Given the increasingly poor state of some of Google's biggest properties (YouTube is a prime offender, its user experience only ever seems to get worse) I'm obviously surprised to hear this.
As a visitor, I want to watch a video that someone linked.
The chance that I first want to see a non-skippable video (or video skippable only after 5 seconds) is vanishingly small yet that's what the YouTube UX frequently provides.
It's impossible to know without watching something whether it's full of swearing or homophobic / misogynistic / transphobic hate speech.
Ads are not targeted to the actual viewer, but to some combination of regular browser user and main youtube user. this means that children will be shown ads for alcohol or gambling. (note this goes against what Youtube says here about complying with local law: https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6012382?hl=e... Note that this is something all ad networks get wrong, and it's likely they're going to see regulation in the uk at some point if they don't fix it.)
It's hard to know before clicking a link whether it's sponsored content or not. (in the UK sponsored videos need to be clearly identifiable before the user clicks the link or clicks play. in the US sponsored content needs to be clearly identified).
If two people (eg a parent and their child) watch Youtube the recommendations fail hard. If a single person watches youtube the recommendations are pretty poor.
Both Facebook and Twitter employ a large number of human moderators, and they still regularly make judgment calls that are comically bad - defending stalkers while suspending their victims, suspending users that are the target of coordinated harassment campaigns, etc.
The reality is that when you have an army of people who need to churn through a vast amount of content per day, without the time or authority to look at the full scope and context of user interactions, they will make lots of bad calls. Doubly so if the moderators live half a world a way and have little awareness of the culture and norms of users they're asked to evaluate.
Add this to the fact that the really obvious abusive comments can and are already being moderated by automated systems, it means the human moderators are overwhelmingly exposed to the trickiest, least cut-and-dry situations.
or refusing to delete photos of women and their ex-partners when they've been killed by their ex-partners.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-3461822...
YouTube remembers where you stopped watching a video.. sometimes. Maybe. Usually it just plays from the beginning anyway.
The "already seen" marker on a thumbnail is very often missing.
Recommendations are awful.
Subscriptions have been broken intentionally so that you just see a subset of the new videos. Many YouTubers are warning about this problem.
YouTube unsubscribes people randomly from channels and denies that this actually happens.
The volume control slider is hidden by default for no reason.
The bar with the video controls overlaps the video content for no reason. It could simply be placed below the video and be always visible. The current design only makes sense in fullscreen mode. This is an example for harmful consistency in UI design.
it's also super flaky often getting lost/unresponsive. I have to manually disconnect chrome, close all the youtube tabs and start over.
Other non-chromecast youtube issues are the fact that it knows everything I've watched but still 5% to 25% of the stuff it's recommending is stuff I've already watched. If they want me to watch more it really needs to be 100% new stuff.
The hidden ways to find my own videos or playlists always drive me nuts. Because the UI changes based on width the options disappear.
Another minor grievance, playlists with deleted videos don't show the titles. I have playlists with missing videos. I'd like to know what I lost. The name of the deleted video would be super helpful.
A major one for me is the volume controls on chromecast. Chromecast is built into my TV (Sony Android). The issue is no device I've ever owned in my life controls the TV volume from the device. Instead at most it controls it's own output level to the TV but the TV itself controls its own volume. So, the Chromecast youtube experience is that the volume control in the webpage directly controls the TV's volume. You can imagine this has woken up my neighbors serval times late at night when it decides to set my TV at full volume