People subscribe to reality TV channels and plenty of guilty pleasures. OnlyFans is booming and so forth.
You may be correct, but I would love to see anything besides our wishful thinking that this would necessarily breed better content.
Not necessarily though - I can think of plenty of partially ad-supported media and publications that have retained their reputation for quality for decades or even centuries, for example, The Economist and the BBC World Service News channel.
...the thing is that the aforementioned don't generally run mass-market ads: the kinds of ads you see in the Economist or in-between World Service news segments is stuff like Rolex watches, Credit Suisse, and Chase Private Client Banking.
One is a subscription service, meaning they aren't reliant on their advertising for most of the finances.
The other is a quasi-govt entity, whose funding comes substantially from a tv license fee.
The people who make it have only profit to consider, and the recommendation system gets them more profit.
You can get good recommendation, but you have to let YouTube track you, if you are the kind with no account and block every tracker, you will get the stuff that is the most generic and gets the most clicks, because that's the default. It is good if you want to do a sociological study, but it is unlikely to match your tastes because the algorithm doesn't know your tastes.
I guess that if you really don't like the YouTube recommendation system, you can add a few rules to your favorite ad blocker, the tag ids are not obfuscated.
This doesn't make any sense. The recommendation system that exists right now will only tell you to keep watching more of things you already watch. YouTube already works without a recommendation system. Recommendations by YouTube are the source of... very little that I watch there. You watch things because you already know what you want and search for it, or because you got a recommendation from something other than the YouTube recommendations.
You are getting more of what you are interested in, but you get even less diversity. You are less likely to binge watch useless stuff, but it makes it harder to get more content about the topic you are interested in. Less platform independence, but worse integration.
Things become even more complex when you consider monetization. Obviously, YouTube does that for money, but more money for YouTube also means more money for creators. And if you begin to take into account alternative revenue streams (Patreon, sponsors, ...), you get even more tradeoffs. In any case, YouTube needs money, and it is not that profitable (I think it started at a loss).
As for searching, search is recommendation, unless you know the exact title of your video. For example, if you are looking for "how to install a graphics card", YouTube (or Google, or Bing) will make a small selection of the thousands of videos on the subject.
I think when you see one of these obviously-fake video thumbnails and think to yourself "who in their right mind would click on that?" the answer is usually: children. Millions and millions of children.
this. I'm pretty sure current incentives from an era of capitalist (based on industrial manufacture) are just not good at software and digital goods in general.
However, the exclusive ownership paradigm is so ingrained in our civilization that it'll take a long time for humanity to even properly consider other possibilities.
I spent a lot of time thinking about the platform as a whole after this, about all of the both wonderful and terrible changes it causes for our world. Some sections of YouTube are not just equivalent to television, but much worse and clearly actively harmful, but other sections are so amazing (educational content being one of the best examples imo) that it would be far too careless to dismiss the platform or its incentives as inherently bad.
I suppose the best we could hope for is that we find some ways to improve the viral algorithms (and incentive structures that produce them) that control our Internet ecosystem over time, because there are better ways to align incentives with the goals of humanity than we are currently doing, even if it is hard to get there. I often find that society actually does really care about and improve on these issues, but the reason why it is often easier to be pessimistic is because the changes that we make in response often occur very slowly, often over the span of decades even.