There's great content on YouTube but there's a lot of garbage. AI-generated slop, clickbait thumbnails/titles that actually don't payout, sales pitches, and plain old low-quality garbage. The lack of a thumbs down really makes it hard to avoid these. I realize that thumbs down is also used to punish "wrong" political viewpoints and companies, so it's a hard problem. But as a viewer who never uploads content, it only makes my experience worse.

There's a "I don't want to see content like this" option you can signal on content and I find it works quite well

If only they would respect that when you tell them to hide shorts. Drives me crazy that they utterly refuse to let you turn those off.

Get a browser extension that does it, I finally looked for one after clicking the "not interested" button one too many times.

If you're at getting a browser extension level, you're not too far off from also getting an adblocker and not having to pay for premium.

My recommended feed mostly consists of chess, machining, Mario Maker, fighter jets, and assorted other things like that, which is exactly what I want to see. There's some dumb stuff in there, but it's easy to skip over and it learns to recommend what I actually watch. And there is a thumbs-down button, at least for me.

Well when normal news like NBC just got immediate front page stuff with super low engagement people downvoted the crap outta it because it was showing such preferential treatment. Feels like they deserved it, they bought their way in.

Little did we know how far YouTube would go for them.

I'm not sure there's a ton of real full programs on YouTube that would really leave you with, say, a college level understanding of something. No doubt there's some, but it's def not the norm. Even for those courses you lack the ability to interact with the instructor.

Learning on YouTube 10 yrs ago meant supplementing your guitar skills cuz you didn't have a teacher. Or learning how a compressor works so you can use it yourself in music. It was always supplemental tidbits from numerous creators that helped me hone skills. Learned a ton about tools and woodworking too, but it was always me working for awhile then going back to get more information. Much more difficult to do in like, biology(probably don't have a bio lab) or a high risk repair like plumbing.

Pretty much any computer skill is going to have a cache of resources where filtering out trash is going to be the harder part. There are fantastic coding and modeling guides from very experienced people. Most financial things you should be very wary of except top professionals with proven credentials.

Asking a community who their favorite creators are can be a good place to start.

I bought one 14 part video course and the resources/assets it had were more valuable than the info. I exercise caution with that stuff now.

And I entirely agree YouTube asks too much for premium.