This is a key reason behind my discomfort with social media. The algorithms that seem unresponsive to clear signals of intent was the last straw. Ended up leaving YouTube over the incessant push to new channels and ragebait shit.
Anyway, lemmy might be a cesspit at times, but its a cesspit I can choose/not choose, to engage with, and thats some nice anti-monopolisation of my online experience in the design.
The best way to use YT, is to have a bookmark folder linking to the recent video list (Descending by release date) of the channels you enjoy.
YT/Google by definition (large American technology company) cannot be trusted.
Even better: YouTube still provides RSS feeds. You can “subscribe” to your favourite channels by adding them to your RSS reader.
And for desktop, there’s also FreeTube.
Word of caution because you may be under the impression that youtube isn’t suppressing videos that are supposed to show up there:
Youtube is known to skip certain videos and never surface them in the chronological view of subscribed videos. They explain it by “technical issues” every time, but intentional or not, the experience is the same, Youtube does not want you using it
Yeah, I noticed this, so I started using RSS feeds of my subscribed channels. I honestly think RSS (and other web 2.0 tech) is when the internet peaked from a user experience perspective.
RSS only faded away because it’s so convenient that it’s hard to monetize. When the goal became keeping people on your platform as long as possible, RSS was antithetical to that goal. So platforms either abandoned support for it or (like YouTube) stopped advertising its existence.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the case, but since we are using YT to start with (I do use Peertube, but it’s a lot smaller), this is a good baseline approach IMO.
Use YT as hosting/player service, not as a discovery/library management service.