YouTube, we've to talk...
This is what my open letter to YouTube would look like. If I were to write one.
Dear YouTube,
You've always been one of my favourite social platforms. I've spent hours on the service during almost a decade of using it. I've been watching my favourite bloggers and speakers. You taught me many skills. Starting from the simplest, such as how to format Word documents, all the way to those bigger ones, including language skills. I've really started getting English in my first years of learning because of the video content on the YouTube.com domain. But you've been lost recently.
You're a leading video platform on the internet. I can watch Casey Neistat and Gary Vaynerchuk. I can catch up with the Polish YouTube community and watch my favourite tech videos from Marques Brownlee. But you've stopped innovating and listening to your user base. I was heartbroken when I heard about the boycott. On the top of that, you've recently announced the sharing platform, which is essentially making a poor attempt of taking over the world of messaging apps.
Really? Messaging? Is that what you're good at? Paraphrasing Albert Einstein, don't make a gold fish climb trees. Why don't you focus on your strengths and start improving what's really important and beneficial for users? We'd love to watch videos simultaneously with our friends. YouTube creators have been complaining about the flawed commenting system for a long time. Granted, it's getting better -- it's not as bad as it used to be. It's not anonymised any more. But it takes ages to be able to see all the comments and the system is still slightly confusing.
Your competitors don't sleep. Facebook have been doing really well with their video content is doing splendidly. Our feeds are filled with more and more videos. Moreover, they've just announced a dedicated video service. It'll have a lot of powerful options, such as creating groups of people to watch a show together.
Please, stop pretending you're a WhatsApp or any other service and start focusing on what you do best -- building communities, educating people, and allowing them to both create and watch the best video content out there.
Yours truly,MK x
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