May have to go back to spotify or offline mp3 files, I don't miss having to manage my own playlists tbh.
Some people would argue that optimising YouTube for the bottom 1% of Internet connections makes no financial sense, but I have gigabit fibre and YouTube stutters. It automatically upgrades to 4K videos (of course), but its buffering algorithm is pared so close to the bone that it can't handle high bandwidths as well.
You can make something quite bad on average, and that's okay, you just have to be able to filter out everything you don't want and keep what you want. When CPUs are manufactured, this is what they mean by the "yield". It's the percentage of the product that can be kept, with the rest of the wafer discarded.
Chef's Gallery had a scene that actually shocked me a bit -- this award winning chef was making this deep-fried puff thing that was absolutely perfect. They showed his process, which was to make dozens of them and then plate just the best one for the customer. He never had a knack at all for making them perfect! He was just throwing out 99% of the puffs that he made, using the same technique as anyone else would.
You just have to change your perspective: You're the product. You're the deep fried puff.
If you're an outlier, you will be discarded. You're the bent piece of framing. You're the slice of the silicon wafer that failed the test.
Nobody feels the slightest bit bad about rejecting a faulty product on the production line. No tears are shed. No phone calls are made to the product to see if there's anything the manufacturer can do to fix the situation.
This is Google and by extension YouTube in a nutshell. They're an advertising company manufacturing ad impressions and ad clicks. Viewers are their product.
Viewers on 1 Mbps or 1 Gbps are equally outliers. Both are too weird to cater to, less than optimal, unpredictable, difficult to advertise-to viewers.
Rejected.
They're too aggressive on their optimizations for mobile networks/devices.
This is a peering issue and your ISP's fault, not YouTube's. They can't fix bad peering from their end, your ISP has to do it.
Engineers at Google get bonuses for shaving 0.1% off of something, because at their scale that could be millions of dollars saved.
Hence protocols like HTTP/3, which exist almost entirely to optimise some Google backend by single-digit percentage points.
YouTube has had every last percent of "inefficiency" squeezed out of it, to the point where lots of users have a degraded experience.
Google famously doesn't care about user experience at all. They care about costs and their own internal KPIs, which are all tied to advertising revenue, not "video playback smoothness".
This is why Firefox was 5x slower on YouTube for years. This is why Google famously has next to zero "customer support", even if you pay them. They don't view you as a customer. You're the product.
Firefox users click on ads less. Firefox users tend to have adblock. They're not good products.
Similarly, Google is fighting a turf war with the likes of NetFlix and Apple for advertising eyeballs, so they do not want to ensure that Apple TV can play back YouTube in the best possible quality. They optimise for Chrome and Chromecast first, everything else a distant second. Got to build that walled garden!
I pay NetFlix the same amount monthly as I pay for YouTube Premium. NetFlix provides support, YouTube doesn't. NetFlix works flawlessly on every device I have, YouTube doesn't.
YouTube doesn't play 4K on my Apple TV 4K! It doesn't play 4K on my flagship Samsung TV! It downgrades my iPhone for 480p even on WiFi!
This kind of anti-consumer (anti-product?) bullshit is why Google needs to be broken up.
The vendor that makes the device, the browser, the search engine, the network protocol, and the advertising platform shouldn't also be television for half the world.
They shouldn't get to degrade the experience to benefit their browser team. They shouldn't get to slow down the experience for a competing browser. They shouldn't get to simply ignore customer complaints. Television broadcasters in most countries have to answer to an ombudsman. YouTube doesn't.
That's too much control that invites anti-competitive, anti-human behaviour. The incentives are all wrong.
There's even a little popup saying something like "It seems we can connect to the server, do you want to play your downloaded songs instead ?" when there are connectivity issues.
