Opinions about YouTube may be mixed here on HN, but it is objectively one of the most successful businesses in tech or media to emerge in the past 15 years. If it weren't buried inside Alphabet, Youtube would be worth on the order of $400 billion, more than Disney and Comcast combined. It's a weird mix of a huge creator monetization network, a music channel, an education platform, a forever-store of niche content, and a utility.

It's also not a business that rested on it's laurels. It's easy to forget how novel creator monetization was when YouTube adopted it. They do a lot of active work to manage their creators, and now have grown into a music and podcast platform that is challenging Apple. To top it off, YouTube TV, despite costing just as much as cable, is objectively a good product.

Few products have the brand, the reach, monetization, and the endurance that YouTube has had within Google. And I know for a fact that this is in no small part due to the way it was managed.

I've probably watched tens of thousands of hours of YouTube at this point. Some of it sublime, some of it absurd, some of it critical for my work or my degree. I couldn't imagine a world without it.

RIP.

They've been way behind on adding standard features that their competitors see lots of benefit from. For example, YouTube was years late to the 'channel memberships' game despite the popularity of Twitch and Patreon. YouTube still lacks many of the popular streaming features from Twitch, and only relatively recently got around to adding stuff like polls. I can't think of any feature in the past decade that was a YouTube innovation rather than an innovation from competitors that was copied over years later.

Mixer is one of the best examples of this. MSFT paid hundreds of millions for exclusivity for some of the most popular streamers and people complimented how it felt much smoother than Twitch. But that wasn't enough to get off the ground for MS. Youtube is an even bigger behemoth to tackle.

But youtube's main services are free, so that's harder to pull off compared to stuff like Patreon. Offering exclusive videos probably doesn't outpace the ad revenue from "free" videos either (and if we're being frank, you're still bound to YT's rules. So you can't offer truly "extra" content free from censorship or copyright or whatnot.)

They do. But as explained, the revenue gained by maybe 100 users paying $5/month won't necessarily exceed an average video release of 10,000 "free" views. It's a " free service", so most subscribers (let alone unsubscribed viewers) won't join the membership for a few extra videos. It's a similar issue Reddit is trying to do right now with paid subreddits.

The idea can work, Nebula as a "competitor" works off this model. But I don't think it can be tacked on 20 years later onto a "free" service.

I was always critical of YouTube from the sort of technical perspective than just pure UX. The core product and the core UX are great and I'm even considering getting YouTube Premium because I use YouTube so much. All in all, YouTube was and still is internet phenomena and they definitely dominate internet video, imo one of the best internet product ever created.

Why?

Serious question, too. You can sideload clients that give you every single feature of YouTube Premium for free. Unless you're expressly lazy, like being taken advantage of or enjoy watching advertisements, there's really no excuse. YouTube Premium is the "I'm trapped in this place and you people have finally gotten me" fee - you can circument it all together by just, not using YouTube's software. Newpipe is must-have on Android, I'm certain something similar exists for iOS. I run SmartTube on my dirt-cheap Amazon FireTV and don't get a single ad when browsing. Subtotal is $0.00 for the installation and usage of Open Source software.

I use YouTube a lot, but between uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock (which I set-and-forget like 4 years ago) I don't have a single gripe with the experience. I hear people contemplate paying YouTube for a worse experience and it gives me hives. The content is on a server; you are making yourself miserable by acquiescing to a harmful client. Paying for YouTube Premium is your eternal reward for submission to the Walled Garden.

The answer is the same to all these questions: because I’d rather not live in a world where everyone is a taker.

I see a lot of people say this, where they despise YouTube and it's advertisement scheme but somehow mentally justify it to themselves that Google deserves their $10/month. Before any of you ask "What's wrong with the world these days!?" again, reflect on what you're paying for and how these companies sucker you into buying it. The free market can pound sand, Google has you right where they want you.

You could choose something better by consuming media from sources that don't engage in the malpractices you're complaining about. There's plenty of media available for purchase without advertisements or subscriptions attached. There's also plenty of media on offer for free from the people who created it.

I'm not even anti-piracy, but your rationalization is just ridiculous. No, you're not sticking it to the man; you're being subsidized by people that are willing to pay for content they consume.

I've pirated a ton of content/software in my lifetime and I use adblockers. Countless mp3s, video games, applications, movies, tv shows, and articles online consumed by me without paying for it. Sometimes it was impossible for me to pay for it because of regional licensing, but a whole lot more of it was simply because I didn't want to pay for it or I couldn't afford it.

Now I pay for music and other media streaming services, including Youtube Premium. I pay for the games I play and I pay for a lot of software that I use. Does that balance things out? Maybe, maybe not. But I'm definitely not someone that is pretending I'm on some moral crusade against advertisements by circumventing them.

> you're being subsidized by people that are willing to pay for content they consume.

Good! Those people hate YouTube too, otherwise would be perfectly satisfied with the default service. If Google kills YouTube and forces people to finally create a better system of content ownership then humanity will be all the better for it. Google doesn't deserve this content, they are poor stewards of the service and deserve to be deposed for their lazy management of a shared resource. If we were talking about ad-free Facebook subscriptions HN would be wearing the shoe on the other foot, ripping people to shreds for supporting a demonstrably destructive business. But YouTube is different, because we all have some incentive to prop poor Google up.

I feel zero empathy contributing to "the problem" of ruining the service. This isn't the tragedy of the commons, it's the progression of corporate greed. Keep paying for YouTube Premium, tell me with any honesty your contributions are making the world better or providing a more complete user experience. You can't.

I'd be surprised if Google didn't take adblocked users into account when administering pay, because the pay scale isn't some flat "X money's per Y thousand views". So yes, you are indirectly short-changing them.

>If Google kills YouTube and forces people to finally create a better system of content ownership then humanity will be all the better for it.

or we get a worse format like Tiktok taking over. The most popular reddit alternative during its "protests" was Discord. I don't consider that an obective net good for the free web.

That's not to say Reddit deserves to stay alive, just a consideration that this forced migration will not necessarily lead to a desired solution of "new website like X but without the bullshit"

If I write a song and put it up on bandcamp for purchase and on youtube with the intention to monetize it through Youtube's monetization options, how do you arrive at the conclusion that you're not pirating my content when you're circumventing the medium through which that is monetized? Advertisers will pay Youtube for an advertisement on their platform -> Youtube places advertisements in front of my video -> Revenue from advertisements is determined by how many times an advertisement is viewed on my video. So circumventing advertisement reduces the view count and thus the revenue. This is making it both less profitable for Youtube and for me.

> Good! Those people hate YouTube too, otherwise would be perfectly satisfied with the default service.

The willingness to pay for no advertising is not equivalent to hating Youtube. If you hate Youtube, why do you use it?

You might say it's because the content is there. Why is the content there and not somewhere else? Because Youtube incentivizes people to upload their creations to it. If it is somewhere else, why not watch it there or pay for it there?

> If Google kills YouTube and forces people to finally create a better system of content ownership then humanity will be all the better for it.

Why would Google killing off Youtube force any change to how content ownership works?

> Google doesn't deserve this content, they are poor stewards of the service and deserve to be deposed for their lazy management of a shared resource.

If they didn't deserve the content, then people wouldn't upload their content to Youtube. It is every creator's prerogative to choose how they distribute their content and there's a reason many do so on Youtube.

I could levy plenty of criticisms against Youtube just as many creators on the platform could but there's no coercion involved here. People want what Youtube has to offer.

> If we were talking about ad-free Facebook subscriptions HN would be wearing the shoe on the other foot, ripping people to shreds for supporting a demonstrably destructive business. But YouTube is different, because we all have some incentive to prop poor Google up.

What incentive are you speaking of? If ad-free Facebook subscriptions were tied into revenue-sharing with content creators on the platform, it'd be as reasonable as Youtube Premium.

> I feel zero empathy contributing to "the problem" of ruining the service. This isn't the tragedy of the commons, it's the progression of corporate greed.

I don't care that you're a selfish person acting in their own self interest; I'm no different. I dislike that you're trying to portray your behavior as righteous.

> Keep paying for YouTube Premium, tell me with any honesty your contributions are making the world better or providing a more complete user experience. You can't.

Paying for Youtube Premium supports the upkeep of the platform and directly contributes to creators through revenue sharing. Both the platform and its creators make for a better world. You could absolutely replace the platform, but there's undeniable value in one that allows basically anyone to share what they have to offer to the world and create mechanisms to monetize their content. The content speaks for itself. There's countless hours of educational and entertaining content. There's content for niche subjects and hobbies that would never have appeared in traditional media.

...and the reason is: they were the first. Now they are so huge that you can't go past them. If you want to have your video seen, you HAVE to go to YouTube. It's not an argument for them. It's just a quasi monopoly. Every Smart TV these days comes with an YouTube app pre-installed. It has it's app on most of the phones on this planet.

There is no real choice.

I think you're understanding the value in the platform itself, then. It is pretty trivial for someone to share their video online but it's extremely difficult to get it to propagate.

> There is no real choice.

There is kind of a choice. You already added the primary condition for uploading it to Youtube and that condition isn't something that matters to everyone for everything. Traditional media is Youtube's competition for attention on long form content.

This feels like a "you participate in society" argument. Yes, it'd be better if all intrusive ads were banned or heavily regulated. But that's not reality and I can't simply withdraw from the internet in protest.

>If you consider advertising bad enough to pay money to get rid of it, why would you pay that money to the business putting up ads?

it's a calculus of "energy spent" from fighting vs value gained from "giving in". There's fortuntaely more value than "remove ads" so that's how I justify it.

>Because you refuse to leave their client?

because I can't leave the client. I've been de-googling for the past year or so and I realize the main two things I can't leave are

1. Youtube, because it basically has a monopoly on video content.

2. gmail, mostly because there'd be a huge burden ediing almost 20 years of accounts all through the web to leave. From random sites I visit once in a blue moon to my banks and bills. I'd have gmail haunting me for years even if I dropped it today.

If there's one thing that has a reckoning coming, it's Youtube.

>Because you don't want to acknowledge the scary world of choosing something better?

I do it all the time. There is always friction so I think it's a bit dishonest to phrase it as "choosing something better". Firefox still has quirks with translation and the occasional weird interaction with factors like video calls, even after days of researching tweaking settings and installing extensions. Picking up PC gaming still has tons of configuration issues and hardware considerations compared to popping in a disc into a console. There's simply a lot of intersting information I miss out on from not browsing reddit, things that the other 3 forum social media (including HN) just don't catch. It's never objectively better.

>reflect on what you're paying for and how these companies sucker you into buying it.

I suppose you can criticism any bill with that logic. Water is a natural resource, why am I paying for plumbing? video games are just code, all code should be free, why pay for video games? Why am I paying $100 for this art commission when someone in Venezuela would do it for a dime (disclaimer: this is probably a very wrong conversion)?

Some of these are societal (we're never going to escape taxes, some of these should hopefully be so you can support other workers instead of exploiting them. It's your call either way, but I won't fault someone (especially someone decently off) for choosing convinience of entertainment over some grand stand against "the free market".

It's about 2 things

1. the principle. You get something, you pay for it.

2. the practicality. Youtube cannot run on fumes. It needs to generate funds from somewhere

If everyone decides to not take premium, it only incentivises youtube to harvest your data for a profit (yes, they're already doing it but that's not the point). Premium immediately pays for the product, and provides Youtube with the cash to run it's servers and pay it's content creators.

Not to mention, premium is pretty darned good, provides almost all the features and functionality that are available through other clients.

That was it and I side loaded STN. I feel bad for content creators, but I let my favorite ones know about it.

>I feel bad for content creators, but I let my favorite ones know about it.

Same. Sometimes I try to support my fav ones with a nominal patreon subscription whenever I discontinue my premium.

I have YT Premium and it works perfectly on every device I have and I have never had to configure anything nor research anything to not see an ad. I only vaguely understand some of the phrases or words you are using (have no clue what a newpipe is, but kind of understand what sideloading) is. I do not care to ever fiddle with my devices, there are more important or at least gratifying things in this world then futzing around with and tweaking devices.

> Paying for YouTube Premium is your eternal reward for submission to the Walled Garden.

If this is the great battle you have chosen to wage with your precious, fleeting time on earth, by all means, go with God -- but a lot of people really don't give a damn about Walled Gardens.

The biggest issue that I had, was that I couldn't find shows that I wanted to see. YT kept shoving a bunch of stuff into the UI that I wasn't interested in. All my searches were littered with results that were not relevant to me. I suspect they were paid.

The Apple App Store has the same problem. It's infuriating.

Listen, I apologize for diverting from the real issue, that a tech luminary died young. I did not know her, but it sounds like she was popular, and did well.

1. less annoying for non-desktop devices. Especially when casting content onto my TV

2. moral niceties: Premium viewers apparently help give more revenue to content creators, and I tend to watch smaller channels. It's nice knowing I can disproportionately help those kinds of creators out.

Also, apparently Google is in the middle of its latest clash with adblocking so even that can get unreliable.

I hope YT Premium is a step in that direction, but only time will tell.

I glance away from billboards, I refill my drink during commercial breaks, I show up when the movie starts instead of when the preview starts. These are normal behaviors, not leech behaviors. The ads are not very sophisticated, so I don’t need sophisticated measures to avoid them. On the web, the ads have ratcheted up the intensity (tracking, targeting) with technology and in response I have augmented my ability to ignore with technology. That’s fair.

You have framed this as a contrast between leeches and normal people, but this is actually a contrast between normal people and bootlickers. It is perfectly fine if you want to guzzle Kiwi Black, but understand not everyone wants to do that.

I don't think it's that extreme, but it's always hard making comparisons between physical and digital.

>You have framed this as a contrast between leeches and normal people, but this is actually a contrast between normal people and bootlickers.

I prefer the framing that doesn't chastise those who are simply ignorant or have their own morals. I recognize adblock is technically "theft" so I don't want to go on a high horse insult the "normal people".

Blocking ads and trackers is no more theft than blocking crypto miners. Malware is malware. You'd be crazy to consider running it as some bizarre form of payment.

You can track a bunch of metrics for software and perceive ad blockers, so the loss is more explicit.

>You'd be crazy to consider running it as some bizarre form of payment.

I wont say reality isn't crazy, especially these days. But that's the reality, yes.

In any case, why would I care about how people who are trying to scam me set up their business deals? If I don't run their script, they didn't "lose" anything. Their malware was never allowed to run on my machines in the first place. They failed to steal something from me.

>why would I care about how people who are trying to scam me set up their business deals?

1. Because you are spending much of your energy and time getting around them. Because by silent consensus people would rather consume ads than pay for their content. Keep your friends close...

2. Because it's an indirect contract. I don't care if you don't care, but I'd at least wish people would be honest and admit that they aren't in some moral high horse for evading such a contract. People get so pompous as if they are combatting the behemoth by taking 10 seconds to download a program.

The house always wins. We're allowed to steal because the cost to catch us is less than the cost to lock the doors. And the company is profitable anyway. The main downside to this is similar to hardware: pricing is a bit more expensive because stores expect X% theft/defects/refunds. I'm sure the same thing happens where content creators get paid a bit less, and YT premium costing a bit more to offset adblock users.

> Additionally, Fox alleged that Dish infringed Fox's distribution right through use of PTAT copies and AutoHop. However, mentioning that all copying were conducted on the user's PTAT without "change hands" and that the only thing distributed from Dish to the users was the marking data, the Court denied Fox's claim. Citing Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., the Court concluded that the users' copying at home for the time shift purpose did not infringe Fox's copyright. Then, Dish's secondary liability was also denied.

In that weird era, (a) average home Internet connections became fast enough to support streaming video (with a healthy adoption growth rate), (b) the most widely deployed home recording device was likely still the VCR (digitizing analog video from cable to burn to DVD was a pain), (c) there was no "on demand" anything, as most media flowed over centrally-programmed cable or broadcast subscriptions, and (d) people capturing video on mobile devices was rare (first gen iPhone couldn't) but obviously a future growth area.

So early YouTube was literally unlike anything that came before -- watch a thing you want, whenever you want.

I remember uploading it from my Sony handcam, then editing it in Sony Vegas and exporting it to make sure it hits the required YT file upload limit.

I honestly don’t think YouTube would exist without that particular piece of regulatory capture.

Contrast the video and podcast ecosystems.

Podcasts are arguably much healthier (the publishers maintain creative control), and are certainly decentralized.

I'd be fascinated to look at their peering terms.

Really most of the content that YouTube had available was material recorded off of broadcast/cable which was mostly not available otherwise unless you had recorded it or gotten it off a torrent.

Lots of people carried digital cameras, but even more have mobile phones.

Sadly, the copyright cartel swiftly attacked and all the regular people lost their rights. It seems like the lesson learned is that the copyright-owning corporations can't be trusted to play fairly or meet in the middle on fair use. We really need to just abolish copyright laws entirely.

>but it is objectively one of the most successful businesses in tech or media to emerge in the past 15 years. If it weren't buried inside Alphabet, Youtube would be worth on the order of $400 billion, more than Disney and Comcast combined.

it's very weird because "successful" doesn't mean "makes the most profit" here. It's undoubedtly a huge and challenging infrastructure to manage, but it apparently took Google over a decade to start being profitable. I don't know if that's some hollywood accounting or commodification to ads, but in many ways I feel like YT outspent the rest of the competition and in some ways stifled more efficient ways to deliver video content.

I feel a bit bad because it's clear YT has been turning the script for some time, and while Susan took a lot of that blame these wheels were turning long before she became CEO (and turn long after she stepped down). But that just shows why monopolies are bad. I do hope something better for creators takes over eventually.

> Whatever is here, is found elsewhere. But what is not here, is nowhere

More than 20,000 hours over at most 18 years is at least 3 hours per day on average. That’s a lot of watching.

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

What makes a business successful and what makes a good product are both highly subjective.

Why on Earth would you want shorter videos? The best thing about YouTube is that it's one of the only places you can find quality medium-to-long-form content.

That's all due to changes by YouTube to reward length and frequency, which of course makes sense for maximizing their ad revenue. But the result is creators are incentivized to pump out 20-minute fluff videos, not well edited/written videos.

People on here complain about SEO sites being filled with meaningless garbage. That's what YouTube is starting to be. The difference is their search bar still works whereas Google's will only give you the garbage. Though I still get "such and such breaks down their career" even though I've never clicked on that.

And despite all the dredge, there is a lot of good content on YouTube, at least in certain niches. Video essays on media and politics, lots of video-game analysis and other fan communities, history content, lots of e-sports to name just a handful that I personally enjoy.

There's almost no meaningful 3 minute content possible, so a platform like TikTok that only works for short videos is basically condemned to be meaning-less, to be pure entertainment.

In a world full of distractions I for one love the more slow-paced videos than “shorts” churned out by content mills designed to feed the modern day digital ADHD…

Youtube learned the wrong lesson and started to optimize the algorithm for retention and length. It is annoying to click for a review of some product that looks like a lengthy one with probably tests and what not only to see painfully slow unboxing and a wikipedia read of the history of the product and company and then sponsor read and then they turn on the device for a minute and give arbitrary score.

Exact same info could have been communicated in 30seconds, but then they wouldn’t get sponsor money and mid video ad roll

I would say it’s more a business that rests on its monopolization of the market. As a product there’s plenty I like about YouTube, but it dominated the market through the use of many highly anti-competitive strategies, and has what many would consider (and what may well be proven to be) an illegal monopoly.

You can’t deny its impact, but to give such high praise to the management seems rather misguided to me.

To name a few, Alphabet is currently being sued by the DoJ for illegally monopolising digital advertising technology. That technology, which directly integrates with youtube (and which you or I could not integrate with our own competing youtube-like product), is one of the key reasons that youtube has become as successful as it is.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...

They have also recently lost a lawsuit regarding the legality of their search monopoly, which likely also contributed to the success of youtube.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/24155520/judge-rules-on-us...

The way they leverage the OHA to ensure YouTube is shipped with every Android phone is also highly anti-competitive, and isn't too different from the IE case against Microsoft.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...

The same concern exists in the smart TV market.

While it's not illegal (as far as I know), the practice of burning through billions of dollars until your competitors are gone and you have an unassailable market dominance is also certainly anti-competitive, and that really has been one of the other key ingredients in youtube's success.

None of these are management practices that I would consider worthy of congratulating.

The personal side typically will center on emotional aspects of being human. However what you do with your intellect is also a major part of being human. And that part is most often expressed only in our professional lives.

Celebrating a job well done and an outsized impact is a good thing - and if I may, the most "human" of things to do?

RIP.

Any time someone posts a YouTube link to a political discussion, it’s guaranteed to be the worst nonsense that pries on people who “do their own research.” (No matter if they’re left or right on the political spectrum, there’s endless junk on YouTube for both.)

There’s surely good stuff on YouTube, but as a parent I honestly wouldn’t miss it if it disappeared overnight.

Fox News and CNN may have low journalistic standards, but at least they have some. They also have liability. (Fox paid $787 million to a voting equipment manufacturer as settlement for lies they published in relation to the 2020 election.)

YouTube has neither. Their algorithm will happily promote any nonsense that has traction. The lies that cost Fox $787 million continue to circulate on YouTube unabated — and an untold number of other lies too. Alphabet has no reason to prevent this.

Any tweaks around the edges will never be able to compete with that.

And unfortunately that central tenet incentivizes creators to make clickbait content that plays on emotions, because that's the most reliable way to deliver what YouTube wants.

(YouTube could decide it was optimizing for something else, but that would put a big dent in ad revenue)

By banning Indian school children and sucking the oxygen out of competing influences like Pewdiepie.

Also, just as an example, YouTube demonetises (and therefore effectively punishes) you for using words like ‘suicide’ so now we have to say silly things like ‘unalive’ — at least until Google/the advertisers catch on. These days YouTube is more censored than traditional TV.

As with all of this crap, it’s about taking offence on behalf of those who aren’t offended or don’t even exist.

> censorship boards in traditional media too, which are typically much stricter.

Which ones? In which country would the word ‘suicide’ be censored? There are countless other examples of topics that YouTube has decided are beyond discussion — even the left-leaning BBC aren’t as censorious.

Yes, they can do what they like on their platform. But by the same token, we can complain about it.

My point is that average YouTube is going to be less censoring overall. The perception may be that there is more censorship because there is simply more content on it that can be censored and they have more stakeholders that they have to appease. BBC released The Modi Question, which got censored on YouTube. However, YouTube has significantly more Modi criticism than anything on TV in India. Likewise, YouTube censors covid related conspiracy theories, but you're still going to find more of them on YouTube than the BBC.

This is true; the problem is that the customers aren’t unhappy. No sensible person cares about this kind of posturing, virtue-signalling, euphemism treadmill-riding for-lack-of-a-better-word ‘wokery’. It’s pushed by an incredibly small vocal minority of people who stand to benefit — mainly because it’s now possible not only to gain social cache but to have a whole career and make lots of money pushing this stuff.

Yes, YouTube may find that advertisers choose to virtue signal, ‘make a stand’ and leave their platform when their chosen magic words are not used, but ultimately they’ll come grovelling back. YouTube shouldn’t be so soft. Ultimately it’s just the endless cycle of unsolicited offence-taking.

And, by the way: this is all totally separate from Musk’s management of X, which purports to be rules-based and morally sound but is in reality entirely ad hoc. What Elon says goes… until he changes his mind tomorrow. At least YouTube has policies, even if they’re bonkers.

This is evident in (e.g.) WW2 documentaries where an old 4:3 television broadcast is simply put online, and the original footage had perhaps footage of corpses but on Youtube it is blurred.

It’s as if a government said ‘we’ll tax you 1000% if you criticise us on social media’. You’d still get some bozos online saying ‘it’s not censorship; people are free to speak’ because you’re not directly prevented from speaking. But you can imagine the effect it would have.

I do wish the TikTokification would stop, though. But that’s never going to happen, given how effective it is at holding our eyeballs hostage.

Corporations get freedom of speech, freedom of reach, no consequences. The people do not.

To the HN crowd, sorry but I'm not going to hold back. Death does not turn you into a saint. Susan is the one who turned YouTube into the censored mess it is today, pushed for unliked mainstream channels over popular organic content creators (changed the algorith to push late night talk shows), ruined the algorith to always push "authoritarian" channels (CNN, CBS, MSN, NBC, PBS, etc), gave creators the option to disable the dislike button, permanently banned thousands of channels that even mentioned "pedophilia" like Mouthy Buddha's channel during the Q-anon nonsense. Creators at the time made 30 minute long videos analyzing data and proving that the recommended mainstream channels being pushed were inorganic.

She helped ruin YouTube. I will not apologize. Bye Susan. Come back in your next life and help fix it. Downvote away. I do not care.

Covid vax concerns were allowed during the last months of the Trump administration, but it suddenly became censored after Biden was elected.

Moderna reported positive phase 3 trial results in November 2020. FDA’s review was completed in December and an emergency authorization was granted. The full trial results were published in medical journals a few months later, around the same time as Biden entered office.

So maybe it had nothing to do with Trump/Biden and simply was a reaction by YouTube to the proven efficacy of the new vaccines.

The New England Journal of Medicine in February 2021 published Moderna’s results indicating 94% efficacy. Further studies confirmed it. If you know better than the reviewers at a leading medical journal, it would be interesting to know why you’re so qualified.

Anecdotes are worthless in a scientific setting, or literally any setting with the slightest amount of rigor. More often than not, we do not have anywhere near a representative sample in the people we know or hang around.

The first time I got Covid was a year later, December 2022. Exactly as predicted by the vaccinations.

I don’t go around pretending that this anecdote is worth anything. That’s why companies like Moderna do clinical trials with 30,000 people.

Somehow lots of people whose experiences are slightly outside the median are convinced that everything is a lie. “Statistics are hard, let’s go shopping?”

So which is it: 1) The mRNA vaccine was rushed out without sufficient clinical trials; 2) The results from the clinical trials were delayed to hurt Trump.

You can’t have both you know. So far the far-right argument has been entirely based on scenario 1, but it’s certainly interesting to know that scenario 2 also exists for some people.

I’m a Trump critic and I was happy with the priority given to Operation Warp Speed. It’s the only thing he did right during the pandemic. But a lot of the MAGA crowd are anti-vaxxers, so he’s been trying to distance himself from the successful vaccine operation.

Exactly. Trump himself killed his own stance and delayed initatives that cost thousands of lives. Probably killed off a lot of his voter base to boot. if he managed to convince people to lockdown he may have still be president in 2020-2024.

When it comes to “anti-vaxxers”, a lot of people, including both Biden and Harris, were outspokenly skeptical of any vaccine that would have been approved under a Trump administration (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/05/kamala-harris-trump...), so frankly this is largely an artifact of political polarization.

Page and Brin started Google in her garage. She was employee #16 at the company. She was behind the Google logo, Google Doodles, Image Search, AdSense, then all of advertising, and ultimately YouTube.

Safe to say Google would not be where it is today without her role. RIP.

So she made some of the most user-hostile, internet-ruining products and created one of the most evil companies currently active? Great obituary going on there. With apologies to the people grieving her, she is basically 2024 Thomas Midgley Jr.

> Unbelievably saddened by the loss of my dear friend @SusanWojcicki after two years of living with cancer. She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her. She was an incredible person, leader and friend who had a tremendous impact on the world and I’m one of countless Googlers who is better for knowing her. We will miss her dearly. Our thoughts with her family. RIP Susan.

I'll say personally it's tragic to see someone like this pass in their 50s. Given Susan's impact on both Google as a whole and more specifically YouTube it's no understatement to say that she changed the world profoundly.

I don't think that YouTube, in its current form, or the creator economy that it produced, would exist in anywhere near the same shape had Google not acquired and then spent years funding the company at a financial loss.

Daily adderal RX for ADHD or studying. Coke at night to party. Xanax at end of night to come down from the uppers and try to sleep. That mix is pretty common.

Also, it doesn’t seem so weird for someone to try and mix uppers and downers. And those are all commonly abused drugs.

For those reasons, I can only assume this comment was a poor attempt at sarcasm and/or humor.

Just being baffled at the combination: I could understand that someone takes a downer like Xanax to end a stimulant session and get rest. But when they're at an end of a stimulant session, how would they OD at that point? Xanax only really causes trouble in combination with other depressants such as alcohol or other benzos.

So I'm presuming they probably indeed had a panic disorder, (probably triggered by the amphetamine) and used the Xanax to calm down, and kept dosing themselves up. Cause of death, I'd reason was probably a cardiac event caused by the stimulants, in particular cocaine.

I said it's odd because that's a weird way to OD in my opinion, having dealt with a number of cases.

Posted by Sundar Pichai.

I’m not familiar with Susan’s work directly, but for example, it’s widely accepted that YT has the best revenue share and payout for its creators compared to competitors like twitch or TikTok.

Someone has to really sit down and figure out how getting paid for making internet videos works. It didn’t exist before.

Also great product leaders give team members principles and tools to work with (like metrics), so they don’t need to micromanage every decision, and the product can still be cohesive.

My mom was one of her teachers and just told me “this is so sad, she was such a beautiful kid. She went on to do amazing things.”

Yes, she did.

> Unbelievably saddened by the loss of my dear friend @SusanWojcicki after two years of living with cancer. She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her. She was an incredible person, leader and friend who had a tremendous impact on the world and I’m one of countless Googlers who is better for knowing her. We will miss her dearly. Our thoughts with her family. RIP Susan.

https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/1822132667959386588?s=46

Not really religious, but always liked the short line

'For dust you are, and to dust you shall return'

definitely miss that now after the switch back to the faceless leadership, and saddened by the loss. condolences to the family.

They hold that none of us can ever be good enough for God's standards. That's why Jesus' atoning sacrifice is such a big deal.

So pick the person you hold in highest regard, and they're still too sinful to merit eternal life. And pick the worst person you can imagine, and Jesus' sacrifice is enough to cover them too.

One wonders if his mom having terminal cancer was a factor in his overdoing it.

And I cannot imagine how news like that would hit a mother with cancer, when the only thing left for her is legacy.

Truly tragic.

lung cancer as well, I don't think she was a smoker so what a bad stroke of luck.

https://seer.cancer.gov/statistics-network/explorer/applicat...

Furthermore, their claim is not and has never been “This drug is safe, effective, does not cause cancer or other harm in either the short term or the long term, and is in every way trustworthy.” as an absolute. They explicitly release numbers such as effectiveness, efficacy, etc which show how safe, how effective, etc a drug/vaccine is.

Just because you ignore those numbers and choose to believe your own absolute interpretation of what they say doesn’t somehow mean that is what was said.

And as though $7.2 billion a year isn’t enough to get the job done.

Cool, how does that any way shape or form relate to this discussion? Did they make the claim that they are 100% safe and will never cause interactions ever? If so, show me the exact quote where they said that. There are many reasons to ask for an NDA, and lying is only one of them. Hanlon’s razor and all that.

Are the numbers incorrect? That is what actually matters, in the end.

> I don’t have to be anti-vax at all (and I’ve got the full regular schedule) to say that’s acting suspicious and like you have something to hide.

Just because something looks suspicious doesn’t mean that it is. You are choosing to believe that it is, and that is influencing your response.

You still haven’t shown any sort of study or proof that vaccines (or even this vaccine specifically) cause cancer, by the way. If you’re so sure they do, I’m sure there’s something to back that up. After all, Moderna has provided the data to back their own claims up already.

Lets look at the timeline :

1. Be born to a stanford physics professor and his very conscientious/intelligent wife

2. Have google start in your garage

3. Pivot and be successful

I don't know you but it sounds like you are not thinking about that kind of countries.

You edited your message and added a timeline, there are more people stucked before your "pivot" moment. I know a lot of those too.