And indeed it was - videos of every type lengths topic style is was just a true treasure chest.
Now the algorithm means everything is 12 minutes, shorts are everywhere, nothing is in depth and it's all samey and bland.
And nothing seems able to compete.
Sad days.
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 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.
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.