To be fair, the content creators are building the castles, consumers just visit. If my favourite creators all build new castles somewhere else one day, I'd go there.

And there's some really nice content on the platform which other platforms just lack. Considering how much Youtube I watch for free and how much I pay Netflix for not a whole lot of good content, I think Youtube is somewhat getting a rough deal here. But it is what it is. I'm actually considering cancelling Netflix. Their content has gone down the drain in the last years and I spend an order of magnitude more time watching Youtube content at this point.

Content creators on the other hand seem to be doing fine in Youtube. This is what matters to me. I follow about 120 channels and a few dozen of those are very active and getting lots of sponsorship deals. Several of the wonderful people I follow seem to be getting a full time salary out of their activities while maintaining good production quality.

The endless promotion of a handful of the same companies sponsoring their content on these channels is a bit weird but I just fast forward through that with the arrow keys. These companies seem to be spending a lot on Youtube marketing, which I guess is working for them. And I get some satisfaction out of watching stupid VC cash being funneled into the pockets of people I actually care about. At least it looks to me like VC funded companies buying traffic by spending their investment like this. Old trick in the valley that makes the investment portfolio look healthier than it is. Whatever it is, thank you! I never see ads on Youtube because ublock origin doesn't let any of those through. Works really well. Hence I'm not paying for a premium account (yet).

Yes Youtube recommendations kind of suck. Don't they all? Glorified more of the same shit dressed up as machine learning snake oil. Very hard to escape the recommendation bubble of stuff I've already seen and stuff I'm never going to watch no matter how often Google recommends it. I mostly just watch my subscription feed instead. Which is just stuff I follow in order it gets published. Exactly the way I like it.

Honestly, It's not like Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, etc. have much better recommendation algorithms. This whole space seems to have hit a local optimum about ten years ago where it drives enough of their business that they stopped trying to improve it. All the generative AI stuff that people are talking about lately isn't being applied for recommendations yet. I suspect, Google has actually reduced investments in this team years ago. It's been sort of a constant and I've not really noticed any changes in the quality of the recommendations. It was bad five years ago and it still is in more or less the same way.

> Honestly, It's not like Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, etc. have much better recommendation algorithms.

YT has a dislike button that:

- doesn't prevent video from being at top of search results

- doesn't remove it from recommendations

- doesn't remove it from autoplay nor mixes

Even Netflix deals with that better.

Amazon and other e-commerce sites all have "toilet seat collector" problem with recommendation systems, I don't know if it can be improved upon.

> Hence I'm not paying for a premium account (yet).

I gave it a try for a month - as there is no adblock available for my TV. It somehow makes all sponsor segments much more annoying. I don't give a damn about Brilliant, I don't neead a reminder it exists every 15 minutes. And if I get yet another VPN ad that includes bullshit claims about security or anonymity, then I will drop the channel - I guess the "Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" doesn't work within single video stream.