The recommendations on YouTube are endemic of Google's general design problem as of late. They appear to "go by the numbers" and effectively bucket all users t

The recommendations on YouTube are endemic of Google's general design problem as of late. They appear to "go by the numbers" and effectively bucket all users together. So children, who almost all use YouTube and want to watch the same content repeatedly, get categorized the same as say, me. Then they look for the largest patterns without discriminating or partitioning and just cater to that. So for search, they'll ignore the focused queries and just return general results. They place amateur and sophisticated computer users in the same giant bag. This is why the order of the tabs on search (web/products/images/videos) just dance around and are totally inconsistent. It's also why they axe projects and strip features, replacing them with effectively the bubbly hazy shoppingmall version of the feature. Image sizes no longer have numbers in the toolbar. It's some amorphous icon, medium, and large. It doesn't even serve the ends they are looking for. If I was really unsophisticated, I'd look for an "icon" and then be frustrated because, say Apple, requires 1024x1024 icons, which I will absolutely not get with the "icon" size filter. So not only are we worse off, but the newer way doesn't even service the demographic they're targeting. Another example, same pattern: Recently all my android devices seem to have a much smaller dictionary on their gboard keyboard. Less common words are impossible to swype and perfectly valid, correctly spelled words are getting the red squiggly underneath them because apparently, using an uncommon word must have been an error. Almost every day I'm pulling up a dictionary to make sure I'm not making a mistake. I call this "design by dictator" syndrome: some person or group (called the design group) is given unlimited unilateral authority over all aspects of a product. It's the opposite extreme of "design by committee". Nobody else can question or change things. When nobody is allowed to say "that idea is stupid" then you end up getting stuff with lots of stupid ideas. There's a reason why the one word critical means "very important", "detailed", and "judgmental". Uncountable empires have fallen when it is ignored. Back in the 90s/early 2000s when I did windows development, Microsoft was really quite good at bucketing users. There were "channels of usage" available which facilitated many kinds of needs and many kinds of users. By ignoring the variation of sentiment, Google has lost its magic and in their quest to please everyone while assuming everyone is fundamentally the same, they end up leaving the majority minority dissatisfied.