I uploaded my first youtube video in 2006. It was a magical place then, but I love it just as much if not more than I love it today for entirely different reasons.

Granted I don't use Tiktok (in an attempt to save what little sanity I have left) but it cannot compete with google/youtube on certain levels even if all the good "content creators" switch over.

Youtube is the world's second largest search engine in the world and competes on an entirely different level than tiktok or other competitors.

The utility of youtube far outweighs whatever artistic integrity or youth culture it may have lost. It is much closer to wikipedia than tiktok in my estimation.

The one thing that Myspace had going against it was that it was easily replicatable. No company in the world can offer SEO, cloud storage and mass audience like google/alphabet can.

The success of youtube as a platform (and all their wonderful analytics creators conform their content to improve) has in many ways steered it's creators astray by forcing them to conform to "what works" as opposed to what's truly valuable: original authentic content.