Devs are beholden to customers.

And the highest paying customers are enterprises that want to advertise. No one cares about the lemmings that actually watch videos.

It seems like a lot of this perception originates in the gaming industry where in some cases the devs actually do have quite a bit of control over user experience. In the rest of the software world, this stuff is driven by product management / marketing / whatever title they give to the people who define requirements.

Ads and subscription aside, any time there is a feature I like on YouTube, they remove it or change it. More often than not when they add a new feature, it makes the experience worse for me.

I understand they need to make money. I'm willing to sit through ads or pay a subscription for that. But the ads are constantly getting worse. Mid-roll ad breaks that are auto-generated into the video (for older videos, content creators would have to go through their library to manually change them, from what I understand). A push for censoring content to avoid demonetisation, even content not intended for children.

Yes, part of it is that I got used to YouTube in its early days when it was operating at a loss. When it was a wild west of content creation. But it just feels like it has become so unfriendly to users and content creators alike. It has become corporate and sterile, while trying to squeeze in revenue everywhere it can. (Likely to barely break even, sure, but they don't have to make it crap to use to do that.)

I’ve been stewing on making an “unpopular opinion” post about how neckbeards ruined the internet by demanding everything be “free” (meaning ad-supported) and then using ad blockers (meaning the normies had to pick up the slack).

Yeah, especially when you consider that if you're nostalgic for any time on YouTube prior to 2015 it wasn't profitable at the time.

Well you say that, but I feel entitled to free shit. - Common take on lemmy

Not a business plan because business=money, but how about creators host their own videos and share them through BitTorrent. No need to deliver real time video, users just download what they want to watch then watch them as they become available. Funding occurs through Kofi or Patreon etc. They'll need to publish the magnet links somewhere but that's a whole load cheaper than publishing RT video.

On one hand, yes, on the other, the devs won't pitch ideas that go against the ad machine either. So ideas from devs are either neutral or pro-ad as well.

...into the ground

???

There's a lower cost ad plan for YouTube music is that what you mean?

I thought everyone wanted YouTube premium without the music. That's the ad plan: it shows ads on music because you're not paying for ad free music.

Two big things I've noticed:

1. They removed the Chromecast queue feature. So if I'm casting to my TV, I can either play one video at a time, or I can enable autoplay and see what the algorithm decides to serve me - I can't queue up a few videos and just watch those, like I used to be able to.

2. Playlists are becoming harder and harder to use. Finding the button to add a video to a playlist, moving videos from one playlist to another, and managing playlists in general has all become more difficult recently.

Why does the video stop when you turn your phone screen off?
If the only answer is "so that people will pay money for it", you are garbage.

There is also a lot of educational content, including lectures, interviews, popular science channels, investigative journalism, and tutorials on anything from how to apply nail polish to how to fly an actual Boeing 737 from real airline pilots. This list is endless. Besides, there's nothing wrong with junk content either, sometimes we all need to unwind and watch something silly. Don't take YouTube for granted.