A New YouTube, Herding the Funny Cats

Time between the creation of YouTube and hatred of the new YouTube: six years.

The world’s largest video-sharing Web site introduced a new design this month, unleashing a wave of anger in blogs and online forums. It’s visible on YouTube itself, where a video explaining the changes has received more than three times as many dislikes as likes, and many of the attached comments couldn’t be published in a newspaper. That negative reaction certainly has a lot to do with a general hatred of change (which is surprisingly strong on the Web, the only place that most of us visit seven days a week). People had grown accustomed to the YouTube home page’s messy, eclectic sprawl, and the new more organized and blandly tasteful look — arrived at in several stages over the last year — was bound to draw howls whether it was an improvement or not. But beyond aesthetics lies a deeper change, one that the naysayers have perceived, explicitly or intuitively: the redesign is a muted but firm declaration that the party is over. It’s YouTube’s strongest step away from what will be seen as its short-lived early heyday as a largely unregulated repository of funny cats, anonymous guitar masters, angry Asian bus riders and countless other weird and wonderful things. In place of that free-for-all will be a new YouTube, more commercial, more predictable and, its owners hope, more televisionlike.