I find the autoplay so annoying because it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage. Often the video gets inexplicably added to my watch history, and if I do choose to click on it I have to go back to the beginning because I missed the start of the audio
Additionally there's a bug on the Android app that it sometimes doesn't show video titles (or the worlds worst A/B test?), so scrolling through I just see talking heads (since it autoplays instead of showing the video thumb) and have to force restart it to actually understand what's going on.
This has been one of the most frustrating things I run into with Youtube scrolling the page. Can’t leave your cursor on the page while scrolling without managing to have the spacing shift the thumbnails just so slightly so that your cursor lands back into a thumbnail for an autoplay to start and add to the metrics.
You can disable autoplay at https://www.youtube.com/account_playback, then uncheck "Video previews". It resets itself every 15 days or so, but at least one can have some peace in the meantime.
The automatically generated thumbnails were often the best at conveying what the video actual is in combination with a title and description that is currently overlooked in place of thumbnails.
These went away when people started gaming the system with a thumbnail frame right in the middle to intentionally misrepresent the content of the video. Same problem with the current YouTuber pog faces. The next step is to automatically generate multiple random frames to preview.
The garbage stock footage doesn’t work well here because it’s not great content to begin with. It’s lazy filler often used to hit the bare minimum arbitrary adsense time limit which wastes countless amounts of user hours.
By all UI logic this should not scroll as this element is not scrollable (it's the top bar above the scrollable content), but YouTube and Google in their infinite UX wisdom kept the scroll mouse events go behind the hovered element. I won't complain about this one too.
This might be intentional. Depending on how they calculate a view, this means they can pump up their stats they use to sell ads by making you "view" more videos than you actually click on.
I like the previews TBH. If you turn on sound in the preview, you can watch part of a video without seeing an ad. It only shows me an ad when I actually click the video to watch it, so I can spend the first minute or two watching the thumbnail to decide if the video is going to get into meaningful content and be worth watching the ad. Without previews, you click on a video, watch an ad, then watch the video for a minute or two before deciding you don't want to finish.
Is it maybe caused by an adblocker? (I have YouTube premium, so no ads.)
Edit: Actually, the picture in the article shows a misalignment in the "Breaking News" section. It's odd, because the sections align perfectly for me on various screen sizes
They added fuchsia to the timeline bar so that it now clashes in an ugly way with everything else on the page.
Don't like Shorts? TOO BAD!
Me too! So I turned them all off:
Youtube Settings -> Playback and performance -> Browsing -> video previews (off)
Fortunately, there's an actual setting to get rid of that. Found out yesterday, when trying to fix the OP problem (which youtube sadly forced on me).
That's extremely depressing on 27" 4k screen. Give me a density setting! I want compact thumbnails and to glance at a pack of vids at once.
If anything, I feel like that this is by design to hyperstimulate their core audience seeking instant gratification.
Irritating, but the quality is fine for most things and I save a few minutes not watching ads.
The home page is made up of: a search bar with some extra buttons that link to different pages, a sidebar with some more buttons and a list of videos. What are the multiple teams for ? And even assuming it is necessary, there is really no single person responsible for the page so that issues like this can be seen and fixed ?
And since we are talking about pet peeves, on my laptop when you open the homepage you get a placeholder with 4 videos per row, and then you get 3 videos per row (or 5 shorts per row)
It's buried in the settings but it's there.
Nobody cares about coherent UI/UX anymore. They certainly don‘t care about your fringe usages. Do new stuff. Do good enough. Expensive designers with a clear vision and attention to detail? Sounds slow. And expensive.
The move towards forced autoplay and infinite scroll will continue in any media app. AB tests show it is what humans crave.
I tend to select some text in long textblocks to keep a point of reference while reading. Medium and other new generation slop loves to open an obtrusive menu above my selection.
Wait what? Thumbnails are useless. DeArrow has been god sent.
The worst casualty of the current design is the search. You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations. No? Fuck off? Do what I tell you to do!
Maybe a good opportunity to remember that you watching the videos you want to watch is actually just a workaround Google suffers through in the YouTube product.
They have to do it so that you come to the site, but it costs them money and makes it harder for them to optimize the revenue they get from your eyeballs.
Strycturally, their goal is to push the line as far as they can, and they spend a lot of product design and engineering effort to do so. They're only going to get better at it as time goes by.
And of course this principle doesn't just apply to YouTube, but at pretty much all media sites once they get large enough to pivot from growing their audience to optimizing its profitability.
This has become increasingly annoying for me. Sometimes I want to find a reference I saw a few years ago on some topic. Even if I know the speaker, the topic, sometimes even the title, I can't find the video. I get a handful of results vaguely related to the search terms and then a never ending list of garbage not even slightly related to my search terms.
I really want my own memory augmentation. A personal tracker for all of the content I have ever consumed in any form, indexed and searchable (like in a personal Elastic Search cluster). The trouble is, I only want it for like 1% of the content I have consumed. The modern web is so hostile in general that aggregating any kind of data about my own usage is so onerous that it might as well be impossible. The friction they have purposefully created worked exactly as they intended.
But you can use Gemini for better search, recommendations and you can play videos right in the chat window. At the very least replace search and recommendations with the model. You can explain what you want to explore and guide the recommender much better than on YT. There are no ads in Gemini itself.
Worst part about this is you search for food recipes and after the first 5 results there are gross out videos, "popping" videos, kids dying in an elevator video.
I'm about to eat dinner here... I know Neal Mohan REAAAALLLLY wants people to watch the video about the kids dying in the elevator because he keeps putting it in the trio of videos that show up when you search unrelated to your search but can he not wait till I'm doing a search that isn't food related to try and make me watch gross out content if he's so desperate to make me watch it.
Report it every time, makes no difference it all has millions of views so they'll keep doing it.
! YouTube Fix & Customization by Arch v1.8.4 ! (1/11) YouTube 4 Videos Per Row Fix (Home and Channel Pages) / YouTube Fix & Customization
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row, #contents.ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;)
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 5 !important;)
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-posts-per-row: 5 !important;)
youtube.com##ytm-paid-content-overlay-renderer
The `this video includes sponsored content` that covers and takes over the click into a video.
Whoever designed that, implemented that, approved that, needs to be fired and blacklisted from doing user-facing code changes.
As a result I installed the "Control Panel for Youtube" chrome plugin and Im able to fix it back to 6 videos per row. I also found I could make shorts play in the traditional youtube player by default - which is an added relief.
Some of the revelations from the various lawsuits against Google by the US and other governments over the years have been about this.
The company replaced leaders who cared about users with leaders who cared about revenue optimization and those leaders changed the direction of the company to what we all see in all of their products these days.
Unfortunately UX teams aren't actually paid to make great UX, especially at large corps and any place ad-driven. They're paid to move the metrics and move the revenue line.
this is the story of the big company web sites
- huge budget
- best programmers
- terrible design
- terrible usability
- doesnt make sense
- gets worse over time
it's unreal. seen on many major sites.
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID
https://cinemaphile.com/watch?v=VIDEO_IDSeriously, though, w/o RSS feeds Youtube would be completely useless to me. I keep waiting for Google to kill them.
It does get more complicated if monitoring too many channels since execution will timeout due to sheets limit. But can make it to pickup where previously timedout.
Bonus using API gets you video info so you can filter by length (shorts), keywords etc. Limitation is ~150 videos added per day due to API limits.
The preview is 530x300px on a 1920x1080 screen vs the image shown being 336x188px
How this passed any sort of QA is beyond me
Or maybe the next step will be automated AI-generated thumbnails based on the video and the user itself, so each user will be grouped into a different category and gets served a different thumbnail accordingly.
In my case: German and English. I don’t want either to be translated to the other, but no chance. If you switch languages in the UI, you will get the garbage translated titles.
I need to open a private window to have proper Portuguese search results. No matter what language preferences I set, I cannot get what seems to be most reasonable: show results matching the language of your query.
I HATE Short form video content and no matter how many times I select "show me less of this" I still get them front and center when I open the app or website.
It’s similar to why I don’t buy Oreos. I like Oreos, everyone likes Oreos - they’re engineered to be liked, but they’re bad for you. The best way to not eat them is to not have them in the house.
Short form videos are the heroin of media consumption - meta having to pivot instagram to it is because they’re facing competitive pressure. Same with YouTube. You can’t only have vegetables when your competitors are dealing heroin and your revenue is engagement based.
It seems the revealed preference of addicting consumption for engagement is tv with with a novelty button. TikTok and short form videos are that distilled to its purest form.
These companies can’t turn them off - they’re trapped by market incentives, it’s moloch. A few years back when Facebook had a more dominant market position Zuck said they were intentionally going to focus on human connections and friends despite the revenue cost that would cause because it was the ideal he wanted. In battle against TikTok you can’t hold those kinds of ideals unfortunately.
-Enhancer for YouTube extension (Firefox) — mopsi
-Unhook extension (Chrome/Firefox) — jabroni_salad, kelvinjps10
-YouTube-shorts block add-on — timbit42
-ReVanced for mobile — kelvinjps10
-Shorts filter list in Brave browser (works on mobile) — my personal favorite
I HATE youtube shorts. Not their content (I've never watched one) but how they've infected the whole youtube experience.
You search for something and half the results are irrelevant... which includes a ton of shorts.
manifest.json
containing: { "manifest_version": 3, "name": "Hide YouTube Shorts", "version": "1.0", "description": "Hides YouTube Shorts", "content_scripts": [ { "matches": ["://www.youtube.com/"], "js": ["content.js"] } ] }
and a file named content.js
containing:
function hideShorts() { const shorts = document.querySelectorAll('ytd-rich-shelf-renderer[is-shorts]'); shorts.forEach(short => { short.style.display = 'none'; }); } hideShorts(); const observer = new MutationObserver(hideShorts); observer.observe(document.body, { childList: true, subtree: true });
add the contents of this folder as a chrome extension
Absolutely this! I was looking to see if it was an option yesterday. Annoyingly not :/
I go to Youtube, shorts.
I go to Instagram, shorts.
I go to Facebook, shorts.
I go to Imgur, shorts.
I go to Pinterest, no shorts because it only plays 1 video per screen, but on mobile the screen is smaller so, shorts.
I go to Reddit, shorts.
I go to Bluesky, shorts.
I don't go to Twitter.
Tumblr is probably the only social media that isn't filled with vertical videos and that has an algorithmic feed. I go to Explore and I get dandelions. A static photo of them, not a video. I'm crossing my fingers it stays that way.
I also hate shorts, however, if this is to believed, we're for sure stuck with it: https://www.zebracat.ai/post/youtube-shorts-statistics
If yes, then they don't care. Sorry. If you'll tolerate it and some other cohort of users will engage with the site for 0.1 seconds more than they would otherwise, it stays. YouTube is an optimization machine.
Not your software, not your control.
I hate that 'feature' so much.
It also gets rid of that nonsense they did to the search page.
You get almost a complete blank page and a search bar when you go to "youtube.com", and then when you search, you get the results. Just simple, really.
I also hate that the first one or two short may be relevant to whatever I'm consuming, researching, then it quickly turns into me watching Kill Tony comedians, girls basically naked in the gym, etc. they know my brain basically just turns off and enters the void
Remember, with normal videos you (primarily) decide what to watch, but in shorts, you decide what not to watch.
I mean, I do know, it's ads and the attention economy, but still. Pick a lane. This is why I pay for Nebula.
More guidelines available at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
EDIT: I said "do put it on my desktop" -- I meant to write "DON"T put it on my desktop".
And for fucks sake give me an option to disable the AI translation trash everywhere, and show the title of shorts on a creator's feed page...
facebook works the exact same way
billion dollar companies forcing you to look at stuff you dont want and gaslighting you into thinking you have a choice
And also yes, I want long form and short form videos to be separated, when I'm scrolling through results 6 at a time(minus 1-2 ads) to queue the shorts really mess up the flow.
This filter list is the most up-to-date that I've found to hide shorts with uBlock Origin:
It's kind of conceptually like a Shepard's tone, though, which is maybe interesting.
There's probably a rule against apps impersonating the OS on the App Store, one could only wish for Apple using a more heavy hand against this type of "experience".
https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
Edit: for comparison with the screenshot in TFA, this is my Home feed on a 14" MacBook. No Shorts, no Mixes, videos which are 85% (configurable) watched or more are hidden, stream VODs from channels which also stream, Movies and TV, and any channels "Don't recommend channel" refuses to work on, can all be hidden for you:
Seriously. Clear your cookies or open a private window. All of the videos are replaced by the message "Try searching to get started". Granted, as someone who clears cookies regularly, I like the change.
As an aside, this is something I've noticed recently switching to KDE from Windows/OSX No one is trying to get me to do anything with my computer to pump their metrics. You log in the first time, there's a little welcome popup, and that's it. You are now free to use your computer as you wish.
It's oddly stressful being a rat in a bunch of PM's maze.
Like why do thumbnails have an invisible overlay that appears on hover over, hijacks the click and takes you to a support page about paid product placement?
I'm clicking on the thumbnail to watch the video not for a jarring detour off the youtube page to a boring help article. Honestly WTF. Maybe the UI designers don't use youtube themselves?
This freakin page:
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10588440?nohelpkit...
I actually cancelled my YT Premium sub after this latest change with the thumbnails. I realised it doesn't really offer me that much value, and often using the platform just annoys me.
It used to open that page in the same tab you were in. So you press the browser's back button, you get back to the YouTube home page, but now it's shown you different recommendations and the video you wanted to click on is gone, and you've no idea what it was called...
I highly recommend installing an extension that hides the home feed and sidebar recommendations, which at least makes YT non-distracting again.
Pausing a Youtube video overlays the video with a row of more video recommendations.
So if I'm pausing the video to see something in the video, video thumbnails are in the way.
This happens in the Roku app and sometimes in the desktop browser, but for some reason I couldn't trigger it when I tested it just now. Maybe one of my extensions blocks it.
This is one of the largest corporations in the world and they make one of the most visited sites on the entire internet look like it was someone's hobby project and they just couldn't be bothered to align things correctly. This is insane.
The YouTube Startpage is incredibly bad in so many regards. Low in information density, full of things people do not want to see and fails at basic design. Even a basic, low effort redesign would be a major improvement.
Also, promoting 10-20 minute videos with 2-5 minutes of content is also wasteful. Most videos are extended to 10-20 minutes just to be recommended by YouTube.
Finally, videos with AI voice, which I hope can be easily detected, need to have a label clearly visible and I want to have preferences to hide those completely.
Short form content, especially combined with AI is an abomination foisted upon this world in search of a meagre profit.
My issue with Shorts are that you watch it, conclude that it was garbage and a waste of your time, so you hit "thumbs down". That apparently does NOTHING in YouTube land, because you watched, and hit a button, so you "engaged" with the content. There's so much good, well made, quality content on YouTube, but even if you pay for Premium, the algorithm, tweaked for engagement and ad impression just ruins it and the more YouTube push Shorts the worse it gets.
Tthe youtube shorts are already there, so yeah that is what they want you to do, just watch the first thing.
I cannot remember a single time in the last 5+ years when the website wasn't broken in some way. Right now the UI has at least 5 separate bugs and a Premium feature of the iPad app has 5 distinct bugs which are also so obvious that it's clear YT doesn't even test their paid version at all.
YouTube is the best argument against opt-out (or forced) telemetry in apps.
The UI is slower in almost all aspects, the grid mentioned here isn't even aligned properly. Playback buttons are slow to respond to hovers and clicks and the 1080p quality is no longer a "true" 1080p quality.
Don't even get me started with shorts because while the baseline functionality of it works, its pretty buggy for what it is. Maybe they are just too busy with scaling the entire thing that UI is an afterthought because the basic functionality is there and now its profits over quality.
I don't care to waste time letting the machine guide me to "discover" something. There is the thing I need to learn/watch/enjoy _now_, and that's it.
``` ! Display 6 per row youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row, #contents.ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;) youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 6 !important;) youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-posts-per-row: 6 !important;)
! Block on profiles "/videos" youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row:matches-path(/.\/videos/):style(display: none !important) youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer:matches-path(/.\/videos/):style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 4 !important) ```
No search. No desktop/friendly UX. It’s all going to go away.
You can see this happening already with the inability to permanently disable “shorts”. They can only be disabled for 30 days. You can see this happening when unrelated recommendations appear in search results. You can see this happening with the inability to block a channel, you can only stop it appearing in recommendations. It’s only going to keep getting worse.
Get off YouTube (and especially get your kids off the platform) and find alternatives. It’s not going to end well.
It's insane. I don't use it on roku anymore.
If the author scrolls down another 5 videos and an ad will appear, etc. Shorts are designed so that they can feed more ads/hour to viewers. Both are strategies to increase monetization on the site at the cost of customer experience.
By 'content' I mean the fact that every video has a moron talking for 10 minutes at the beginning. You can search up something as simple as how to tie a shoe, find a promising video with a lot of likes, then click it. Gotta start with 2 ads first, naturally. Then the first 2 minutes will tell you they'll teach you to tie a shoe. The next 5 minutes will be a backstory on the history of the shoe and how it's impacted the creator's life and their own shoe stories. Then a 2 minute sponsored segment for some dropshipped wallet or sock nobody needs, then another youtube ad, then hurried 10 second clip of someone poorly tying a shoe.
Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't see how anyone can stand it anymore.
Honestly, I think I prefer this. It makes my use of YouTube a little more deliberate since there's no clickbait to click, initially.
I really dislike auto-play so I have always strategically rested my cursor in between the columns of video. Now, as I scroll, my cursor will end up within a column that is misaligned and start autoplay. The worst!
It's kind of silly that they add these attributes to each nth item based on what they expect the grid width to be, when you can get the same layout without them (my YouTube extension mentioned elsewhere in this thread performs this style fix so grid items line up properly when videos and entire cross-cutting shelves are hidden and the rest flow to fill in the gaps), but I suppose they have no incentive to make the layout work when videos are being hidden or the grid is otherwise being modified externally to work in a way they didn't want.
Then of course the content is also routinely interrupted by rows that take up more space than a row of video suggestions: * Premium movie suggestions, which also manages to take up half the width with just two sentences: "Discover your next favourite movie. Watch without ads, included with your Premium membership" * Shorts, despite me continually pressing the triple dots and saying "Stop showing me this crap". * Interactive Apps (same, I keep saying "not interested" or whatever variant message it shows me).
I think I'm more irritated that youtube gives me the choice to say "don't show me this" and ignores it, than I would be by not having a choice in the first place.
On Smart TV devices, there is One large ad on the first row, then 2.5 video thumbnails on the second row, no other thumbnails.
Looks like this...
https://www.google.com/imgres?q=youtube%20app%20on%20smart%2...
The 2019 layout actually respected your time — now it’s just dopamine bait on rails. Feels like they’re optimizing for engagement metrics only a machine would love.
That graph made me laugh way too hard. "Zero videos by September" might honestly be the most realistic roadmap Google’s shipped lately.
Also, I’d 100% use a lightweight frontend that just shows recent uploads from my subs in a clean grid. No shorts, no nonsense. If no one builds it, I might.
* Block shorts
* Adjust the number of thumbnails per line, thumbnail shape, border, etc
* Limit the length of titles/descriptions
* Force titles/descriptions into normal upper/lowercase
* Change the default player window size
* Show thumbnails actually in the video (from start, middle or end)
* Fix literally dozens of other annoyances
For Windows desktop under Firefox:
* "Nova YouTube" https://github.com/raingart/Nova-YouTube-extension script running under ViolentMonkey add-on. Nova YouTube is framework that puts modular YouTube fix scripts under one UI.
* "AdashimaaTube" script running under Stylus add-on.
* "Enhancer for YouTube" add-on
* uBlock Origin (of course)
For Android phones: Revanced Extended
For Android-based streaming sticks: SmartTube
Note: The set of add-ons & scripts I use in desktop Firefox is just what I happened to end up with at the time I finally got fed up a few years ago, looked for solutions, tried out several and settled on this mix as working for my needs and preferences. YouTube is constantly changing (usually for the worse), so the landscape of community add-ons and scripts is constantly evolving in response. You'll probably need to update to latest version on whatever solution(s) you use at least every couple months.
I just experimentally opened youtube in a maximized window on my desktop with the 24" monitor and ... it's 3 videos per row again but I never noticed.
Perhaps all youtube UI "experts" work from cafes on tiny laptop screens?
They would rather focus your attention on a single short video you can lock into and then transfer that focus to an ad suddenly. Its perfect for their business model.
I still use AppleTV for pretty much everything else, but got a firetv stick just to use that. https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube
The worst part is everyone who tries to compete quickly turns the pain dial up to 11 as well. I realize YouTube existed for many years as a Google subsidized product, but Rumble is the best competitor we have and they can get quite annoying as well.
How does something as big as a player redesign go through so little QA on one of the largest websites in the world?
I wonder what's the purpose of this A/B test? Definitely has nothing to do with revenue, right? So what could it be? More engagement? I doubt that few seconds added upon more scrolling won't be much. Retention? Hard to tell.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/news-feed-era...
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/df-youtube/
Doesn't exactly that already exist with TikTok?
Which is somehow still an upgrade over the last version of the UI, where the titles of the videos were getting clipped off after about 16 characters.
[0] https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions
Also there are bugs there, and after some magic combinations of clicks I sometimes see 9 grid, or even rarely a 16 grid. Though it lasts only for one session and I can't ever reproduce the bug. So the support is there, they made it shitty on purpose. And I even pay for that crap :(
There are a ton of great UI/UX choices they've done over the years too; I just wish we had more options as a users.
2) Windowed mini-viewer (is a total PITA)
3) The "full screen" mode never seems to lign up where I'm either cropping part of the picture out or I have some stupid white slider-looking thing in one corner of my screen.
I have a vertical monitor and all I want is to put the video on one half of the screen without all this crap constantly cloying for my attention.
The google maps app has similar bizareness.
I guess somehow this all makes G more money, but it sure is painful as a consumer.
I'd pay money for a good hand-crafted (non a/b tested) experience. Competition should be the true a/b test :).
https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/economics/the-par...
There are some hits when I search online for this issue but in my case, it's been happening intermittently for the past few weeks. Reloading the page fixes it. Not sure if I'm part of some A/B test.
exactly what happens on a black mirror episode. Recommended!
1) Aaron Marcus - who found optimal menu count to be 5 +/- 2
2) Magic number 7 +/- 2
3) Fitt's Law selectivity (bigger is easier)
4) Shared layout for mobile + desktop
5) I hate short form
6) Is 5) a non-sequitur?
7) No! I now have the attention span of a goldfish.
8) Maybe I should read a book
They chipped away and chipped away at the usefulness of Youtube and the recommendations got worse and worse (and sometimes blatantly corporate), then they lied about what was trending, and now it's just a mess (some of the recommendations can still be good). And I'll forever maintain they absolutely do regularly remove videos (or demonetize channels) for reasons of 'misinformation' (which they aren't, at least some of the time); they've taken an ideological stance. And there's a reason why the default homepage isn't your subscriptions page
Companies do not listen to their users. I guess in part it's because if you did you'd have to take on board every asinine suggestion under the cover of "the customer is always right" but there's a middle ground, y'know? They just really don't seem to care, giving any sort of feedback is like screaming into the void
When did 32-pixel headlines and 18-pixel body copy become “desktop friendly”?
Can't recommend youtube redux alongside disabling watch and search history highly enough.
Also, I can't believe this is a problem. But if you watch with subtitles and the video has embedded subtitles, they just clash. A fucking intern can write you the program to turn them off (ADAPTIVELY!) as needed. But when they clash both become unreadable!! It's so fucking bad that everyone that makes shorts puts captions in the middle of the screen because YouTube puts theirs at the top. Like you got all this machine learning and you can't use it for something useful?!?!?
The idea that a design is perfect does not exist at Google.
it does jank up a bit sometimes (i can't change the youtube region, and some other defects), but it's sufficiently good that i keep it.
They've made it terrible.
Well, of course. It’s all gonna be Shorts by then.
Can recommend!!
Ah, the same advanced analytics package used by most consultancies and all politicians, which consists in prolonging a trend as a straight line until it reaches then end of times, and beyond.
The same very powerful analytics package that was recently used by AI fanboys to predict AI will consume 100% of the world electricity in a few years.
I assume they have the resources to measure _everything_.
They know what they're doing. Your use case may be desirable, but they've determined it's not profitable.
This way I'm always in control of what I see. Sure Youtube can still slather me with ADs injected into videos every 2 minutes, and much of the content I watch has ADs right in the video, but at least I feel more in control by never giving Youtube the chance to unleash their algos on me to entice me into as much fake AI-Generated garbage recommendations as they can jam onto a page. That's no longer a problem. I no longer dig thru their dumpster fire of a home page.
I'm more than a little disgusted by how moronic we are made to look now that every video tile caters to the dumbest person with the most base instincts. If YOU aren't SHOCKED by this TITLE how will we get you to CLICK IT? :O :O :O MUST SEE this video BEFORE YOU CONTINUE READING HN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvFZjo5PgG0
On my modern phone it's all pictures and you can see at most 2 headlines at once. It takes a bunch of scrolling (= 'engagement' = $) just to see what the top headlines are. Worse, the categories are all mixed together, so I keep being subject to sports 'news'. Absolute garbage.
What in the world.
Lmao
So many websites are not tested on large monitors ffs.
From the top of my head I remember the previous Gumroad marketing website. It looked terrible. Everything was huge. Even the new one doesn't work that well on a large monitor:
Also the lack of 'gutters' to lay my mouse cursor to rest while scrolling is annoying.
But hey, I subscribed to your RSS feed. That's at least some good news.
Algorithm will be 50/50 - it could either be gore or AI slop.
it's not like they don't have 3 layout sizes already enshrined, it's that they are forcing the desktop layout to act like a portrait mode phone screen for no apparent reason other than trying to be on trend with enshittification or somesuch.
SO much stupid bullshit is going on that boggles the mind. But they are only bullshit from "our" consumer perspective - they make perfect sense from other perspectives, like the creators, the platform providers, and so on. Most just boils down to the participants having different priorities. And to the power dynamics between them. For example - yeah you might not like YouTube (addressed to the creator or the consumer), but where else will you go?
I'm back to 10 videos on the homepage from 2.
YouTube sucks so bad.
On the one hand, you have the amazing engineering prowess, enormous hardware resources, reliability and scaling of Google. The amount of sheer bandwidth of video that YouTube can pump is absolutely staggering. Having to deal with fraud, abuse, content moderation, copyright disputes, and to create an ecosystem that rewards creators and all...a lot of problems were solved. AFAIR from my days at Google, YouTube finally broke even in terms of revenue in the early 2010s. It turns a profit now--a massive one for any company except Google scale. Compared to search ads its still a pittance.
And yet, the product is getting worse and worse and worse. It's worse for users and worse for creators and worse for society.
The UI is atrocious and the ads are annoying. It regularly breaks for me on non-Chrome browsers (maybe partly attributable to adblockers I run, who knows). It's unusable with full blown ads. I just don't know who has the patience to spend any time at all on a site.
With ads, it's on again off again with interruptions in the middle of videos. Entire classes of use cases are utterly destroyed by ads in the middle. For example, I spent a significant amount of time collecting backing track and play along videos for guitar. Play along use cases are just ruined by ads. Full stop. YouTube is completely unusable without an ad blocker. So I do what I should have done, which is to rip the audio tracks out of videos and put them on my local computer. What an absolute fail of a computer system. The internet sucks.
But that's just the ads. The UI--even optimized for tablets--is so stupid as to be nearly unusable. The basic functionality I want to use--SEARCH FOR A VIDEO--is hidden somewhere in a corner somewhere, doesn't show up on most pages, tries to hide itself whenever possible, and in addition to that, the pages are clunky, slow, poorly organized, confusing, and reorganize themselves every six months. FFS I WANT TO SEARCH FOR A VIDEO. I don't know how to find it now. I don't know how to use any of the crap anymore. I counted and for some workflows it literally required me to use the back button three times to even get to a page where the search ICON was hidden in the corner somewhere using the quietest, unobtrusive labeling possible. They don't even want you to search anymore.
What is this new UI regime we are in where the five basic functions of the video browser (at least for me)--play/stop, advance, go back, search, and toggle full screen--are so badly labeled, hard to get to, and laggy, that it's basically unusable? Oh, that's right. All of those things are annoying for YouTube engagement that spends all of my screen on stuff that IT WANTS ME TO SEE--including ads. Like literally the entire point is to pull you away from whatever you are doing to watch something else...
Don't even get me started on how bad search has gotten and how the ecosystem of videos is totally borked by the attention economy now. I find myself wishing for an option where any video made in the last 5 years is just excluded. Otherwise I just get some 8K video of some fool sitting in a racecar chair talking so fast and loud that I feel frankly assaulted. And some people edit their videos to literally delete the spaces between words and sentences.
It's all so terrible and I kind of don't want it.
...except that YouTube just kind of became the world's repository of all video data? What does that mean for history when an ad company takes it over?
If you don't like the service, you can stop using it. And if you do, they have already factored that into their metrics guardrail, and it was the right decision.
