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YouTube is very frustrating because it might be the greatest store of human information but has no decent search function. I would pay $20 a month for the best

YouTube is very frustrating because it might be the greatest store of human information but has no decent search function. I would pay $20 a month for the best search functionality Google could create, with the transcript of every video fully indexed in BM25 and vector indexes and the videos in a vector index. So you could search for "All videos of pewdiepie wearing a blue shirt talking about bitcoin"

ButlerianJihad 6mo ago
I subscribe to YouTube Premium Family (and yes, they raised my monthly rate too.) YT's search functions are nerfed very deliberately. YouTube's main purpose is to shove content at the user that we don't want. Ads or no ads, we're supposed to consume unwanted content at a far higher volume than the stuff we actually sought out. This is the same no matter what the platform or the medium. It's long been a paradigm for scheduling television shows, that the viewers are too lazy to switch channels away from that great show they loved, and so they can "tailgate" a really awful show after a highly-rated one. Radio stations aren't playing what the listeners want to hear, they're shoving sounds into our ears as dictated by the labels and the media companies, and so forth. YouTube (and YouTube Music, especially with its extremely sticky "AutoPlay" switch) are shoveling suggestions at us, and counting on our laziness, to just mindlessly click the first thing that comes under our mouse. I'm obviously all-in on YT and Music as media players, and I use their Playlist features extensively, but it is completely impossible to organize Playlists in a way that will help me find content again! It is completely impossible for me to create a nice, uniform set of Playlists across the months and years. I often create time-and-date sensitive playlists, i.e. I want to find it again in mid-April next year, but that all basically falls by the wayside. I often impulsively create a Playlist based on some theme I envision in the moment, abandon it, and I never find it again. YouTube and Music count on that behavior and they will never show us our own Playlists in suggested stuff, or in searches unless we deliberately hammer on it. YouTube wants us to find "Community Playlists" and stuff that you don't want, but is otherwise hyped or algorithm'd to appear in front of our eyeballs.

ButlerianJihad 6mo ago

I subscribe to YouTube Premium Family (and yes, they raised my monthly rate too.) YT's search functions are nerfed very deliberately. YouTube's main purpose is to shove content at the user that we don't want. Ads or no ads, we're supposed to consume unwanted content at a far higher volume than the stuff we actually sought out. This is the same no matter what the platform or the medium. It's long been a paradigm for scheduling television shows, that the viewers are too lazy to switch channels away from that great show they loved, and so they can "tailgate" a really awful show after a highly-rated one. Radio stations aren't playing what the listeners want to hear, they're shoving sounds into our ears as dictated by the labels and the media companies, and so forth. YouTube (and YouTube Music, especially with its extremely sticky "AutoPlay" switch) are shoveling suggestions at us, and counting on our laziness, to just mindlessly click the first thing that comes under our mouse. I'm obviously all-in on YT and Music as media players, and I use their Playlist features extensively, but it is completely impossible to organize Playlists in a way that will help me find content again! It is completely impossible for me to create a nice, uniform set of Playlists across the months and years. I often create time-and-date sensitive playlists, i.e. I want to find it again in mid-April next year, but that all basically falls by the wayside. I often impulsively create a Playlist based on some theme I envision in the moment, abandon it, and I never find it again. YouTube and Music count on that behavior and they will never show us our own Playlists in suggested stuff, or in searches unless we deliberately hammer on it. YouTube wants us to find "Community Playlists" and stuff that you don't want, but is otherwise hyped or algorithm'd to appear in front of our eyeballs.