There’s still a ton of interesting content on YouTube. They have taken down stuff that didn’t deserve to be taken down, but it’s a very small portion of overall content. Other than people who are only interested in watching borderline material, I don’t think it affected the average user much. I can still watch a guy marvel in an endearing Canadian accent as he inspects the manufacturing of a $500 toaster.

And YouTube continued to grow quickly last year, so in the empirical sense it is doing well. The nature of the platform is that it is full of content producers with massive followings. If a small portion of those producers get dinged, they can make a lot of noise, but it doesn’t necessarily amount to much compared to YouTube as a whole.

I think GP's point might have been specific to Trending. Youtube's algo is pretty good at throwing me interesting content from my own subs, but I agree with the GP that the trending list is garbage.

Also, attempting to do broad searches for most news topics simply returns CNN, ABC, etc like clockwork now, and they're not at all the type of content that got Youtube where it is today. It's become more and more MegaCorpTube in recent years.

Like every other startup, they pursued "growth at all costs," got acquired by a business that could eat all the red ink, but now over a decade later, that business is sick of it and looking for the mouth wash. It's just too bad they got pretty much the entire first world addicted to it before they decided to ban anti-war content as "racist" and alternative approaches to medicine as "dangerous."

Why is YouTube so insistent that we not use our own minds to decide for ourselves? Perhaps because they really would find it more preferable if you didn't do any of that thinking for yourself. That's not how advertising works. [0]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/781798-universal-literacy-w...

Pre-acquisition YT was nowhere near as large or popular. Videos used to be tiny resolution, heavily compressed and limited to a few minutes in length. Which is to say, most of their pursuit of "growth at all costs" was well after they were acquired and became part of Google/Alphabet.

That could be because the massive viewership driving the trending videos, e.g. music, make up and dood perfect, seem to be younger than those who might be browsing HN.

I've had the app on my phone for over a decade and I share your sentiment with trending vids, but there is a lot of excellent content that would not exist without youtube. The recommendation algo is pretty good these days.

That might not last, the younger crowd seems to be going for TikTok these days.