getting worse. Mid-roll ad breaks that are auto-generated into the video (for older videos, content creators would have to go through their library to manually change them, from what I understand). A push for censoring content to avoid demonetisation, even content not intended for children.

Yes, part of it is that I got used to YouTube in its early days when it was operating at a loss. When it was a wild west of content creation. But it just feels like it has become so unfriendly to users and content creators alike. It has become corporate and sterile, while trying to squeeze in revenue everywhere it can. (Likely to barely break even, sure, but they don’t have to make it crap to use to do that.)