The great thing is that you only have to watch junk if you want to watch junk. Even if you confine yourself to free videos on youtube, there’s plenty of good stuff out there. If you curate your subscriptions and browse on the “subscribed” tab, rather than letting the algorithm feed you, you can control your viewing experience fully. You can even set up rss feeds for your subscribed channels if you want. Plus there are no shortage of ad- and sponsor-blocking options out there.

Ultimately, you get the online experience you work for. But it’s certainly possible to curate a stream that is the equivalent or superior to the experience of the Discovery or History Channels back in their heyday, before their enshittification.