I would argue neither is better for it, as a user.

They're more lucrative for creators/streamers and have further reach but the platform experience is noticeably worse.

Youtube was about to get destroyed by an avalanche of lawsuits by the TV/movie industry. Without Google's army of lawyers, they would not have lasted.

True. Android might be another example.

But there's also hundreds of examples of the opposite happening: Successful products being bought by a big company and then killed post acquisition.

We probably won't know which camp Pixelmator will fall into for a few years yet.

You would be arguing wrongly YouTube today is the largest trove of knowledge accessible by the largest number of people in the world. It also has a lot of false information but overall it is one of the greatest cause of change in the world.

Would YouTube be the behemoth it is without the plethora of content (some of it, high quality)? And if it being more lucrative for creators is what got that content, I would argue the platform as a whole is better. You could have the most whizz bang video platform, but without good content, what good is that?

With the money came the greed, the over-polished mass market content, and the ecosystem of creators is now mostly driven by engagement.

Not to mention all the topics that have been soft-banned because one algorithm flags those videos as not monetizable, and the next algorithm decides that only showing or recommending videos that can show ads results in the most add revenue

I don't think YouTube is clearly better or worse than it was before acquisition, and maybe an independent YouTube would have walked the same path. It is simply a very different platform that was ship-of-theseusd

Eh, it feels like you're looking for the worst.

Follow some channels like Practical Engineering or Veritasium ... both good quality, information dense. Yes, decent production values, but that's not a bad thing at all in my book.

YouTube was acquired in 2006. I do think since then things like video quality and length have improved, although you can argue the ads everwhere are bad UX.

Youtube is an absolutely miserable product compared to where it's been in the past, are you joking?

I immediately thought of Keyhole, Inc, which became Google Earth.