> Content means absolutely fuck all if it can't reach its audience
Obviously no, or YouTube wouldn't be where it is today...
> Youtube hosts, encodes, streams, distributes, and circulates the content and has recommendation algorithms to increase the productivity of every public video published on the platform
Nothing of this is in any way special. Nobody would care if they wouldn't already have their quasi monopoly. The algorithm is a topic for itself. Enforcing hate, misinformation, etc. but in the end always working in such a way as to maximize YT profits and not recommend useful content to the user. What are you trying to sell here? The way the algorithm got terrible is a meme by ow. What is it even supposed to justify?
> but a massive user base means fuck all if you can't deliver a product that they want to use...
The fact that the algorithm was much better before and works perfectly on other pages who actually care about what you wrote more then about the artificial limits YT forces on their content providers shows that this approach at justification is ridiculous.
If there would be even one competitor out there with the same amount of luck and YT would work exactly as it does now while the other would actually care about their content providers, YT would go broke.
People who upload their content to the open internet usually want to have it seen by others. So no...there is no real choice.
Also, suggesting that this "value" is something YouTube still delivers or creates, is ridiculous. It was luck and from then on the value is being provided by the people who upload content there. What they get in return is ridiculous compared to what YT generates financially. This is nothing to be proud of. It's your usual digital rip-off through privilege.
> If they didn't deserve the content, then people wouldn't upload their content to Youtube. It is every creator's prerogative to choose how they distribute their content and there's a reason many do so on Youtube.
...and the reason is: they were the first. Now they are so huge that you can't go past them. If you want to have your video seen, you HAVE to go to YouTube. It's not an argument for them. It's just a quasi monopoly. Every Smart TV these days comes with an YouTube app pre-installed. It has it's app on most of the phones on this planet.
Haven't been to the US though...where is the connection to COVID?