I think this may be a case where the truth is difficult for the general public to believe because it sounds too "conspiratorial".

Well, I mean when you write a book and explicitly say that you believe your company needs to take an active role in guiding global human culture, does it really make it a 'conspiracy'? His viewpoint is not as radical as some people might take it to be. Up until the American Revolution, basically every society operated under the notion that some people are fundamentally 'better' than other people. Kings, queens, chieftans, whatever, were not simply people who were good at leading, they were all believed to be either chosen by or literally a god. It was seen as natural and proper that those people would lead, and that other people were born to follow.

To accomplish great things, it was believed, those leaders have to take the reigns and direct the commoners or else they would tear themselves apart in anarchy. A great many of the upper class still believe this to be the situation (which is partially psychological self defense, believing that they were simply lucky would lead to many feeling very bad about having so much more than almost everyone else). While something like YouTube becoming a way for tons of people to make a decent living, and that becoming the dominant means through which media is created and consumed, as opposed to centralization of media production and consumption under a handful of more directly controlled companies sounds like a renaissance to most people, to them it sounds like outrageous stupidity. It sounds like letting the rats chew through one of the pillars holding our society aloft.

No, I don't believe it because it sounds like a really stupid idea. YouTube isn't going to have much less variety, because YouTube makes money by selling ads to viewers, and they're going to have a significant number fewer viewers if they try to do that.

And I suspect that they want to make money even more than they want to reshape the culture into the image of what they think it should be...

The theory as I've heard it goes that youtube believes manual human review of videos is becoming increasingly necessary and creates a significant expense (hiring human reviewers is more expensive than algorithmic review). The less monetized channels there are on youtube, the less money youtube has to spend manually reviewing videos. And if youtube users all 'choose' to watch only a relatively small portion of channels, youtube users will be less distressed when smaller channels start complaining about being demonetized. If the vast majority of their users are only watching a handful of channels, youtube becomes more efficient and more profitable.

Therefore culture shaping and profit are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they both reinforce each other.

I don't believe this idea, but allow me to play devil's advocate.

>And I suspect that they want to make money even more than they want to reshape the culture into the image of what they think it should be...

Groups often do this to secure future profits at the cost of current profits. It would be to the advantage of YT to reduce costs by funneling as many users as they can to the same result, allowing for the reduction of dynamic elements within their structure.

It could be that they are juggling total lost customers with a total cost of operation and trying to achieve a more profitable ratio with cheaper/easier to substantiate channels/results

tl;dr : Google would be cheaper to run if there were only 20 results. Google would be #1 if they could keep their current audience happy with that style of operation, due to the disparity in income versus outward expenses.

Maybe some group of psychologists is discussing what channels to bar next that won't hurt the bottom line...

(but, like I said in the beginning , I doubt it very much -- it's just a fun exercise to imagine why they would want to destroy content)