Has Google Ruined YouTube?

Not yet? Nearly? Mostly?

Lately I’ve noticed a difference. Click on a thumbnail now and the video page takes longer to load. The video starts playing, frustratingly, stupidly, while the page keeps loading. You can’t click on the mute tab, or the full screen, until the page is fully loaded. Then you have to try to click on the start of the video again, if you can find it.

Naturally I use an ad-blocker which has been tremendously effective. But in the last week the ads start playing for a few seconds before the blocker catches them and stops them. Enough for the name of the advertiser or its logo to get noticed.

If ads are the norm for YouTube videos – if the company decides to override blockers – then I’ll give up on it. Pretty close to doing so now.

And a search returns silly outsourced websites or something: some sort of notification page, if you click on the wrong thumbnail. Have trained myself lately to beware the thumbnail that is marked “sponsored”.

Google ruins everything it touches, eventually. It can’t help itself. Their tech guys keep doing things until, one day, they jump the shark. They lack the wisdom and peace to leave a digital property as is.

Google may not be the culprit for the above, of course. But because they are notorious, and in the end it devolves to money, they’re deserving of suspicion.

Sad really. The beginning of the end of the YouTube era. It was better before Google got their hands on it.