You sign up to some random T&C that they can change at any time and/or selectively enforce or break on a whim, then you upload your content and take your chances that some mystical algorithm will favor you.
The hype train stops for no one.
I´d say with educational type content you can outperform a sensationalist way to shape the (same) content, simply because it is linkworthy from external sources and usually up to date for far longer periods. The recommendation really only favors certain types of content, length, upload rate and so on, but it´s not as if youtube is responsible for how interesting people will find the video or show it to everyone. The "start page as a kiosk" approach is so highly successful that it became a problem of its own and is adressed as being responsible for lack of success.
You can't blame YouTube's algorithm for an oversupply of cat videos, but there are serious problems with the algorithm:
'An ecosystem of hate': How YouTube radicalized Brazil
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/youtube-gave-rise-to-a-radical-right-wing-movement-in-brazil
I read
an article that stated these videos became popular through echo-chamber groups in Whatsapp, as Facebook has a deal with carriers for free traffic.
It used to be a fair playing field, the algorithm was based on views in first few hours, engagement, sharing etc, so the independent person in their basement had a fair chance to succeed. In fact the independent players got vastly more engagement than the big news networks which get hardly any, so they were getting beat big time by someone in their basement.
Of course "they" weren't going to let that go on forever, so the "problem" has now been fixed.
Well, hatespeech and fake news became a widespread problem and governments pressed social media of all sorts to react on it (they brought themselves there by providing a platform that lacks conventional human moderation). I don´t really know why you need new approaches for actually existing law (like libel or incitement to racial or ethnic hatred, where applicable), but i guess they just searched for a way around declaring the impact on the data privacy wasps' nest that will happen when actually enforcing the law and giving the free speech argument a spin.
I was thinking something like that actually, could be some kind of social media platform that simply aggregates your existing social media. It would give users more control. For example it could work kind of like a FB feed and would grab data from FB, Youtube etc and then display it as you wish while cutting out all the crap.
Guessing something like that would probably be illegal though and get shut down. Yeah could do it at the personal level but it would be more effective to offer it as a free service.
For most, as far as i understand it, twitter does kind of serve this purpose, just post a link to every piece of content you make there and it aggregates.
The problem with this starts when a twitter account is used to talk and discuss, same with hashtags applied in an "unintended" way.
It´s an interesting idea, actually you would just need to collect the RSS feeds of your favorite sources and aggregate them. RSS however became a bit unpopular, because it does suppress advertisement opportunities a full webpage has, so fewer platforms offer it. OTOH you could also just scrape websites conventionally and convert them to an RSS feed, or creators themselves could offer RSS feeds to enable such solutions.
I however don´t see a working business model around it.