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Like, Comment, Subscribe documents the rise of YouTube: Bloomberg journalist Mark Bergen delves into the second-most visited website in the world behind Google, how it was created, its technology, and the key people behind its inception. The book follows the platform’s journey from its early days as a bizarre and fun yet unprofitable website to its rapid growth, which led to Google acquiring it for USD 1.65 bn 10 months after it was launched. Google brought ads and imposed its metrics on YouTube, replacing some of its employees including moderation teams with machines and algorithms. “The Google way of solving problems is to throw machines at them, not people,” a manager explained to a YouTube employee. It sounds like a pretty standard decision from a tech company, but this approach at times resulted in mishaps such as horror movie ads on children’s nursery rhyme videos. Bergen refers to YouTube’s story as “the story of a new mass media programmed not by editors, artists, or educators but by algorithms,” although humans are very much still calling the big shots.