Comment by Starlevel004

> Do what I tell you to do!

Maybe a good opportunity to remember that you watching the videos you want to watch is actually just a workaround Google suffers through in the YouTube product.

They have to do it so that you come to the site, but it costs them money and makes it harder for them to optimize the revenue they get from your eyeballs.

Strycturally, their goal is to push the line as far as they can, and they spend a lot of product design and engineering effort to do so. They're only going to get better at it as time goes by.

And of course this principle doesn't just apply to YouTube, but at pretty much all media sites once they get large enough to pivot from growing their audience to optimizing its profitability.

> You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations

This has become increasingly annoying for me. Sometimes I want to find a reference I saw a few years ago on some topic. Even if I know the speaker, the topic, sometimes even the title, I can't find the video. I get a handful of results vaguely related to the search terms and then a never ending list of garbage not even slightly related to my search terms.

I really want my own memory augmentation. A personal tracker for all of the content I have ever consumed in any form, indexed and searchable (like in a personal Elastic Search cluster). The trouble is, I only want it for like 1% of the content I have consumed. The modern web is so hostile in general that aggregating any kind of data about my own usage is so onerous that it might as well be impossible. The friction they have purposefully created worked exactly as they intended.

Zooming out actually makes the thumbnails bigger, because they grow to fill the space ceded by the rest of the UI. Just incredible design all the way through.

The homepage of YT has become a disaster area, it has almost zero customizability or exploration value. Can't remove vertical video shorts, can't control the topics displayed at the top. It maximizes engagement and time waste, not what I need.

But you can use Gemini for better search, recommendations and you can play videos right in the chat window. At the very least replace search and recommendations with the model. You can explain what you want to explore and guide the recommender much better than on YT. There are no ads in Gemini itself.

I just wish they'd fix the "sort by date" bug in search. I search for something, it gives me endless results. If I then choose to sort by upload date, whoopsie, no results found!

> You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations

Worst part about this is you search for food recipes and after the first 5 results there are gross out videos, "popping" videos, kids dying in an elevator video.

I'm about to eat dinner here... I know Neal Mohan REAAAALLLLY wants people to watch the video about the kids dying in the elevator because he keeps putting it in the trio of videos that show up when you search unrelated to your search but can he not wait till I'm doing a search that isn't food related to try and make me watch gross out content if he's so desperate to make me watch it.

Report it every time, makes no difference it all has millions of views so they'll keep doing it.

The dummy "loading" grey boxes it shows are still this size. Such a great "user experience."

Yes, this search thing is absolutely infuriating.