I use it, but I loathe having to scroll past random text posts, pics, and shorts before getting to content I actually subscribe to.
I get too many Notifs from the YouTube app for channels I don't want. I use Newpipe Subscriptions, I can refresh feeds from multiple channels whenever I choose.
I don't use YouTube website at all. I'm not even logged in there. I use purely RSS feeds of my selected channels, and my RSS reader embeds those videos in its web UI. I hate all the noise of the standard YT.
Over time that subscriber section has become less prominent. At one time it was the way to find content you wanted to see. I think most people now just use the feed YouTube gives you.
Subscribing does seem to affect the algorithm. If nothing else it should help the creator pay the bills so you can keep getting videos from them.
Probably the same people who browse all on lemmy.world and complain about the garbage in "their feed".
Honestly I try to only use the subscription feed because the home feed is addictive. I installed the unhook addon to block as many recommendations and other algorithmic things as possible, and try to just search when I want to find a particular thing.
However, sometimes I find myself running out of ideas and just disabling unhook and watching a few things from the home feed before reenabling it and going back to subscriptions only. I think if I also disabled ublock, youtube would be infinitely less addictive, since it would shove ads in my face constantly, and I'd soon get fed up.
I have subscribed to so many channels (like, 800 of them by this point), that sometimes my subscription feed turns to shit, so I simply decide not to use it anymore.
Nowadays I only use it when I want to access my list of subscriptions.
Maybe unrelated but what I do when I find a good channel: I click their name, go to their videos tab and look if there's other good stuff. Often videos a bit older have very few views while the newer one has loads, which makes me think nobody ever clicks through all this.
But I also don't log in to Youtube. I had a separate Youtube account until they forced me to use a Google account. I can always delete my YouTube cookies when the recommendations get to shitty.
Honestly I rarely do. I almost exclusively use the for you page and click what I want to watch
I don't subscribe to anything. I search what i want to see, sometimes dabble a bit with the recommended feed until i search for the next thing.
It's because the hot the button every time the channel asks them, constantly toggling it off an on.
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