Apparently very few people use the subscriptions list and rely on the videos they subscribe and watch to appear on the Youtube homepage. And youtube changed what videos they put there. Instead of new videos by people you watch and related ones they show:

videos you just watched

videos you watched 10 years ago

auto dubbed videos on topics you are not interested

clickbait videos with 10 views

anything, but what you are used to watching

My first thought when I read AI search was that people might use it for instructions rather than tutorials and troubleshooting videos.

Could it be related to mandatory Widevine encryption?

On my phone, the mobile site (m.youtube.com) has introduced Widevine a couple of weeks ago (last week of August IIRC). No idea if I’m just unlucky and part of a shitty A/B experiment, but I definitely had to recompile libc (being on Linux) with patches from Chromium and install Widevine so I could watch videos again.

Whenever I replace my patched libc with the unpatched original, then the Widevine plugin crashes everytime I try to play back a video on m.youtube.com. And it used to work before.

I wouldn't think google search is a significant source of views anyway. Last I saw, the top platform for youtube usage is TVs.

My pet theory is the war on ad blocking aka manifestv2 deprecation: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...

Anecdotal, but for a while it felt like YouTube had decent content on whatever I was looking for. I trusted product reviews on there ever so slightly more than text content because of the relatively higher cost of producing videos. Nowadays there’s a glut of low quality stuff. Anything from low-effort videos to outright text-to-speech, non-videos that snare you using a promising thumbnail. The search results only surface about 5-10 relevant videos followed by things that have specious relevance. On top of that, they jammed Shorts into prominent screen real estate. It screams “hey while I’ve got you here, about a few of these distractions!”

So, I stopped going there as much. They stopped respecting visitor intentions. Just like every other platform, they just want to keep you on the site for as long as possible sifting through a feed of dopamine slop.

While I have no idea, I just think it would be funny if this is YouTube blocking a massive number of bots/scrapers.

As TFA says, you can't even be sure what constitute "a view" and if Youtube keeps that consistent.