I don't see Youtube being in much danger. Truthfully a lot of Youtube's criticism seems to be that it was once a very open forum, which later got challenged by business interests, politicians, and other groups, and wound up becoming not-quite-so open, running around shutting down videos due to copyright complaints, shutting down videos because a corporation wanted to funnel people towards the "official" versions, and then of course cow-towing to politicians and such over offensive material ranging from claims of religious offense ("Innocence Of Muslims") to pure "oh, will someone think of the children" content regulation when someone got too sexy/violent/edgy. Not to mention this allegedly free platform locking certain content behind walls which can be slightly inconvenient. For example once I decided to look up "Prussian Blue" (a pair of girls that sing white supremacist songs) when wondering what the big deal was (they hardly turned me into a fan, they were nothing special as singers, though they were decent. Their only real "point" seemed to be controversial material), and honestly it took what seemed like an act of congress to find any of their stuff, where in comparison accessing say black metal or gangsta rap is comparatively easy.
The point here is that Youtube has become increasingly subjective, and involved in censorship (or close to it), as opposed to the "free frontier" for everyone and anyone it was initially supposed to be. The whole "let the user beware" attitude was kind of the point to begin with since you could almost guarantee there was something to offend just about anyone on Youtube, and it was declaring itself a sort of "free zone" away from corporate harassment, sort of like what "The Pirate's Bay" was doing, albeit not as extreme since it was just home made videos, and of course lacking Pirate's Bay's gigantic nards.
Good or bad, right or wrong, it's likely we'll never see anything like what Youtube was appear again. Something like Yahoo, which is a huge corporation itself, is not going to reinstate a big part of what made the WWW a "wild new frontier" due to not being willing to fight or take the risks given that they are easily targeted and have a lot of resources to lose. The best Yahoo is likely to do is pretty much create a service just like Youtube with most of the same policies, censorship, and content limitations/control, at which point the big question becomes why anyone would decide to move to their service. It's not likely they are going to pay massively more money than the competition to people producing content, or give them more of a free hand than Youtube does in terms of say shielding people if some band gets uppity because they used one of their songs.
The point here is that Youtube has become increasingly subjective, and involved in censorship (or close to it), as opposed to the "free frontier" for everyone and anyone it was initially supposed to be. The whole "let the user beware" attitude was kind of the point to begin with since you could almost guarantee there was something to offend just about anyone on Youtube, and it was declaring itself a sort of "free zone" away from corporate harassment, sort of like what "The Pirate's Bay" was doing, albeit not as extreme since it was just home made videos, and of course lacking Pirate's Bay's gigantic nards.
Good or bad, right or wrong, it's likely we'll never see anything like what Youtube was appear again. Something like Yahoo, which is a huge corporation itself, is not going to reinstate a big part of what made the WWW a "wild new frontier" due to not being willing to fight or take the risks given that they are easily targeted and have a lot of resources to lose. The best Yahoo is likely to do is pretty much create a service just like Youtube with most of the same policies, censorship, and content limitations/control, at which point the big question becomes why anyone would decide to move to their service. It's not likely they are going to pay massively more money than the competition to people producing content, or give them more of a free hand than Youtube does in terms of say shielding people if some band gets uppity because they used one of their songs.
