The comment system apparently appeals to a lot of people, just not you or I. It's probably better for the artists to have that than not.
If you pay for Youtube Red / Google Play Music, you can get audio only easily on mobile. That's actually why I started subscribing, though now I use it mostly on my laptop. It's essentially 100% covered my music needs since I started.
The search actually seems pretty good to me. I generally find what I want very quickly even with typos, etc. Do you have specific thoughts about it?
UI can definitely be a little wonky for say, browsing a channel I frequently can't find what I want without searching. And the damn auto-playing video on the channel page! I end up having to stop it playing four or five times in short succession the way I use the page.
YouTube Red is not available everywhere (or even US-only at the moment, I think?) and Google Play Music is a completely unrelated (though excellent) service.
Also, YouTubers complain more about the comment system than the people commenting do. There's a reason many videos these days have comments disabled. There was also a lot of negativity when the comment system was changed as part of the Google+ rollout. The commenting system is really only useful for the channels when considered in aggregates -- there's barely any point in trying to hold individual conversations -- it's worse than Twitter. Maybe NLP and sentiment analysis could be used to build moderation/analytics tools to improve that use case.
The UI is nice but wonky. As a web developer myself I frequently look at YouTube as an example for what kind of sloppy UX you can get away with in a billion dollar flagship product. It's also gone through several even worse iterations (e.g. the dreaded keep-video-playing-when-you-navigate-away "feature" that was supposed to emulate the behaviour of the mobile app).
As an example for a current mis-feature of YouTube (i.e. something intentional they had to actually go out of their way to develop): volume and speed are saved (less or more reliably) and persisted globally and indefinitely if you change them. Listened to a couple of talks on 1.5x or 2x yesterday? Now all the music videos you're watching are sped up too. Had to turn the volume way up on that video podcast? Better turn it back down before the next video's incredibly loud conference jingle comes up.
These features as they are only make sense if you use YouTube for precisely one thing and one thing only. The second you approach it with different use cases the features become annoying and distracting.
Google Play Music and Youtube Red aren't unrelated, at least in the US: you buy one you get the other. For all practical purposes for me, they're just different features of the same product and are actually integrated (you can play songs from Youtube in Google Play Music). I'd never have bought Youtube Red, but getting it in a bundle of features is nice.
You can avoid the auto-playing video stuff in Firefox with the media.autoplay.enabled setting. It makes things slightly awkward, since web apps assume autoplay will work, but avoids that dumb problem.
If you pay for Youtube Red / Google Play Music, you can get audio only easily on mobile. That's actually why I started subscribing, though now I use it mostly on my laptop. It's essentially 100% covered my music needs since I started.
The search actually seems pretty good to me. I generally find what I want very quickly even with typos, etc. Do you have specific thoughts about it?
UI can definitely be a little wonky for say, browsing a channel I frequently can't find what I want without searching. And the damn auto-playing video on the channel page! I end up having to stop it playing four or five times in short succession the way I use the page.
Anyway, opinions differ.