I was spending too much time on YouTube. Thanks to YouTube for fixing that.
Over the last couple of years I've consumed a lot more YT videos. I'd say 95% of the YT videos I've ever watched came in the last two years. That's mostly because I rarely watched online video content before.
My earlier habit was to use my phone to listen to podcasts. The podcast app I had been using (who knows what it was) became enshittified. Other options like Spotify were already enshittified which is why I was using that other app in its pre-shittification stage.
Meanwhile, I had the YT app installed on my iPhone. Sometimes I'd watch educational content for one reason or another (work, hobby, boredom). As I moved away from podcast as the default option for outdoor activities, I came to appreciate the YT app. Sure, Google is an awful company that wants to profit from your information, but the YT app gave me the freedom from algorithms I wanted. You could go to the subscriptions area and see new content from all the channels you subscribe to in chronological order. If you wanted something new, you could go to the home feed and click a button to see new suggestions related to a particular topic.
As with all good things, the profit motive killed this off too. It seems that companies treat "enjoyable user experience" as a bug that needs fixing. Getting utility from a company's app is a sign, to them anyway, that their app is broken.
Now the subscriptions tab is filled with loads of non-video garbage. I get to see the new videos from my subscriptions that Google decides I should see. Try to wrap your head around that. I subscribe to channels because I want to see videos from particular creators, and Google overrides that and makes the decision as to which videos I will see, and on top of that, they want to force me to see those junk social media posts. The reason I'm using YT is because I don't want to scroll a feed of social media posts. If I wanted to do that, I wouldn't be using YT.
The second change is that the home feed no longer lets me select the topic of the videos. I have to see the garbage the YT algorithm sends my way. That includes political trash whose existence elsewhere is one of the reasons I was using YT.
There's an upside to this. Every time I open the YT app out of habit and get hit by the wave of enshittification it makes me realize "oh, I opened the app yet again". I was spending way too much time on there. I'm going to cancel my YT subscription. I haven't decided yet if I'll delete the app entirely from my phone.
On the one hand, I mourn the loss of freedom from algorithms that are really bad at their job. On the other, I'll have a little extra spending cash each month and more time for thinking.