

It’s all a ploy to generate “engagement” and make more money for Google. They have already been caught once boosting video views to milk the advertisers. Oh no, it wasn’t them! It was some evil hackers using their infrastructure and tools.
Regarding the video platforms, the only way is everyone hosts their own content and distribute via RSS… But then where is the money in it
The main problem is that building a web browser is extremely difficult and everyone else uses Google’s version of WebKit. So there’s no alternatives: it’s either Google or Mozilla. Forks don’t count because if some functionality that end users need is deprecated, nobody will maintain it and it will just disappear once it’s removed from the main codebase