YouTube’s new censorship tactic is to limit streams that are too popular

Let's see, what do I know that's decentralized?

Ah, Web1 and the Internet. HTTP, SMTP, FTP, etc. How are they doing? Ah, right, in practice the protocols people really care about like HTTP and SMTP became oligopolies.

What exactly does Web3 add to prevent this > problem?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23276430

So, ask yourself, why would YouTube need to throttle in the first place? Who is giving all these protest-streamers their first 300 viewers, making them rise in the live-streaming rankings and exposing millions to anti-mandate protests?

I think YouTube is under attack. I think they learned from live-streams during George Floyd protests, which, incidentally, I also was exposed to, even though not caring too much about that. I think throttling is an attempt to avoid the artificial boosting of divisive and polarizing content.

I really do not want to turn this into a conspiracy theory, though Mark Zuckerberg did offer for Facebook to make some changes, with the rest blacked out under "secret weapon" technology. After experiments done on Facebook on emotional contagion, surely, they must have ways to, instead of rile up an entire populace, calm them down. We are at an age where a single out-of-context video of alleged police brutality can shut down the economy.

These(software & legal arguments) all are irrelevant considering the fact that the web is hardware-wise not decentralized.I've seen this weak argument from smart people who argue that everyone can buy their own equipment, start their own ISP(which they can't, legally speaking, without going into a centralized process) and go through the process of creating one's own network that's being piped into the internet, but besides the fact that it defeats the point, ~nobody has access to that hardware in the consumer space.(There are few interesting projects existing but those are extreme outliers).

To continue your point and to reinforce it: software decentralization being useless, web3 will solve almost nothing, even in the best case scenario: where we defeat performance & "cultural" issues (NFTs, shittyverse, secure money, etc).It became a platform for the big players to show a shiny new big toy to the masses, one where security is improved; but security for the user is irrelevant from the POV of a company which seeks usage & entrapment.