My personal answer to all of this is that YouTube is a failed product for me. It may serve some general consumption/ad revenue production use case but it is a terrible product for a self-directed “power user.” I see the situation analogous to Twitter. The benefits of the platform are too powerful to entirely leave behind but horribly deficient to what they could be and there is no real alternative because of monopoly. YouTube in my view long ago stopped focusing on providing more value in a two sided market between content consumers/creators and shifted to pure monopoly resource extraction. I’m sure there are alternative emerging platforms but the logic of natural monopolies in two sided markets makes it brutally hard for any of them to reach critical useful scale.
But I realize I’ve gotten very lazy over the past decades and outsourced far too much power to the platform companies. Business is always some combination of providing value to your customers and extracting value for yourself but too many of these platforms have lost the balance. I’m tired of being the product even when I try to provide an alternative paid revenue stream to opt out of that deal.
Annoying and painful as it will be (I’m at a point in life where I no longer have bandwidth to self-hack every thing) I am going to have to reclaim big chunks of my digital autonomy. Thanks all for the great discussion here.