Rejoice people who complain for a living. Susan Wojcicki is now former CEO of YouTube. This not only means that you get to have every single thing you you hated about her management validated, but you also get to have a new person to hate with as the platform continues to slide down the path of general malaise.
9 years is a lot of time on the internet, and the difference between YouTube circa 2014 and 2023 would be stark even if we’d gotten a different CEO. Not to mention that it would be controversial no matter who was at the help. That’s just the way it goes when you’re running the largest, most popular video sharing site in the world. This is not to excuse any of the more boneheaded decisions. Removing dislikes is still a blatantly anti-viewer move. To say nothing about their “algorithm” (like it would only be one), which seems to be an exercise on “Here’s this video you watch or the one you told me to ignore six times already” most of the time.
But a change in management is sure to help avail this horrible situation isn’t it? After all, Alphabet’s entire thing is change. Eternal change. Countless theories speculating that the only way to advance in Google is to do something new to the detriment stability. Theories built upon the pile of bodies that Alphabet has left in its wake.
I’ll never not link that site given the chance.
But people who do that tend to to forget the things that allow all of the other experiments are actually taken very seriously. So while they may make and cancel 17 apps, the Operating system that they run on is not thrown into disarray…very often.
That’s clearly how they see YouTube, as Susan’s replacement is Neal Mohan, Google’s Chief Product officer. He was right there for the Shorts, and the weird duality of Play Music/YouTube Music. So people who expected sweeping changes like human moderation, a better balance between big YouTubers and little channels, and more transparency regarding what can cause your channel to be demonetized are going to be disappointed. People who expected that the change of management would somehow cause an immediate 180 to when dislikes didn’t require an add-on, and you could put little notes on your videos are simply delusional.
He was the one with the post mentioning NFT’s in the official YouTube blog for Pete’s sake.
Time will tell if Mohan’s reign over the platform is going to be as controversial as Wojcicki’s. That is, if he stays for as long as she did, that’s essentially a certainty. No matter if he tries to be less blatant over the fact that the viewers are the product. Ever the optimist. I expect that he may perhaps re-evaluate some of the more questionable decisions from YouTube’s history, and is able to reach compromises where viewers, creators, and advertisers (and their fat stacks of electronically transferable funds) win.
Then again, his record reminds me of the immortal lyric: *Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss*.
