The unwavering fixation on metrics like Click Thru Rate, Average View Duration and Average View Percentage explains why so many of my previous channels get formulaic over time. It sounds like a small thing, but for some reason the thumbnails/titles with the Youtube face enrage me the most.
Thankfully there are still enough channels which are not that optimized.
But I wonder: How would the scene of Youtubers cope, if Youtube suddenly changes its algorithm to something completely different? I remember the tears in SEO-land, when Google did it.
There's a disincentive for YouTube to change because it'd make both creators (to a greater extent) and users (to a lesser extent) unhappy.
It's almost like the situation of buggy hardware implementations of networking protocols being so prevalent that software has to adapt to it, and vice versa, leading to lots of silly non-compliant (or non-optimal) behavior because it's disadvantageous to fix your behavior before upstream/downstream fixes theirs.
I think the better ways to fix this would be either gradual change, carefully-crafted regulation, or a new platform entirely that's not owned by an ad company.
There are various browser extensions that you might like. Clickbait Remover for Youtube, DeArrow, etc. They remove the thumbnail images and replace them with a frame from a random time within the video, and replace or modify the video title to make it less sensational. I also recommend Sponsorblock.
I'm using an even more nerdier variant: Subscribing via RSS feeds, then downloading as MP4s.
Having a small backlog of video files in the file system shows how great file systems are compared to a subscription feed on a web site: You can pick and choose your next video, you can sort by different criteria, you can tag then and/or put them into folders and you can do that all one the fly.
Thankfully there are still enough channels which are not that optimized.
But I wonder: How would the scene of Youtubers cope, if Youtube suddenly changes its algorithm to something completely different? I remember the tears in SEO-land, when Google did it.