I can't stand Netflix's interface, and it's recommendations are absolutely terrible.

We're approaching the One True User Interface: search bar and recommendations. And it's awful.

Netflix never gave me a popup or played recommendation of anything between two episodes of a series.

I think that's what most people mean. They want to listen to an album/several/playlist and not hear anything else. (should add: and also not see any popups. Netflix doesn't give me popups, the only place I see stuff I do not want to see is the landing page)

Or YouTube? The homepage and literally every video are full of recommendations.

Thanks to various plugins for Firefox, my experience of the YouTube homepage is a blank page apart from the search bar.

That's so much worse than actually YouTube though. If I've been watching programming, physics, or history YouTube it absolutely surfaces excellent creators I'd have no other means of discovering.

YouTube isn't Wikipedia. I don't go into it wanting a specific narrow thing. Like how do you even find content you'd like otherwise?

Absolutely. I've found probably 20-30 great channels thanks to YouTube's recommendations successfully recommending me stuff I actually enjoy.

I do use it like Wikipedia, I guess. Or actually more like Google.

I'm really not into doomscrolling "content". Life's too short.