"youtube is bad because they don't believe in my values", saved everyone a read

Walled gardens are meant for the owners. Everyone else are decorations.

Media distributors have always exercised control over the content they deliver—editing for length, compliance, or audience standards is nothing new. The confusion often comes from viewing YouTube as a neutral hosting service, like Dropbox, rather than as a full-fledged media distributor. Once you recognize that YouTube operates more like a broadcast network than a storage platform, its behavior - curating, monetizing, and enforcing content policies - looks far less unusual.

What feels different today is the scale and automation: traditional networks relied on human editors and clear standards, while YouTube uses opaque algorithms that can affect visibility and revenue in ways creators don’t always understand. That shift makes the control feel more intrusive, but the underlying principle - 'the distributor sets the rules' - has been part of media distribution for decades.