YouTube has become an absolute nightmare for me. The user interface seems designed to be as awkward as possible. I keep running into obstacles that just don’t seem to make sense. I really hate what they have done with this but I still want to be able to use it if I can. I have lots of frustrations and lots of questions, but will keep it to just a few things to start.

First, is there a decent third-party interface that works better than the mess Google has imposed on us? I have looked at a few but can’t find anything that addresses my issues. I have many issues, but will confine myself for the moment to the Home page. I am using both Android and Android TV. The problems are the same with both.

When YouTube first starts you see rows of video thumbnails to the right and a red column of categories to the left. If you click on the ‘Home’ category you see the same thing, except the screen moves right and the categories are obscured. The heading also changes from ÝouTube’ to ‘Home’.

My first issue is with those rows of video thumbnails. YouTube fills that with random crap I don’t want and have never clicked on. My subscriptions are also there, but they are mixed in with all the crap, making them hard to find. I would like to be able to remove the crap and prevent it from returning, but YouTube offers no way I can find to do so. I have turned off recommendations and disabled notifications but I still get all this arbitrary rubbish I don’t want.

If I click on the next category, ‘Subscriptions’, I get a single endless horizontal row of random videos from my different subscription categoies, but there seems to be no particular order to them and no way to arrange them. I do not see the point of this. It is calculated to be as useless as possible. Also, if I scroll them to the right, I have to scroll al the way back before I can access the categories column again. It feels like YouTube is stuck in 1995.

There are some more categories and then I come to the list of my subscriptions. They are not alphabetical. The order cannot be changed. It is a long list and there is no way to jump up or down it. You can only scroll through it an item at a time. It also doesn’t loop back to the top when you reach the end. You have to scroll back through it an item at a time. Again it feels like 1995.

There is much more, but this will do for starters. Am I missing something or is the YouTube interface really as unbelievably bad as it seems? What is the logic behind this nonsense? Can anyone help me?

Edit: To be clear, I am talking about Android here. Most of the problems don't exist on the Windows browser, but the Android apps almost seem broken.