The funny thing is, the second you take a step out of the anglosphere it still hosts an absolute tonne of copyrighted content that no one cares about. Just search for "full film" in Polish and you get lots of full films uploaded as-is and no one is taking them down
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pe%C5%82ny+film
Most of these were (1) a full film, but not the film the title claimed, (2) looked like they were non-HD broadcast TV quality, (3) were not in English, and (4) had a URL overlaying the video which I would guess was to a site where the movie given in the title could be found.
The youtube recommendation algorithm brings up new and cool content over long period of time, and I cultivated my recommendation feed as such.
It's a destination in itself.
Sure, you could have a video site that just have a top ten video and a subscription list, but it wouldn't be as compelling.
Now. There are a lot of things that youtube could rightfully be criticized for, and perhaps there should be major changes made to how youtube works. Better pay for youtube creators and payment to small channels for example. More promotion of youtube premium, and less advertising.
I assume that youtube is profitable. The question is how much service that they can offer but still remain sustainable. If they're not profitable, how they could monetize it without destroying the value of the platform, ideally adding to the value rather than taking it away. I like some of the youtube scripted show, and I was disappointed that they canceled a show that I want to see continued.
For you.
For kids it brings up amputation videos and seriously weird/predatory shit. Should they be cultivating their recommendation feed better?
Try searching for '!' on the homepage. You'll get a mix of kid videos and fucked up animated softcore furry shit. It's been like that for fucking years.
For me it brings up Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson shite constantly, despite my refusal to engage in such content whatsoever. It just figures, hey you like watching video game content so you'll love these smarmy shitheads.
It's vastly inferior to TikTok's algorithm by all accounts, like it's not even close. And it's been horrendously gamed.
All they have is the network effect and Google's monopoly powers. Their algorithm sucks, their ads suck, their policies towards creators suck (as you said yourself). Everything they've ever brought in that was actually good was cribbed from porn sites.
I've had success with just blocking these channels, or selecting "don't recommend this to me", after a while it stops suggesting right wing content to me, it hasn't for quite a while in fact.
Also, at this point the suggestion algorithm seems close to worthless. My Youtube suggestion feed is either channels that I already follow, or whose videos I've watched recently, or complete garbage. Any worthwhile new channels or videos, I've have to seek out for myself.
That's part of it, but I'm certain there's more to it.
I've seen too many people and pages get their reach cut 100 fold over the last 7 or so years. The content was very engaging, had lots of likes and comments, then boom, they all started going from 5 or 6 figure posts down to 2 and 3 figures. Marianne Williamson, for example, hit 10% support nationally - then her Facebook posts went from 6 figures to 3 in a day.
Take Gaza, and the global calls for a ceasefire. Despite huge engagement, and the strong support of the vast majority of every countries population (bar Israel itself), I've seen virtually nothing about it on Facebook. On LinkedIn I've seen 1 single post concerning it since October 7th, and it had 0 likes. That's not natural. No fucking way.
Eventually, it does.
Or, I make one mistake, rando-click on something favorable and boom! They are back.
You can watch "adjacent" content—at least according to YouTube—and you'll be fed Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.
Even if you wanted to see that content, maybe that's as far as you're willing to go, personally. Too bad! You get even more extreme commentators.
Before that, you needed a video player installed on your computer that then either loaded in-browser or played videos after download. You often needed multiple players installed as none supported every video format.
Don't attribute user interest (which is what made YouTube grow) to the technical aspects of the site. That is almost never the case.
If you wanted to share videos online, good luck? You needed somewhere you could upload them and a lot of forums had file size limits, so sometimes you just spread/discovered them via p2p services. For the non-technical person, there were a few places you could submit videos to or browse 'funny internet videos', but most video sites were an individual or community's curated collection
Youtube bundled all of that up as "a video repository and search engine that provides a streaming player which is already supported by your browser", and (in the US anyway) that moment coincided with: (a) wide-spread broadband access and (b) digital cameras becoming accessible to consumers
So in that context, I think it might be a bit like saying "interest in reading increased after book printing technology made libraries comparatively inexpensive"
It's important to recall that Youtube grew not because of "you" -- there was really not any kind of creator ecosystem for the first phase of massive growth. Youtube grew because of piracy and the posting/distribution of copyrighted content.
Unlike Napster which was blatantly P2P and obviously tried to circumvent copyright protections, Youtube had an official way for content owners to take steps to remove unauthorized content. In the days or weeks that it took to get content removed, it was copied and re-posted, and all the while Youtube continued to earn ad revenue from it until finally, many dollars later, it would be removed and successfully blocked.
In Today's world, Youtube makes money by incentivizing generatively created garbage content, much of which is shown to kids, and by spamming promoted content into playlists and generally always preferring to play content that was promoted over non-promoted content.
It's not clear how much of Youtube's revenue comes from quality content that people consume intentionally vs content that nobody would ever pay for that has managed to hijack the recommendation algorithm in some way.