Good thing I work on internal infrastructure and not pointing a gun to this guy's head to prevent him from scrolling down past the first three results or refining his query.
Furthermore, search is fundamentally broken in that it translates your query and then tries to match every title in every language that is vaguely similar. Of course it still only gives you a handful of results before listing off unrelated recommendations in the "search results".
Search used to work great ~10 years ago and I used to find majority of content that way. These days it's so useless I don't really bother trying anymore.
Reading comments like this really shines a light on why Youtube is as bad as it is, I didn't expect the employees to be this out of touch with the product that their company makes.
I have about as much say in YouTube as you do. In the org tree, the lowest common ancestor between me and YouTube is Sundar.
My original comment was a joke about the fact that someone felt as if they were "forced" to watch something. It was more of a comment on consumer attitude than YouTube itself. I'm sorry YT isn't working well for y'all. That said, expecting some grunt employee like me to feel personally responsible (or even "ashamed"??) is ridiculous.
The point of a company is what it does: The money in your paycheck comes from anti-competitive behavior, denying accountability and customer support to your users, and yes, even the enshittification of Youtube.
Deny it all you want, but you have every opportunity to walk away and do something better for society with your life if you so choose.