Welp... Guess it's time to rip that bandaid and finally stop using YouTube all together.
It just keeps getting worse and worse and this is the line for me.
What are you going for instead?
Dailymotion, vimeo and metacafe are basically zombies at this point -- only reason I might have visited them in years now is because they are archives of some things that youtube might have pinged. Most of the external services like blip (powered thatguywiththeglasses at one point) and gametrailers are long gone, though I am sort of seeing the rise of if not the content partner networks then more dedicated stuff that youtube neuters.
Twitch for now does OK at streaming but streaming is not tightly edited, scripted and produced works so... yeah.
This leaves the likes of bitchute, rumble and odysee/lbry (which still have an interesting lawsuit hanging over their heads) for long form stuff. These will invariably be tarred with the "OMG right wing" brush, mostly because such types will probably be those to embrace it if you go in for free speech and they have had lives made hard on youtube (the left wing set that had life made hard on youtube, which is no small amount either -- copyright, sexual and sensitive history/questioning narratives bothering them as much as those that don't care for woke stuff, then not likely to make the switch to such things for various reasons like pushback from their community if not things they find distasteful themselves and there generally being no equivalents for them). This also means advertising (for better or worse it is a draw for those making content) which is passive as well (I am sure tshirts and ebegging sites make up a notable component for some but... yeah) or achieving some kind of critical mass (and youtube has been going long enough now that legacy content is a big concern there, though a few offer to mirror things or upload to multiple sites) and big boy commercial backers is more dubious unless youtube really lifts its head up high and blows its brains out (a possibility, especially with its current political aspirations, dubious copyright ideas and puritanical bent that makes even the TV channels that it left bleeding look outlandish).
Tiktok and instagram for short form content/basically porn that is not technically porn -- do you particularly envisage going there for gaming content, anything engineering/fixing/building, film criticism, in depth history, comedy or the like? Facebook for marketing and pirated versions of a few bigger sources. Not to mention they are operating on basically the same rule set as youtube, just maybe a few months behind or with a notable exception (tiktok is tinder for paedophiles being a somewhat apt take I saw a while back, and most that pay any attention will note instagram as a dating application that is not explicitly a dating application). Reddit would probably also go the same way if they included a video option tomorrow.
Anything non English then mostly being good for pirating films and TV shows, and maybe some dodging of the "not technically sexually explicit", not to mention a good chunk of those that do general content are in Russia (vk.com being a social media site kind of but with serious video aspects and yandex.ru being a search engine while you can if you want to try something out) so oh well.
Some that might have branched out to bitchute, rumble and obysee/lbry have also found some success hosting on porn sites (they generally take the stance of advertisers already hate us, want to put your gun videos or political commentary on here then go right ahead) but not likely to go mainstream with that one.
Bandwidth and storage seem to have reached a point where it is viable.
To that end while I would love to ditch youtube then I am not sure what (single or collective) really would serve as an alternative in the short-medium term if I am going in for more than news and political commentary, game/film/tv/comic criticism. Might involve going in for the RSS or bookmarks and a copy of youtube-dl (not sure if it exists as an easy install for mobile phones) for the time being.
