What are the alternatives?
Just started looking for direct alternatives. I'd suggest first finding all the people you like on youtube and watching them by their own websites if they have them, which are all superior to youtube by virtue of being able to tailor themselves to their audience. And not being youtube. What pushed it for me was that with youtube you could still find new content from all across the world all in one place, but youtube decided to crush that too.
So far:
http://blip.tv/ (I'm leering on passing on this one, the interface is quite clunky and it's hard to follow anyone... At least without twitter. Which is bad.)
http://vimeo.com/ (actually pretty damn good, good community and they're all quite constructive. So far the only bad things I seem to find is their search bar finds it difficult to find things based on relevance and they don't have a few indie content channels - for example, no gamers, no starcraft D:
Of note is that they don't play ads before or during videos.)
http://www.dailymotion.com/gb (next to vimeo, this is probably the best there is. The only downside is it can sometimes get obnoxious with its ads, but it's
still better than youtube debatable. Use adblock and it's perfect.)
http://www.break.com/ (imagine a chaotic version of youtube 2008, I don't know what so say about it because there's so much... Random. Some good, some bad.)
http://www.pandora.com/ (amazing for music and stuff. May not be available in COPYRIGHT EVERYTHING countries, so use a proxy)
I don't really get it. I don't have any more trouble watching videos on youtube than I ever have, which isn't much at all... and that's all I see the service as being for. The only thing they've ever changed about it that bothered me was more annoying advertising.
Subscriptions have been arbitrarily removed, DMCA abuse is rife, content stifled (featured videos are often held much longer than they were used to, and are now often videos that are YEARS old, the amount of subscribtion content easily accessed has been reduced from over 40 per page to 3, the change from box format to line format to scroll bar everything, the Facebookification of everything, the pressure to use all of your personal information, ads everywhere)
The list goes on.
Switching to a different website would either rely on your favourite video uploaders to do the same or you'd have to stop watching their videos altogether,
Unless they've just started out, most video producers on youtube have their own websites which are a GREAT deal better than watching on youtube, and support them more.