It's a feed, and it responds to your use. I click on longform educational content, I get lots of longform educational content. I find the act of opening clickbait videos in an incognito window along with judicious use of the "not interested" button has kept it quite usable.
Yup. You still get the occasional dud, but most of the feed is relevant in my case.
I once browsed YouTube without being logged in. Do not recommend. I wanted to gouge my eyes out. I imagine it's a similar experience to browsing the web without an adblocker.
Depends on what you're watching.
I mean, everyone on YouTube is playing the algorithm game somewhat -- assuming they want to have their videos watched, and they do, or they wouldn't be there to begin with.
Having said that, I watch a ton of YouTube videos. Not randomly, like zapping through TV channels (do people still do that, by the way?). I watch videos from the dozens of channels I'm subscribed to, by authors I enjoy watching and about topics that are relevant to me. YouTube is unbeatable for this, because almost everyone is on YouTube, but few other video platforms are as universal.
And yes, I pay for YouTube Premium because ads absolutely break YouTube. Ads make everything worse. I'm still upset about the recent trend of authors placing "sponsor segments" embedded in their videos (looking at you, Squarespace -- you can go f*ck yourself); I wish paying for Premium automatically skipped these segments too, but oh well. At least some authors make self-deprecating jokes about their sponsored content.
May I introduce you to SponsorBlock:
For any content I’m interested in, a blog post with pictures beats it. If it needs video then have it interspersed throughout the page.
LLM summarisers are the only thing that make YouTube usable for me in that I can still get the content without wasting time.