YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

Yep. I stopped bothering to report obvious scams on Facebook as any response I got was they didn't breach any standards (for others I got no response at all), yet I've had a comment removed because calling someone a numbskull was unduly rude/aggressive/whatever (I forget the exact complaint given).

For a while I added comments details why it was so obvious the scam posts were scams, but this has little effect as my comment would be quickly drowned out by the many “I got mine OK!” and “thanks!” comments that are presumably placed by compromised accounts. It also backfires: commenting, even to point out the scammyness, is interaction – that interaction tells the recommendation algorithms that I might want to see more of that sort of thing or worse that my friends/family would also.

I will vote with my wallet and never give Google a cent, I feel gross enough already even just using any service owned by them. They are typical giant corporation who corrupt everything they touch. I reckon for every hour of valuable software work that makes its way to the public, 50 hours of bullshit managerial "work" is done by a sucession of gobshites with increasingly inflated salaries.

What actual value do they add? All the features and innovations they have made since acquiring youtube have been uniformly terrible, the best example is their pathetic attempt to ape tiktok with youtube shorts, so now they have two totally different systems awkwardly smooshed together on the same platform. They also, in classic Google fashion just randomly change the UI or randomly remove extremely useful publishing features for no reason on a weekly basis. They've pushed more and more ads. They've moderated and used the suggested videos features to encourage content farm garbage and punish actually good original content.

The real value of youtube is the amazing content creators who make world beating content for free. The actually good ones are mostly demonetized by youtube and either make zero money or only make money from Patreon supporters. So the actual value of youtube is the content creators, and also the audience who go there to watch. Youtube has been around for a long time and is basically the place to upload longer videos. Google gained control of this value by buying youtube and since then they have sat on this communally created value and simply engaged in rent seeking behaviour.

If you wanted to share videos online, good luck? You needed somewhere you could upload them and a lot of forums had file size limits, so sometimes you just spread/discovered them via p2p services. For the non-technical person, there were a few places you could submit videos to or browse 'funny internet videos', but most video sites were an individual or community's curated collection

Youtube bundled all of that up as "a video repository and search engine that provides a streaming player which is already supported by your browser", and (in the US anyway) that moment coincided with: (a) wide-spread broadband access and (b) digital cameras becoming accessible to consumers

So in that context, I think it might be a bit like saying "interest in reading increased after book printing technology made libraries comparatively inexpensive"