When Storyful first laid out its process to staff at YouTube, Clinch heard a Google coder scoff at the proposal to have expert hands curate footage. We have an algorithm for that.

“In a family-owned firm,” Bock said, “what gets rewarded more than anything is loyalty.”

Under Schmidt’s new orders, YouTube began slapping more commercials on the site and hiring more “monetization” engineers. Walk once greeted one tartly, “What are you doing to ruin my user experience today?”

Once it became clear that it wouldn’t rival Facebook, Google+ lived zombielike as a “collective hallucination,” recalled Hunter Walk, YouTube’s former product director.

The internet was not yet an enormous public stage, not yet the automatic place for people to share and overshare. Posting unpolished personal stuff felt weird.

Thailand’s email, which came shortly after the YouTube acquisition, would be the first of many jarring reminders for Google of what it had bought: a free-for-all website accessible in countries that did not look particularly fondly on free expression.

One reason YouTube had struggled to recruit TV networks was that networks wanted to use their own video players. So Kamangar and Google higher-ups voted to morph the site to allow them to do so; YouTube would show its own videos as well as links to clips from Hulu, CNN, and so on, something that looked like Google search.

YouTubers were not just amassing niche fandoms. They were building and fostering communities, ones with powerful bonds.

At PayPal, the YouTube founders had a reputation as more of the B team.