YouTube is once again screwing things up without telling people because they clearly hate their userbase. Essentially doing anything that’s not making a video for babies is potential grounds for getting a channel wiped. And for whatever reason the algorithm apparently either prefers videos under a minute in length or ones that are over half an hour, no in-between. I’m just convinced they’ll only make the site worse as it goes, somehow.
In fact, I have a fairly clear idea on how they’ll make the site worse later on. Mainly it’ll get split into a few sites. The first split would be right down the middle of the algorithm’s preferences. Essentially YouTube Shorts will be its own thing entirely, fully becoming “bootleg TikTok” and effectively copy how that site works, however it works. I haven’t really used it, but in a stage where that site is effectively illegal in some contexts, YouTube Shorts would have a slight chance of working out just to appeal to modern meme kids. On the other side of the algorithmic split, YouTube TV would be the result. While that already exists as some premium way to watch live TV channels online in specific markets, it would also have the addition of a free streaming service that consists of curated content creation available for watching with at least as many ads as there are now, if not more, or by upgrading to a premium subscription, would unlock the live TV thing as well as either reduced or removed ads on that on-demand side. Essentially anyone else who wanted to upload anything would have to go with Shorts or nothing, making the YouTube name an artifact title. The only video content there would be from YouTube picking favorites with their big moneymakers and having them produce whatever fits the MO.
However, they would likely try to attract or keep around the legacy userbase, but at a price. There could end up being a third site which I’ll call YouTube Prime, essentially requiring an up-front subscription to have YouTube like in “the old days” with some justification about how a monthly fee would reduce concerns about monetization from advertising, because there’d be a revenue stream regardless. Of course the base membership fee wouldn’t remove ads entirely just so they can have another tier that does so. At first it would pretty much be as they’d say, fewer restrictions on content once again, just with having to pay in order to watch or upload anything. But they’d eventually cave to supposed concerns from advertisers and parents and throw on all the restrictions they’ve made up now, so instead of having a free faulty product, it would be a paid faulty product.
Long story short, however they decide to further ruin the site, I suggest just downloading whatever your favorite videos are for whenever they’ll end up getting removed by the company for whatever reasons they come up with. If enough people do this, we might end up with a partial but decently-sized distributed archive of content to draw from. Then the question would be how to have this accessible to everyone. And don’t say blockchain. There are more tested decentralized models that aren’t built off raw greed that would serve as a better example. Dedicated archival sites are at least a start here. Maybe someday we might see a better YouTube alternative that’s not just DailyMotion or Vimeo with their particular issues. But that could be decades off due to how much video hosting can cost.