Sharing stuff one has interest in is good. Making use of SEO or “the algorithm” is a cashgrab. You can do so but I won’t support you.
The need to compete in popularity is something that kills good things efficiently and regularly.
Hard disagree. The need to compete drives unique content. You may not like that content, but it’s usually easy to avoid. I sub to channels that routinely put out good content, and avoid those that don’t.
Without the motive to compete, we wouldn’t have nearly as high of production value or variety of content.
So while I also hate the clickbait titles and whatnot, they make it easy for me to avoid stuff I likely won’t like anyway.
This isn’t only the need to compete for viewers, this is the need to comply to YouTube’s search algorithm. It enforces similar content just like SEO is enforced for Google Search. There sometimes will be new stuff, but all as a means to keep being relevant, not because the stuff is interesting. That means that most new stuff will be entertainment, or “infotainment”, which is fine in itself, but drowns out anything else. If you don’t see the danger in that, the US government does in their strive to sabotage TikTok (not saying it’s undeserved).
Production value is indeed up, which is a good thing, but not enough. This is presentation over the actual stuff. However variety is way down in the more successful youtubers. The variety comes from people who mostly don’t give a shit about the performance of their videos; or from people trying to be successful while tending to a niche. The latter however will still implement most stuff from the top youtubers. If something seems successful it will be implemented by the more successful youtubers, but they mostly won’t experiment as it costs money and normally negatively impacts viewer counts. YouTube’s search algorithm has driven people to comply to presentation, nothing more.
Clickbait, asking for subscription, adding ads and more are all symptoms of this compliance to the platform. Do you sub to a channel that has never done any of those?
It only really drives unique, high quality content when the incentives are aligned to reward unique, high quality content.
The reason every title and thumbnail is clickbait is because YouTube effectively forces you to do so or even your subscribers will have to manually go to your page to see your content consistently.