I downvote if it looks like they are posting in bad faith. I’ll upvote some comments that I disagree with if the poster was trying to contribute to the conversation – I usually do that to offset the fact that they’ve been downvoted a bunch already.
Many of the communities I’m in are fairly small, so I upvote almost every comment that I read. I figure it lets someone know that someone else read what they wrote, and I think that’s what a lot of us are here for.
In addition to what you mentioned, another really annoying thing about Youtube’s search is that it sometimes gives totally different results from one minute to the next. You can search for something, then type those exact same words just a few seconds later, and you get a completely different list of videos. So if you ever do get a list of good results, you need to leave that browser tab alone and open a new one to keep those results “safe.”
Reddit is the first one that comes to mind for me, too. It was always easier to use a search engine like Google or DuckDuckGo and do thing I'm looking for site:reddit.com instead of actually using Reddit’s search feature.
I use Funkwhale, which I have liked, but my use case is just streaming music through my laptop and listening with headphones. I don’t think there is a client available that will run on your Autonomic streamer.
Funkwhale does have a subsonic API, so you could use a subsonic client, but you mentioned that didn’t quite work before. (Is that what you mean by __sonic? I haven’t actually heard that term.)
Funkwhale is nice, but I think for most people it doesn’t (yet) offer any useful features beyond what Navidrome has, and probably even lacks a few things that Navidrome has. Funkwhale’s main appeal is that you can follow someone’s music library via the fediverse, although there hasn’t really been a lot of use for that so far. Version 2 is coming soon, though, and adds a whole bunch of new fediverse features.
Reposting what I said on Mastodon, since a few people seem to be falling for this one:
Conservatives have a hard time understanding satire (article about this), let’s make sure progressives don’t become the same way. (I know, it’s hard, especially when a lot of conservative opinions are indistinguishable from satire.)