[edgineer]

This could get opinionated. I do want to praise increased video quality, added ways for creators to get paid, community posts, thumbnail preview and popularity graph when seeking through a track, chapters, live chatting, caption translation.

Shorts are mixed. Also, the tragedy of the commons where people are encouraged to make obnoxious thumbnails and titles. Video reply removal, usually the replies weren't good. Unlisted videos all went private automatically on some date. Sorting by oldest when viewing a channel's videos was briefly removed but brought back.

Bad changes include

the entire copystrike system, which is more stringent than what the DMCA requires,

community translation removal, where people could submit subtitles,

removing dislikes which gave a great red/green bar to indicate a video's quality just below the thumbnail,

removing video recommendations when logged out or if history is off,

scaring creators with being labeled aimed for kids (pewdiepie stopped calling his fanbase "9 year-old army" for this),

the monetization/demonetization system drastically changed how people make videos. e.g., cutting edge engineering recently had to stop swearing so much in their outtakes section, saying "fuck me" when he made a mistake, as YT considers that sexual. nobody dares say the word "suicide" out loud, people use code words to speak. history channels are virtually impossible to monetize without cutting out mention of terrorism.

the search system by default now shows weird results, I can't quite explain it,

searching for newsworthy topics will result in you only seeing channels from approved news sources and not regular users (related, ChinesePod had a daily language learning channel using the news, YT said they couldn't categorize as news... not sure if they were forced off but they moved to vimeo),

gun youtubers worried about showing full-auto firing or how to reload a magazine... I'm still unclear on what they're forbidden to show,

and the multitude of videos and channels removed for a whole variety of reasons. Just one I'm thinking of is Russel Bentley's channel. "Texas" was his nickname, an American fighting in Petrovski for Russia, showing videos of him talking in a radio station or firing a DShK mounted in an abandoned elementary school. His channel was deleted soon after Russia's most recent invasion of Ukraine. Russia Today/RT's live news was booted too, though that may have been due to US sanctions.

And age-gating now. it's hard to know which songs will be age-gated, maybe if they use the word "fuck" too much, it's very inconsistent. Now, you have to not only log in to see a video labeled this way, your account must be age-verified. If your account is old YT doesn't ask this, but they do for my ~5 year old account. I haven't done it. Asks for ID or face scan or to be able to log in to your email account.