Youtube's only done a good job is you use yt-dlp to download the videos. Watching on youtube the video gets interrupted multiple times for "commerical breaks".
But YouTube's management is incredibly hostile to both creators and viewers with regards to everything that made them so popular in the first place: everything from bad algorithms, to censorship, to bad and unfriendly policies for independent creators, to cringe Rewind and CEO videos, and other things show that show that they really don't care about keeping a beautiful site alive.
> they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I’ve been using Gaia gps for what feels like forever without it becoming shit.
I hate to say it, but Gmail has been solid since 2007.
Zoho for example is more than good enough. Arguably better than Gmail in some ways.
I would go for Reddit if you use “old” I guess and pick good subs.
Fan/individual/community run sites and networks seem to avoid this issue, since they don't need to make a profit from their work/pay off those venture capital investments. For example, the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance seems pretty good there, with the likes of Mario Wiki, Zelda Wiki and Bulbapedia most relying on unintrusive advertising to stay afloat.
For a well known platform? I guess WordPress.com seems pretty good in that respect, at least from the sites I've visited there. Can't see many ads, paywalls or other dubious practices there.
Linux? stretching "consumer" platform a little here.
Costco?
Bandcamp.com