Anecdotal, but for a while it felt like YouTube had decent content on whatever I was looking for. I trusted product reviews on there ever so slightly more than text content because of the relatively higher cost of producing videos. Nowadays there’s a glut of low quality stuff. Anything from low-effort videos to outright text-to-speech, non-videos that snare you using a promising thumbnail. The search results only surface about 5-10 relevant videos followed by things that have specious relevance. On top of that, they jammed Shorts into prominent screen real estate. It screams “hey while I’ve got you here, about a few of these distractions!”

So, I stopped going there as much. They stopped respecting visitor intentions. Just like every other platform, they just want to keep you on the site for as long as possible sifting through a feed of dopamine slop.