Over the last few days I have been thinking about some of the moral indignation about how YouTube behaves by some of their users, and I come away with an odd impression.
It seems there's a fair bit of outrage about some changes that YouTube has decided to make, and people feel betrayed or outraged, as if something had been taken away from them. Like having more ads displayed for example.
The thing is, YouTube does not charge viewers. They don't really owe their users anything. You can really expect anything from the service. It's a bit naive to believe messages around bringing people together - at the end of the day, this is a very expensive service to build and operate, and YouTube is well within its rights to do whatever it wants with the service, within the limits of whatever legal agreements have been set out with viewers and creators.
Users will move on to a new service when they're no longer satisfied, driven away by ads, charges, or drawn by a more vibrant community or better/exclusive content somewhere else. This might make the service no longer viable, and users may complain that service owners are pig-headed. If so, it's their right to sink themselves. You can argue from a 'hey be aware of this' point of view I think, but not from a moral high ground.
Dear reader, may you value your time and attention, and learn to let go of things over which you have no control!