I have an absolutely opposite opinion. YouTube is fantastic. If it's bad for you, it might be your own recommendations (which are driven by what you watch).

It's now a fascinating ecosystem with everything from streamers with 1000 followers to people rebuilding cars from scratch with 1M followers to MrBeast.

My own recommendations feed is basically just cooking, hiking, photo, animal videos.

It still works well in terms of discovering content. Most of the channels I follow I found on YouTube. Just recently one of the streamers I watched hit 100k (I remember him at 2000).

I turned off recommendations to try to reign in my screen time a bit and it's worked tremendously. My feed is exactly what I asked for, if I don't see a video worth my time then I close the app. It's better than ever in my experience.

I haven't noticed.

I don't have my YouTube recommendations turned on, I only go to YouTube when I actually have a video in mind to watch.

And I still see quality stuff in my searches.

Is a realistic YouTube competitor possible?

It used to be a nice Library. Now its a nice Library but with every book screaming at you as you pass by - please pay attention to me please. The sky will fall if you dont. No one has any humility anymore. Or the value of humility has dropped to 0.

As Goldhaber famously said people have Limits to how much Attention they can give anything but somehow no limits to recieving Attention. No one knows why.

The platforms have all chosen to exploit that asymmetry rather treating it with some dignity. The end result is too many people crave or think they deserve the worlds attention and all the time. If they dont get it then they now believe they are broken and failures.

So if something gets 10 views youtube doesnt tell the creator those 10 people have gone off to watch 50 other things. So people are getting a constant false signal on how much real Attention they are actually getting. Some day hopefully this will change.

Enshittification