Google is excelling again - as the whole “uncensored” Big-Tech IT now.
The short summary is that for nearly a year, Google was hiding Proton Mail from search results for queries such as ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’. This was highly suspicious because Proton Mail has long been the world’s largest encrypted email provider.
I personally find the recommendation algorithm to be quite useless, since it seems to consistently recommend popular “engaging” videos, whereas my watch history is usually a bit more niche. Maybe it’s better for some people, but I’ve found myself getting better recs from places like Reddit/lemmy, YT comments, etc than the recommendation algorithm. It was so useless that I ended up turning off my viewing history, and I seem to now have better recommendations than before.
So at least for me, the platform itself isn’t particularly valuable to me, I care more about the creators themselves. I use Grayjay on my phone, which is nice because if a creator posts on multiple platforms, I can downrank YT so I’ll pull from those alternative platforms instead of YT. If I watch on YT itself, it’s usually because I’m looking for something specific, like music or information about a topic. The value of YT seems to largely be the sheer amount of content, not the actual features of the platform, so smaller platforms should be trying to get YT creators to also post on their platform. That way it’s easier to transition from YT to their platform, which is how I decided to sign up for Nebula (a handful of my favorite creators were on it, and I found a few new ones through their platform).
The recommendation algorithm (also using a third party app) recommends me tons of niche content. It’s how I found most of the creators that I follow.