There's been a lot of negative changes to algorithms recent years. Search seems to function more as an extension to the recommendation page at this point with l

There's been a lot of negative changes to algorithms recent years. Search seems to function more as an extension to the recommendation page at this point with little relation to the search terms used. Content moderation has also heavily sanitised some communities on the site, but I'm not sure how wide spread that is. I know certain kinds of "edgy" content or controversial political discussions aren't really possible on YouTube today like there were in the past though. My main issue with monetisation isn't so much the content itself, but the content recommendations. It seems that a lot of the content recommendations today have a corporate bias which they didn't used to. If a tech review channel just wants to make market videos and post them to YouTube that's fine with me personally so long as the algorithms don't push me to that type of content (which it currently does). The authentic low-budget tech reviewer doesn't have a chance on YouTube today, and that's real the problem. If you want authentic, low-budget user curated content YouTube isn't the place anymore. There was something special about those early years of YouTube when it was mostly just low-budget videos made by real people on 420p webcams or video cameras. Back then no one made YouTube videos to be rich or famous, they made videos simply because they enjoyed making them and wanted to share their content with the world. I don't think YouTube has peaked as a business, but I think it peaked in terms of an web 2.0 platform about a decade ago. That's a common trend though. All web 2.0 sites have been trending towards corporatisation for years now. The dream of the internet being a place where individuals could make cool stuff that other people around the world could find and enjoy is dead imo. Search and recommendation algorithms across the web are increasingly pushing users towards the approved corporate content because that's where the money is. Unless you know where to look today authentic content is extremely hard to find.