Or it was, anyway. Youtube's choice to tune its algorithm for profitability rather than things I'm actually interested means my home page and "related videos" are almost entirely useless. Youtube's strict search limits also make it very hard to find anything obscure, and impossible to find every video on a particular topic. Maybe it's not the most intellectually healthy thing in the world, but if I want to watch every single, say, reaction video to The Verge's terrible PC build, how dare YouTube decide I'm only allowed to see the three most popular ones before my search results are replaced with random monetized nonsense?
YouTube's search is pretty much horseshit now. Trip off any wrongthink keywords and it will give you nothing but CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and NPR. I wrote an add-on that blocks all these channels by filtering out anything with the verified checkmark, and it's pretty revealing as to how much content YouTube suppresses. It's pretty clear who's buttering their biscuits.
It's truly disheartening to go back through your favorite creators and liked videos and see how many have been removed for violating new community guidelines or deleted by their creators because they no longer fit a marketable image. If I hadn't already had complete archives of my favorite channels due to an obsession with carrying media on the go, I'd probably have broken down and wept at the devastation of channels like Retsupurae and ChipCheezumSA. I learned that if there's any chance I'll want to watch something again in the future I need it saved to disk.
