Yep, it was one of the ways to have an animated avatar on BB forums.

Most recently, I have seen them being used in animated chat stickers (like on Signal).

Yes. I was searching for a video about a panda refusing to bathe on YouTube app of a friend’s phone.

The first 4-6 results were Shorts, and I had no way of knowing if they were what I wanted apart from the thumbnails, since the titles were truncated. The next four were only semi-related videos, in the sense it was about a panda.

The rest of the videos that followed were absolutely bonkers. From Minecraft clips to random mobile arcade games I have never heard of, and many, many, MANY AI generated Chinese videos featuring a baby doing farm work, masonry, or other kinds of labor.

In a way, it felt like a display of arrogance. In the sense that YouTube was confident it had already served me what I was looking for in the first 10 results, and then said: “Now that you have seen what you searched for, why not watch this crap?”

One glance at the GitHub issues reveals just how much of a struggle it is for the NewPipe developers to keep the app functioning, with YouTube constantly targeting every trick they use.

It’s draining so much of their time and energy that there’s barely anything left for working on new features.

The mental exhaustion of the developers is another issue entirely, one that should be obvious to anyone familiar with the demands of maintaining a relatively popular open source project. The fact that it involves YouTube only makes things worse for them.