is it just me or did this article have absolutely zero interesting information

It's not just you.

But it is something you can show a PHB to possibly keep him from doing something to destroy an acquired company. The odds of success are bad enough....

'Let the startup keep their culture'

Slow news day.

Advice from a person who as described does not sound like anyone who has ever worked at a scrappy startup.

This really was fluff and doesn't deserve posting on here

At this point youtube seems more like an experiment in how much bullshit you can put your users through without them leaving your service.

Youtube might have avoided ruin up until now, but it's suffering from suffocation by G+ and the same over-design afflicting Gmail.

Yeah, but google are destroying all their products with G+, YouTube isn't unique there.

I think I've counted at least six different variants of that obnoxious tout screen YouTube occasionally shows to convince you to convert your account over.

I've resorted to stylebot to kill those motherfuckers dead. Annoying as fucking fuck:

    .yt-dialog {
        display: none;
    }

    .yt-dialog-bg {
        display: none;
    }

    .yt-dialog-fg, .link-gplus-flow-has-gplus, .link-gplus-intro {
        display: none;
    }

NB: HN is wrapping lines, may need ';' between specifiers.

Oh yeah, and the name one really bugs me too... Nope I don't wish to change my name for the 400th time lol.

Thanks, we'll ask again later.

I wonder how Vic Gundotra was chosen to lead social at Google. I think he came from MS.

Fundamental UI issues are so irritating.

For example, when I click on a subscription, it STILL shows either videos ive already watched or that users recommended viewing. Is it not bleedingly obvious that this should always have their 'latest upload' as the first thing for you to click on?

I never ever want to see a subscriptions home tab. Youtube is fundamentally broken. At this point I have it bound up in muscle memory to:

1) click the arrow next to "filter subscriptions" and set it to "new activity" instead of absolutely useless "Most relevant"

2) Click a subscription I'd like to watch

3) immediately ignore the useless home tab and immediately click the "Videos" tab

4) click the video I haven't seen before

oh yeah, and I have "youtube options" installed in chrome to turn watching the videos from squinting at an index card from 3 feet away to filling my screen automatically.

My favorite is the list of "Featured channels" that shows up in the right sidebar which of course includes channels I'm already subscribed to. And the only option presented is to subscribe anyways, which I'm absolutely not going to do until I've watched their channel for a bit.

Filter subscriptions is also useless because the username of most of my subscription is not anything close to the name of the channel the producers use or the title of the channel itself. So filtering becomes useless (and it doesn't work right even when you use the name of the user

Youtube is dying for a "mark watched" option. I have a few channels I'm subscribed to with hundreds of videos, 90% of which I will never watch. How many are there exactly? I have no idea, youtube doesn't tell you how many videos a given channel has. I think one channel in particular has a couple thousand videos. If I could just mark the entire channel watched I would actually know when there was real new content. I also have a couple channels that haven't updated in months, and I didn't watch the last couple videos they put up. So they stubbornly sit high in my "new activity" queue even though I swear on my children's souls I will never watch those videos and am aware of them and they are most certainly not "new activity" in any possible meaning of the word "new".

Why isn't there a "start playing newest uploaded videos until all unwatched videos in this channel are watched?"

Why isn't there the meta-option "start playing newest uploaded videos across all your subscriptions until all unwatched videos are watched?"

Youtube is indecipherable. Bizarre useless feature bullshit that doesn't work with glaring obvious interface omissions tied to a stupid CDN system that doesn't work right requiring people to do this kind of crap (http://mitchribar.com/2013/02/how-to-stop-youtube-sucking-wi... it's down right now).

There are moments, brief moments, where youtube is glorious, like a completely personalized on-demand television channel with original content. If I could go to youtube and hit "start playing new subscribed stuff" and chill out for a few hours, I would. But the insane interface completely prevents this.

Oh, and fast forward and rewind have recently become frequently broken as they've rolled out yet again new and entirely useless videoplayers that break basic video watching functionality.

ugh, you'd think nobody who works at youtube actually watches things on youtube