i'm skeptical that google will continue to operate youtube as a public charity indefinitely; perhaps we should switch to decentralized systems with higher reliability instead of locating a single point of failure on sundar pichai's desk
I’ve heard Google employees/engineers make jokes (not entirely sure how much is a joke and how much is real) about how YouTube might be the first website back online after WW3 assuming it didn’t destroy the internet (seeing as the internet originally was designed to survive such a thing it’s not entirely far fetched to imagine global chaos and heavily degraded services but still operating in some capacity)
the year youtube ceases to be profitable is the year it deletes 100% of its videos and you discover that your extrapolation of its reliability into the future was based on an incorrect understanding of the world
if you've been paying attention, though, you know that a substantial percentage of its videos have already been consigned to the memory hole, so its reliability as a repository of human culture is already observably poor