Nowadays I start with a forum/reddit/discord/hn search for a list of hive approved creators and only then go to youtube with that list in hand. Starting the search in youtube (unless for a very niche/non-marketable topics) is close to worthless.
It drives me CRAZY!
How often I want to know something about a product (something less popular than smartphones, let's say IP cameras) and I find only ~3 reviews, I watch them all and they are all full of BS, because the reviewer has no experience with the product type they are given, they just follow the manual/or some given instructions by the sponsor how to make the product work. So I still know nothing about the product, its pros and cons and I can spot mistakes and BS even in those basic info that was given. In this specific case of IP cameras for example there are TONS of videos NOT showing the real video feed (recordings) from the camera, they just record the smartphone screen with another smartphone/camera and that's it.
When I discovered this practice from a well known SEO guru, I was both sad and angry.
I watch those videos to learn something new about the product (actual pros and cons, specific feature implementations, ...). But most of the time the "reviewer" basically reads the product description and goes over the list of features that I can find on literally any shop page that has that product.
It's so hard to find videos of people that have actually used the product for longer periods of time and can give an actual review.
Nowadays all review article just work off the specs without using and testing the products. And the user reviews have moved to Amazon, which are mostly very poor quality or just fakes, or possibly reviews for other products. In any case, there are no incentives to give high quality reviews of products, and google seems to have no incentive to show me the few remaining real review blogs.
I've also found user reviews on Home Depot to be more helpful than most. I'm not sure what they're doing to combat spam, but it seems to be working.
Meanwhile if you ignore all the commercial Youtubers and look for regular people using the product, you might end up with a more 'authentic' review, but also with an equally uninformative one, as most people just don't have access to all the latest tech gadgets on the market. They just have the one they are reviewing right now, so it's hard to get any meaningful comparisons.
There are a couple of good review sites left, but not nearly enough to cover all the tech stuff that gets released in the wild.
A wake-up call that a single company annihilated our ability to sort out information for ourselves. I'm still rather disturbed and shaken.
How can you sort something you know nothing about?
Downvotes, and their ratio to upvotes, were an important signal to get an idea of how good the video overall was.
It's a pointless feature at this point if you ask me.
[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/return-youtub...
This is it isnt it. When they removed downvoting I figured it didnt matter, but really youtube really got past its peak because of this.