http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0bGs-hhenI

There are a few reasons i'm posting this video. We're all seen people crying from the rooftops about how YouTube is making some seriously ugly choices in how they handle content, but i never expected to see this from ChiCity (known for "Keeping your refrigerator stocked will get you many women"). It is very well put together, and although none of it is new, i think we're really starting to see people get pissed off about this.

YouTube needs to be a lot more like daddy Google and treat all content fairly. Stop being copyright Nazis, stop featuring videos, and stop being so "family friendly". More and more users are getting pissed, and some have started competing websites like
http://freespeechvids.com/ http://donatetofsv.com/
- and –
http://thevideobay.org/

I don't think YouTube is dying. I just think it's in a long transition period. They've been making small changes so far. They've introduce full HD videos. They've blogged about how video ratings actually suck. They've acquired On2 which gives them "ownership" of codecs that they can open and use with HTML 5 open web video. I've also detailed how they'll finally be moving away from 1 channel 1 user http://blogoscoped.com/forum/163108.html

There's still more needed. They need to drop the partnership program and allow anyone to make money from ads on videos. It's mutually beneficial. I think they've just been held back by having to work with YouTube's shitty infrastructure which i can only hope they're in the final stages of gutting and rebuilding. They need a new interface that's clean and Google-y. Right now Orkut is still better. 'nuff said. I'm sure they're working on these things, but i am getting a little impatient.

I think the problem is that Google is trying to have YouTube the commmunity and YouTube the hosting platform at the same time. I think these need to be separated.

James, you might be right to a degree, but i think the majority of the problems are technical. Perhaps they've been slow to solve because they have to appease the community which is largely set in their ways (look at how people reacted to the new facebook and youtube looks-- but people warm up fast).

Another site to put pressure on YouTube to adopt HTML 5 allows you to view youtube videos without flash

oops, forgot the link http://neosmart.net/YouTube5/

Cool, i've been looking for a site like that, hopefully ON2 will help the HTML5 spec get an official video format and we can move on to a HTML5 YouTube sooner rather than later.

A kind-of fix I've been using for Mac users is ClickToFlash | http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/ It blocks all flash elements on the web and you can click them to load them up but in addition to that when you click to view a YouTube flash element it instead loads up the video in a QuickTime Mpeg4 web-viewer. Handy and it saves my battery :P

Two things i want to add:

<<I think the problem is that Google is trying to have YouTube the commmunity and YouTube the hosting platform at the same time. I think these need to be separated.>>

On second thought, i think this isn't the problem. YouTube works against the community when they treat commercial content providers better, etc, etc.

Secondly, as far as becoming more Googley goes, i've gotten confirmation that it'll happen to YouTube "soon".

Another thing I want to know, when we get multiple channels for each account, what happens if only one of the channels has "objectionable" material on it? Does the channel o the account get suspended?

You're thinking way too far ahead =]