[Gollapalli]

Being recommended low viewership channels is a positive.

Having everything be polished, scripted and ad friendly is tremendously boring. My complaint over the last few years with YouTube was that I missed the wackos. They were the thing that made the web interesting to begin with.

[lurk2]

I used to feel the same way, but something changed in the last few years to make these videos less appealing to me; they are usually low-viewership simply because they aren’t very good. For certain subjects like religion and philosophy, the novelty-seeking factor is completely gone for me - the best channels are the biggest ones, and everything else is guaranteed to be a grift, an inaudibly-recorded lecture, or an embryonic cult.

I do still occasionally get some good videos from smaller channels, but smallness is a lot more relative these days. A lot of channels that I have started following in the last few years begin to see growth within less than a year. YouTube has gotten really good at identifying quality content and amplifying it, with the end result being that the 300 view videos in your feed are just market testing.

One thing you can do if you’re into the weirder side of YouTube is to append “before:2012” to the end of your searches; I’ve found some cool stuff doing that.