But you cannot opt out of Google having a list of every video you watch and when/where you watch from tied to your credit card details and browser.

Google will use this data to sort feeds and recommendations in a way that helps meet the behavior modification goals of their partners.

When creators upload to platforms that let me anonymously pay them with money, I will happily do so. LBRY has proven this can be done.

How do you think creators gain a following in a world without a recommendation system? I can assure you only maybe a dozen of the (english) creators in the top 1000 are actually popular from word-of-mouth, with the rest entirely dependent on the recommendation system for their entire channel.

I think you misunderstand what YouTube is. YouTube's primary product IS its recommendation system. Other platforms will happily host video files for you for a marginal cost, but nobody goes to them because they won't see videos that appeal to them specifically when they visit the site's homepage.

I would counter that by asking how someone who is not blessed by the almighty advertizer-friendly algorithm can ever be seen. I suggest that the internet is healthiest when anyone has a real chance of gaining a following because they organically went viral or were upvoted by users like frequently happens on mastodon or even hackernews... even if the content is not advertiser friendly.

I understand what YouTube is quite well. The product is providing the most addictive advertiser friendly content possible that ignores all mental health studies. The product is cigarettes and like cigarettes, their use will only be reduced when enough people are educated on the harms and reject the second hand smoke in our public places.

Humans are capable of simply searching for things and subscribing to things like RSS. RSS was peak internet and ActivityPub is the next generation of this. We can go back to that, while maybe adding unbiased, open source, and provably fair user voted topical discovery engines.

https://odysee.com/ is getting close with an open source system with community voted content discovery and creator support via microtransaction tips. You do not need to be advertiser friendly to succeed there, and we all get the same view of the world.

no adblock blocks in-content ads, and if we are talking technicalities and theory anyway, surely it violates the tos. I'm not sure what this suggestion even meant to accomplish now that I think about it.

>no adblock blocks in-content ads

Ever heard of SponsorBlock?