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youtube is significantly worse other than maybe in stability/uptime.

remember google tried to force that weird google plus login instead?

and now it’s so corporatized/ad filled

In no world would Youtube be even remotely profitable without advertising. Google ran it as a $B+/year loss for years before managing to making it profitable.

Tell me now a believable alternative growth story for Youtube where Google didn't buy it and the service isn't "corporatized" and not losing money.

You can't compare an unprofitable small-scale startup product to what the same product needs to be to make it 1) planet-scale and 2) profitable.

Yeah, without an acquisition, YouTube doesn't exist today. And most acquisitions would have turned out far worse than the Google one did. (See Evernote...)

When you consider the alternative is no youtube at all (remember, they were hemorrhaging money), everything you described doesn't seem so bad.

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