I choose what I search for and avoid what's ''trash'' as you mentioned.

I hate it compared to the old Youtube. The are insanely strict about copyright now. Videos are constantly being taken down for it. And to make matters worse they are going 'kid friendly' people are literally getting demonetized for swearing.

Horror narrators have to star out words like 'death' and 'killed' in their titles if they want to get monetized. Hell a few of them have complained about how the kid friendly thing has gotten their videos flagged for violating community guidelines.

Likewise they get less views because the algorithms are set up to burry anything that isn't kid friendly. The algoritims in themselves are fucking annoying as shit. I actually talked about this over on the debate spot; " I remember when I could go on Youtube (think 2006-2010ish) and I could just go down a rabbit hole finding new music via the related videos and there was variety and had some underground stuff. Now I'm being force fed the same content over and over again. I miss being able to find new music. These days it feels like Youtube is trying to tell me what to listen to based on what it thinks my taste is. The 'show videos based on viewing history' doesn't work for me because I literally listen to everything and anything and it's hell annoying to only be shown songs from a certain genre (while excluding others) because I had a day where I was on a metal kick. I've been able to confuse the algorithms a bit by going exclusively to smaller channels and avoiding vevo (while listening to various genres) and was able to get some obscure stuff and a bigger variety on my homepage. But I miss when I didn't have to do that."

I also remember when I could log on and see a bunch of actually funny crack vids. Now they are just looping songs over scenes. Back in the high day, they used to take sound clips from sitcoms and comedy movies and I could laugh for hours at Avatar and Naruto crack vids. Those are rare gems now.

New youtube is shit but for some reason I still use it.

I mostly just watch educational videos nowadays (Overly Sarcastic Productions, Trey the Explainer, ReligionForBreakfast, Mythology and Fiction Explained, Useful Charts, lots of documentary channels, etc.) so I can't say if it's better or worse than before.