YouTube before vs. after massive corporate, profit-driven enshittification

One of the most annoying things YT does to me is recommend videos I've already watched. Like I get it, they are perfect for me, exactly the type of video I watch. That's why I've already seen them. And because I don't have the memory of a housefly, I actually remember what the video was about. If I wanted to watch it again, I would navigate to my history or the channel it's from and rewatch it there.

It makes absolutely no sense to me, why recommend videos I've already seen?

I use a browser plugin to hide those videos, but it doesn't fully work.

Every. Fucking. Year. I swear, google just runs a query to remove view history past a certain age. Every. Fucking. Year, there comes a time where my ENTIRE FUCKING HOME PAGE basically resets to a year ago, because it forgot I watched every fucking video already.
Fuck Google. They're too lazy to do anything correct.

I miss when people made stuff because they loved making stuff, not because they wanted to get rich.

Sort of like how girls used to post sexy photos of themselves because they wanted attention, now they do it to get rich.

I miss when people made stuff because they loved making stuff, not because they wanted to get rich.
They still do, but you'll never find it in the existing layout. The only stuff that bubbles to the surface is so heavily SEO engineered and hyper-monetized that it's got to be sixteen ads on the back of an infomercial in order to break even.
Very true. The old internet perfectly showed how people are happy to create and share content as enthusiasts, eg. wikipedia, reddit/forums, and lot of X rated amateur stuff.
Since then, capitalism has decided to leech on and ruin most of these. Now we have more content, but worse quality - because for the end user a genuine reddit review of a product was more useful than a targeted ad, and most ppl prefered to look at the videos of some random couple sharing it as a kink, rather than some endlessly polished fake amateur video.
There's still people who do that including the dnd group I'm in, but it's hidden behind the algorithm. Gotta hunt for the people doing it for fun.

Do I want to know what Elsagate is?

If you have kids it's probably worth knowing about. If not, it might be better to avoid increasing your outrage
YT is filling up with the very heavily A/B tested content mills.
One thing that is assured to get a click from a small girl is Elsa. One thing that's sure to get a click from a small boy is Spiderman. Consequently, you get enormous swaths of content that are just people in Spiderman and Elsa costumes doing weird or innocuous things on camera. As the format has evolved, more click-baity content gets folded in. Being pregnant, getting vaccine shots, and covering each other with peanut butter all grab kids interest, so the people in the Elsa and Spiderman costumes run around with fake pregnancy bellies and oversized syringe needles and giant tubs of peanut butter to rub each other with.
It's perverse and it has no conceivable cinematic value, but it can be used to grab a small kid's attention for hours on end. So its the perfect tool for monetizing latchkey kids.

The new youtube definitely promotes small channels

Most of my subscriptions are for small channels that youtube recommended to me

Yeah I know it's popular to shit on things here but honestly I'm pretty happy with the recommendation system right now, it gives a good mix of sure hits and adventurous small channels.

I really don't understand the complaints on the "new" side. Most of them aren't even real, and it makes me wonder whether or not OP actually even uses YT at all.

Only promotes large channels - This hasn't been true for a while, and YT's actually been recommending a lot more smaller channels more often. I'm constantly being suggested channels I've never heard of, with sub-100 view counts. They even announced fairly recently that they were further stepping up recommendations for smaller channels, too.
Does nothing about Elsagate - What year is it??? The Elsagate trend has almost entirely died out, largely because the target audience has grown up and the newer generation of kids aren't engaging with that kind of material. There's only a very small handful of channels still making that sort of content, and they're not getting anywhere near the views they used to, because YT has filtered a lot of that out from child viewers now. The only Elsagate videos that I can see right now are "Elsa and Spiderman do something normal, nothing weird with vomit or syringes happens and Spiderman doesn't get pregnant".
No dislikes - They never mattered to begin with. Videos were almost always either 5% liked or 95% liked, and to glean any reasoning for those scores required more research than any user was ever putting in, anyway. It rarely ever represented the quality of the content, and it certainly didn't discourage YouTube from recommending disliked videos, because they recognize dislikes the exact same as a like; it's user engagement, so disliked videos were still recommended all the same.
The videos are forgettable slop - Subscribe to better channels then, that's 100% a you problem. There's still plenty of excellent content available, and it's not that hard to find. If you subscribe to trash channels, you're going to see trash videos. Play with the search more often.
Soulless channel layout - It was never anything more than a grid of thumbnails, what sort of layout nostalgia could you possibly have?
Makes a shitty TikTok clone - Then don't use it, it's super easy to avoid; the videos have a special icon, a vertical thumbnail, and are in their own section on the page. It's hard to accidentally watch YT Shorts.
Makes the site kid-friendly despite having an app for kids - I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. What about it is "kid friendly" at all? The fact that you can't put tits in a thumbnail? I have no clue what this is even referring to.
Age restricts videos for content that can be found in G-rated films - I think you may overestimate what is allowed for a G rating in films. Age-restriction occurs for more than just sex, violence, and profanity. In most cases, the subject material, itself, is what warrants the age-restriction.

I hate having to defend one of the biggest corps on the planet, but this is just not real.

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. I'm getting pretty tired of all the recommendations of videos with 8 views next to "real" videos. I'm most definitely not getting any recommendations to large corpo channels, other than the ones I actually enjoy (Mythical Kitchen is probably the most corpo channel I enjoy).
Shorts can go to hell, but they're very easy to avoid as you say.
i don't mind shorts existing but i wish it wasn't crammed down my throat. like, i'm there to watch longform content but even on my subscriptions page i have to scroll past a big section of shorts to get to the content i actually subscribe to. it should be a separate service, or at least keep it in its own section.

After they abolished the 5 star rating, things only went downhill. The newest bullshit are these "Posts". I had to unfollow some interesting accounts because they started to post images on YouTube which plastered my home feed. I don't want a TikTok clone, and I don't need social media bullshit, I just want a decent video hoster.

Edit: I just saw that revanced has a setting to hide Posts!

Posts in general are fine if they are used responsibly. Like asking which build to play next for an ARPG gaming channel.
I unfollowed a channel that started posting fucking Raid Shadow Legends ads in their community posts tho. Kinda sucked, I liked that channel but I don't condone that behavior. I realize that my unfollow did not change anything, but it's a matter of principle.

I must be using a different YouTube as everyone else since I'm not really experiencing any of that myself.

I remember when YouTube was used to be a very good video platform site under Chad Hurley

WHY DIDN'T LET NEAL MOHAN AND YOUTUBE EMPLOYEES FIX THE PLATFORM AND MAKE IT FAR MORE USABLE?

*manually promoted Logan Paul's suicide forrest video

Find someone else to give you free video hosting then? If YouTube wasn't profit-driven, YouTube would be dead

Yeah bro I pay for premium and it’s still hot stinkin shit

What the hell is elsagate?

I might be imagining things but for a brief period of time it showed a bit of analytics about video views. It was visible to everyone.

Hey now, me playing my flute with myself in an edited duet isn't "forgettable slop"! I'll have you know, my 15 views and 1 Like that I liked myself are the pinnacle of my music career.

Link it and I'll like your video.
- Awwws, thanks!
  ...I've only been playing the flute for 10 months though, so it's not very impressive. I'll send a link in a other 6 months after I learn how to vibrato so that my tone improves dramatically