I love parts of YouTube and despise others, and the love side is strong, so let me be fair before I complain. YouTube hosts videos for free, which is a massive gift to creators, educators, businesses, and hobbyists. The infrastructure works on every device from phones to smart TVs with almost no downtime. The library is staggering: cooking channels, travel vlogs, educational deep dives, movie trailers, obscure hobbies. Something good always shows up.
That is why the broken parts grate. A platform this good should not treat the people who build it this badly.
Think of YouTube like a brilliant city with a broken justice system. The city is dazzling, full of things you cannot get anywhere else, so everyone moves there. An automated court enforces the rules. It assumes you are guilty, hands your property to whoever accuses you, and offers no real appeal. You stay for the city and live in fear of the court. That tension is the whole experience.
Why is YouTube’s copyright system the biggest problem?
Because it is automated, one-sided, and nearly impossible to fight. Content ID was built to stop infringement, a reasonable goal. In practice it leans hard toward whoever files the claim. Innocent creators get taken down, lose income, and face a system that treats them as guilty until proven innocent. Channels get nuked without warning over bogus strikes. The burden of proof lands on the creator, backwards from how justice is supposed to work.
The scale makes it worse. YouTube has roughly 2.5 to 2.7 billion monthly logged-in users worldwide, so a small policy glitch hits millions. This is a global problem instead of the grumbling of a few unhappy people. Creators who fight back meet a wall of automated responses and vanishing human support. When your livelihood depends on a platform that answers complaints with a bot, the frustration builds fast.
These are the people who keep the platform alive, and YouTube treats them as an afterthought, the same pattern that plagues Yelp’s review system.
What is wrong with the YouTube algorithm?
It decides what you watch, and it feels like a science fiction plot where an impersonal machine runs your digital life. The algorithm pushes sensational and extreme content, traps viewers in bubbles of similar material, and makes it harder to find something new and worthwhile. For creators, the problem is blindness. One algorithm tweak can tank a channel’s views overnight and wipe out ad revenue with no explanation. Nobody can build a strategy against a system they cannot see.
The algorithm does help some channels get discovered, and that trade-off keeps people on the platform. It also serves up mountains of AI-generated junk beside legitimate content. Whether the exposure is worth the chaos is an open question. The system is tuned to hold attention, and holding attention and serving quality are different goals. So much of what it surfaces is engineered to keep you watching, whether or not it is worth watching.
How bad is the AI slop invasion?
Bad enough that it is the single biggest reason YouTube feels worse to use than it did two years ago. Search for almost anything and you wade through robotic voiceovers laid over stock footage, fake “Top 10” lists cranked out by bots, and entire channels built to farm views with no human creativity in them. Merriam-Webster named “slop” its 2025 Word of the Year for a reason: the stuff is everywhere.
The numbers are stark. A 2025 study by the video platform Kapwing examined 15,000 of YouTube’s most popular channels and found 278 that produce nothing but AI content. Those channels have racked up 63 billion views and an estimated $117 million in annual revenue. When researchers built a fresh account to see what new users get, roughly one in five recommended videos was AI-generated. A third of those qualified as brainrot: content that teaches nothing, entertains less, and somehow keeps you watching.
Real creators who spend weeks researching, filming, and editing cannot compete with channels pumping out hundreds of videos a day for pennies. History channels, true crime creators, and educational producers have watched AI knockoffs bury their work in search results. One viral true crime series turned out to be entirely AI-generated. Even YouTube CEO Neal Mohan’s likeness got used in a deepfake phishing scam on his own platform.
YouTube started fighting back in mid-2025 with monetization rules requiring content to be “significantly original and authentic.” In January 2026 Mohan named reducing AI slop and detecting deepfakes as top priorities for the year. The platform now cuts the reach of low-effort AI videos and requires disclosure labels on synthetic content. Whether that stems the tide is an open question. It is the same rising tide of machine-made filler drowning real work across the whole internet.
Is YouTube’s moderation censorship?
Under the banner of “Community Guidelines,” YouTube decides what survives. Some call it moderation. Others call it censorship. The rules are vague, the enforcement is inconsistent, and the decisions are opaque. A joke that slides on one channel gets another creator penalized, and that kind of favoritism breeds distrust. Demonetization hangs over creators like a guillotine. Say the wrong word or cover the wrong topic and the video loses its revenue, which pushes creators toward self-censorship.
Advertiser-friendliness works as its own quiet censorship. A video that upsets advertisers loses income whatever its quality, so creators steer toward whatever keeps the ad money flowing. Many keep adapting anyway, and their resilience says a lot about the pull of the platform. It is resilience in spite of the system.
Why is YouTube’s advertising so bad now?
Advertising sits at the core of most “YouTube sucks” complaints, and as the platform has grown, ads have gone from a minor nuisance to an unwatchable nightmare. Early YouTube had skippable pre-roll ads and rare mid-roll interruptions. Now viewers sit through several unskippable ads running 15, 30, or 60 seconds each, crammed in before, during, and after videos. Some videos hit you with two back-to-back unskippable ads before a single frame of content, then cut in again at the worst possible moment.
The experience has gone from “I can live with this” to “I want to throw my remote at the screen.”
YouTube has also cracked down on ad blockers, starting in late 2023 with detection, warning popups, playback delays, and restricted access. The message is watch the ads or pay up. Workarounds still exist. On Windows, uBlock Origin still strips ads in most browsers. For Fire TV users, SmartTube is a free, open-source app with an ad-free interface, SponsorBlock integration, and background playback built in. Neither costs a dime.
The paid escape is Premium at $13.99 a month or $139.99 a year. Many find it steep, because ad-free viewing comes bundled with YouTube Music and features people do not want. YouTube launched Premium Lite in 2025 at $7.99 a month. It strips ads from most long-form videos and drops music streaming, offline downloads, and background play, and it still leaves ads on Shorts and music.
On top of it all, the revenue split feels disproportionately small for the creators who make the content worth watching, and arbitrary demonetization cuts off income for vague reasons with no clear explanation.
What are the alternatives, and what does this mean for writers?
Competition is a click away, and none of it matches YouTube’s reach. That is the trap. Vimeo is known for high-quality content and creator-friendly monetization. Dailymotion is less restrictive. Twitch delivers direct viewer interaction and a more intimate experience. TikTok has become the default for short-form video and pulled younger audiences away. Each attracts different creators and viewers, and most people still treat YouTube as the default. Creators stay despite the frustrations, though the growing discontent could change that.
For writers, YouTube cuts both ways. It is a powerful promotional tool for book trailers, author interviews, behind-the-scenes content, and snippets of upcoming work, with reach that can put your writing in front of millions. The platform is also noisy and competitive, and standing out takes real effort. It is an excellent place to learn craft and publishing, if you can sift through mountains of videos for the reliable material.
It offers a new medium in video essays and vlogs, and production takes different skills and serious time. It builds community through comments and discussion, which takes time to manage and exposes you to trolls. And it pays through ad revenue, sponsorships, and Premium sharing, with unpredictable income and the demonetization threat always present.
The deeper lesson is one I keep returning to. YouTube is one more rented platform, and depending on it puts your livelihood at the mercy of an algorithm and an automated court. Use it for reach and own your real home. That is the argument behind why the owned website still matters. YouTube joins TikTok and Twitter/X in that lesson.
For the wider view, the social media hub covers it, and if you want a body of owned writing no platform can strike down, that is the work I do. Love the city. Do not trust the court with everything you own.
The Guides That Get Your Book Written, Published, and Sold
Four short, practical guides on writing, publishing, and selling your book, plus the occasional note when there's something worth your time. No fluff, no daily inbox clutter. Drop your email and they're yours.
We use MailerLite to manage our list and send these emails. Your address is used only to send you what you signed up for. We will not sell it, share it, or use it for anything else, and you can unsubscribe anytime.
I gave up on YouTube a long long time ago. If there are any videos that I want to post online, I do so on another video sharing platform such as Bitchute, Rumble, et al. If I ever need to view content on YouTube, I use tools such as yt-dlp(https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp), yt-local(https://git.sr.ht/~heckyel/yt-local), and YewTube(https://github.com/mps-youtube/yewtube). YouTube can go f**k itself.
Yes, youtube is not so good anymore. I was an addict for something like 15 years, but the toxicity and too many ads ruined it. I only post because it’s the biggest platform but I expect nothing back and I never go there for anything else.
I am sick and tired of YouTube trying to make me sign in so they can get my phone number and private details, when my broadband subscription comes round for renewal I will cancel my broadband, YouTube is getting greedy and dictatorial with all their, private video, age restriction, are you a bot, I’m getting to the point where I don’t need YouTube in my life.
We all need another platform or I can see the internet will crash at some point in the future, YouTube will then become insignificant and irrelevant, and if people start to stop renewing their broadband contracts which are far to expensive anyway there will be a lot more unemployment.
Agreed.
Modern youtube is basically a tabloid in streaming form.
And their copyright rules have infuriating double standards.
Youtube sucks. It is a censorship site. You can wirte comments without cursing nor using harsh language but if Youtube disagree with your opinion they block it or more likely shadow ban it. Youtube is a pile of trash that needs to be replaced.
Rumble still has some technical issues but it is much better than Youtube because it does not censor opinions.
YOUTUBE NEEDS TO BE REPLACED. Im sick of that garbage site.
“Content ID”
I received a copyright claim on the following video. The Indian Navy has its own world-class musical band and I was privileged enough to be treated to a concert on one of their flagship vessels. The naval band played “Thriller” offering a tribute to the King of Pop, Michael Jackson.
It was such a beautiful experience. But according to YouTube, the music played by a live band falls under copyright claims. This is what the copyright claim says in detail:
“The melody is the words and music of songwriters and composers. These rights are often managed by different rightsholders in each country, and are separate from the rights associated with the recording of the song.”
Indian Navy Playing “Thriller” By Michael Jackson (youtube.com)
I’m very angry with YouTube. How can a song tribute by a musical band fall under any kind of copyright claims? They used their own drums, saxophone, and other instruments to recreate the melody. Can’t Google’s algorithms tell the difference between an original composition, and its recreated version.
With this wrongful copyright claim, Google and YouTube have also shown extreme disrespect to my country’s Navy, and armed forces. All they were doing was give tribute to Michael Jackson, and that falls under fair use in every sense of the word. It’s not as if they were pirating “Thriller” and planning to sell the records later.
I wish Sundar Pichai reads my comment someday, and I want him to know how much he sucks.
I know, copyright claims from YouTube can be very annoying at best. I looked at the video you referenced. Very nice. What did YouTube tell you needs to be done regarding the claim?
I would have filed a complaint if I knew it was being answered by humans and not AI chatbots. Your article is so needed in this hour.
There’s no way you can talk directly to a human in the Google Support team unless you’re subscribed to “Google One.”