My personal long-term complaint is the length of video titles.
Lots of people like to make really long video titles. So right now there is one on my screen titled “The Best Decisions Every Video Game Console Developer Made”.
Now if you didn’t know, that is not the whole title. But there’s absolutely no indication of that. The only way you actually know that is either by checking or if the stuff on the screen is clearly not the end of a sentence.
So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in the title. In this case you also see “(Part”.
Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that.
The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.
Obnoxious.
For example, if you pause the video by clicking the main action button brings up an overlay that takes up almost the whole screen, so you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame. How do you start it again? By clicking the same button, right? No! By clicking up. For some reason up means back and down means to open some additional UI with related videos and what not.
No other app is like this — Plex, Infuse, Apple, Netflix etc. abide by relatively sane UI controls where the action button pauses and unpauses, and up/down don't scroll between weird overlay elements.
The YouTube filled with these incredible non-unintuitive UX choices that drive me crazy. I never use it unless I have a clear idea of something I want to watch.
Amazon has started getting into a state, lately, where it ignores the remote, unless I go back, then go forward again.
This kind of “quality” is considered “acceptable,” in today’s world.
AppleTV has a JavaScript-based development system. It also has a fairly classic native Swift system (which I use). I suspect most apps are JavaScript, though.
[EDIT: Added the “routinely use” qualifier]
> you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame
You can press up on the D-pad to dismiss that overlay, if you want to see the full paused frame.
> How do you start it again? By clicking the same button, right? No! By clicking up.
Maybe we have different remotes? On the latest model, you play/pause with the same button.
One issue I’ve noticed in the app is there seems to be no way to move the cursor “up” to the channel button when the video is in the last 10% of the playback bar. If you rewind it a bit, then you’re able to move the cursor up there.
Only in the last few days have Shorts appeared at the top of my home page. I fear it may be the end for me.
Everytime YouTube gets an update it gets worse. This has been true for years. It's like their design and product team is run by second-graders.
It's similar on desktop, if you pause the video, an overlay with recommendations appears, and it prevents you from reading the subtitles, for example.
The content they offer is either a big back catalog of reality TV dross, or Live sport. The live sport streams, when left open when the AppleTV is turned off will always crash and go into a frozen state where there's no way out except by force quitting the app.
Reported multiple times to their tech support, no fix in 2 years. This for sports services that cost 30GBP a month, minimum, and with a regional monopoly on coverage.
The YouTube app is a walk in the park compared to the app for Hayu which is like torture sometimes it’s so buggy.
I would not be surprised if there is no QA team for the tvOS app.
I would've agreed until Netflix did their redesign and started pushing wrestling for whatever braindead reason. Some executives should just quit.
Given that every other app manages to get basic interaction right, I’m not inclined to believe it’s an os/hardware issue.
Last time I checked, the LG webOS app was just running tv.youtube.com which only expects a TV-specific user agent.
DeArrow replaces thumbnails and titles with crowd sourced versions. I can't use youtube without it anymore. Usually the titles get replaced with stuff like "How to build a table" instead of "Watch the world explode as I try to make a table!!!!!!!!!!!!". Same with thumbnails. No longer are they over-saturated close up AI generated garbage images, but usually just a screenshot from the video that shows what's really going on.
I do this instead: When a thumbnail and/or title is displayed on my screen feels like some variation of spammy clicky ragebait, I use the 3-dot menu and pick "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel".
Nowadays, that kind of stuff is pretty much just gone.
This has certainly nuked whole channels (and also entire categories) from my youtube feed, and that suits me just fine. I need my life to be encumbered neither by clickbait, nor by the subset of creators that are compelled to generate it in the first place.
There's more good, interesting, non-bait content created every day than any person has time to consume. The herd is plenty big enough to be culled.
I think I'll be OK without watching videos -- at all -- from people who are working to jam the cock of influence as hard as possible into whatever they can.
I do agree it is annoying. Some people do it quite a lot with car work videos to make the car look in far worse than it is.
Even with the missing “ (Part 2!)” added, that’s still only 68 characters. I would probably begrudgingly call this long, but I would definitely not call it “really long”—my threshold for that would be at least 90 characters.
If they’re truncating around 60 characters, I’m content to call it unreasonable.
I agree in the abstract it’s a perfectly reasonable title. It should absolutely be readable.
But it’s not. Because the app sucks.
That’s not an option. And if it was? I wouldn’t want to use it.
They could use their fancy AI to generate shorter titles.
YouTube making up a shorter title would be so much worse...
> So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in the title. In this case you also see “(Part”.
> Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that.
> The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.
I'm looking at youtube right now. There's a video displayed with the title "Word Differences Between 11 Countries! | Europe, Africa, Asia , ..."
That "..." is the indicator that the title has been truncated. If you hover the title with your mouse, you can see the entire thing: "Word Differences Between 11 Countries! | Europe, Africa, Asia , America | Why Are They Similar?"
Not far away, there's "Alex Honnold Answers Rock Climbing Questions | Tech Support...", which expands to "Alex Honnold Answers Rock Climbing Questions | Tech Support | WIRED".
Am I using Apple TV? No. Is it really true that they removed the truncation indicator?
Yes.
Any other app, you leave a video paused, the OS screensaver will come on. Those beautiful, aerial screensavers that are better than any screensaver I've ever seen in all my decades of working with computers. So of course the Youtube app had to block them with their own shitty variant. They have no taste and no respect.
The fact that they would ever think that was possibly an OK thing to do though shows you how brain dead they are.
The direction of your swipe no longer matters. All the app does is interpret wherever your finger _lifts up_ as a _directional tap_ on that side of the trackpad. So you can't do nice smooth accelerated swiping like it works _everywhere else in tvOS_; you can only use the remote as a bad D-pad.
Damn it, I still appear to be on 4.51.08/web_20251117_11_RC00 with no indication that there's a new version. Not looking forward to any updates...
> The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.
I sometimes wonder if YouTube is a weird kink cult that gets off on people complaining about the ridiculously user-hostile decisions they make. Because it's either that or they're an evil troll cult that aims to make life just that little bit less pleasant for as many people as possible.
If they worked for me, they'd learn fast or wouldn't work for me for long.
It works so well I’ve gotten at least half a dozen neighbours to do the same. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a definitive step up in UX.
Things like a cheap $5 fan being sold for $60 as roughly: "Super efficient A/C that will save you $100s on your electricity bill and can cool a room down in just minutes"
This week, an instructional video I was watching on how to repair my water heater was suddenly interrupted by a campy ad for pussy-hair razors.
It was so ill-timed, bizarre, and inappropriate I burst out laughing.
The other one I was seeing a lot of, until very recently, was pornographic static ads that were implemented as an optical illusion. If you viewed it at full scale it was an innocuous image of a closet or chair or something, so it passed all checks, but when scaled into a thumbnail, it turns into a silhouette of a woman giving oral or something else obscene. Not sure what this technique is called or how it's done. (It's not a schooner, it's a sailboat.)
Claiming that (youtube) ads are bad is a tautology at this point. What else can be expected from something competing for what is left of a user's attention at the very lowest end of a market already overflooded with crud?
The question should rather be: why would one voluntarily let one's well-being be polluted by such invasive, parasitic crap.
There is nothing normal about ads everywhere. There is nothing healthy about ads everywhere. Ads are not an inevitability.
Run an ad-blocker, protect your mental sanity.
Enshittification continues
YT needs a button to the effect of "I will never, ever, EVER, buy or use this product, stop spending money on this ad"
the obviously-AI created slop or the mobile games that I will never play, etc. is just a waste of time for basically everyone (except YT making that money, I guess)
1. Go to youtube.com in the browser, play the video, switch back to the home screen. Video playback will stop, which is a good default behavior.
2. Swipe down from the top of the screen which brings up "Notification Center" which somewhat strangely contains a playback control for the browser.
3. Press play. Audio resumes. If it's part of a playlist, you don't have to manually advance, it will play automatically.
No ads, no youtube premium subscription, no "desktop mode", no sideloading, no additional apps other than the beloved ad blocker.
I let Brave run in the background and it seems to work fine.
Ad blockers help with the constant nagging about "open in the app!"
it complains about youtube app being separated into parts or smth like that
It would have been amazing value had Youtube Music, which came with YouTube Premium were half decent. But it is not. We got Spotify which isn't perfect, and then Apple Music, which for years didn't know what they were doing, and then Youtube Music, which is basically a company doesn't give a damn about Music.
We now have three Giant companies over the history of the past 30 - 40 years, once they grow big that make junk.
You pay them money, they let you stream music and otherwise stay out of your way. I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty much ideal as far as I’m concerned.
And they don't want to go through alternative workarounds to do so.
For me, it's actually just being able to easily share premium with other users in my household, so that I don't have to have my ears blasted with ads when they open YT on the TV. Less effort than playing around with things like pihole and hoping it doesn't break other things.
Which is fully in their right, I’m not complaining, it’s not like I’m any worse off (waiting on a black screen vs waiting while some bullshit ad tells me to CoNsUmE PrOduCt!!!)
So, for health reasons, I block nearly all advertisements. It is a HUGE mental health win. There is a ton of research behind this, as well.
I'm not going to pay extra money to disable a health concern. I'll block ads instead. I should not have to PAY MORE for a product that doesn't damage my health.
I will always happily directly support content creators. I will not watch ads.
At this point ads are just one of the annoyances amoung so many others.
The general theme is the same as the article: less real estate dedicated to actual videos you might want to watch. There were two rows of completely useless garbage that I had to add to my uBlock Origin filter just now: one for Shorts (which I have blocked in the past) and a new one for some sort of Youtube Games thing (?) that looked like the worst AI generated slop you'd never want to play.
If this is the premium experience then I don't want it.
You will never walk alone.
It is not yet painful enough for me to invest time and energy to research less convenient ways of UX improvement. Not ... yet.
If I'm paying, I expect the best possible experience, and you just don't get that. It's not just YouTube, many streaming services are objectively inferior to pirating.
If you turn off history, you get zero videos on your home screen. This is not because the history is needed to generate the suggestions, because the blank home only started a few years ago.
I used to never subscribe to any channels, I just got reasonable feed of suggestions based off of whatever I happened to search for explicitly or if I got there by clicking a link, or by what I chose to click on even if the list starts out totally random, except of course it never was totally random because they still have ip address and other fingerprnting signals.
After they blaked out the home screen and started showing the "you're not logged in, go here to fix this error", I subscribed to a bunch of channels to provide data for generating a feed. They still don't provide any. You can take extra clicks (which is agonizing on the Roku since it just doesn't react well and misses button presses all the time) to get to the subscriptions page, which will show recent uploads exactly from those channels and no others.
I also still get several other forms of ads in the form of the embedded/native ads and the irrelevant suggestions that come from youtube's interests instead of my own, like shorts. I also still get ads simply because I don't get to use my own account all the time. When you watch youtube anywhere but your own laptop by yourself, you are at the whims of someone else's account and some other platforms app limitations.
And even on your own machine, I absolutely resent having to tie my viewing history to my identity and have someone else log all of that. So there is reason to intentionally use no account even if you otherwise have no problem paying to support not only the content producers but even the delivery system.
Why can't I disable shorts? There is no amount I can pay to hide all shorts, but I can have it for free i=on a pc with a tampermonkey or ublock script. But that only helps on a pc. I watch mostly on a TV and I have no ability to hack the roku app. Maybe if I switch to a google tv I could use newpipe or something.
Paying for premium does not make youtube good. It does not resolve much of anything. It is not remotely the touche this smarmy comment attempts to suggest.
Paying for premium takes youtube from being like pulling out 10 of your fingernails to only pulling out 8 of your fingernails.
That 2of10 fingernals relief and for the sake of the creators, that's the only reason I still pay for premium.
You might like the content, but you don’t pay for a shit box anyways.
I’m really shooting myself in the foot right now aren’t I.
1Blocker and Wipr on mobile. Plain old Orion by Kagi on my Mac.
I get a very unopinionated but effective music player that has all the music I need, and it doesn't try very hard to "upsell" itself to me unlike Spotify because to Google YouTube is the real money driver.
So to me getting no YouTube ads as well is well worth it.
Go into the YouTube app, settings, manage all history, under the history tab hit Delete -> delete all time.
Then go to controls (still in the manage all history dialog box under settings), under YouTube history hit Turn off. It says “pausing…” Hit Pause, and Got it.
It’s been exactly 3 months since I did that. I still watch stuff from my subscriptions and when I search for something I want to watch. There are still recommended videos when you’re watching a video but they are a lot less enticing since they are not personally targeted. I curated my subscriptions so it’s more what I would want to spend time watching instead of reaction videos for instance. My actual time watching YouTube has dropped a lot.
I just deleted the all-time history and now the homepage is blank as you say.
I don't think they're really deleting your viewing history, else the homepage wouldn't have looked the way it did before I deleted "all time".
I have clicked "stop showing me Shorts" several times but they keep coming back, so I don't think the homepage works properly anyway.
EDIT:
On further consideration, I think what was happening with the homepage was that it was showing me videos related to channels that I subscribe to. (But not always videos from channels that I subscribe to).
However I don't see why they can't still do that even after I delete my all-time watch history? Not that I want them to.
But if you did want them to, you could probably turn watch history back on, click on any single video, and then turn it off again, and you'd probably have a home screen dictated by your subscriptions.
Or else they just ignore the setting and it's all a lie anyway.
I think so too. I turned my history back on and watched part of one video in order to make sure I had the steps right for clearing and disabling history again. In that time, after having at least 1 video in the history, the front page was like what you said. The first recommendation made me want to click on it. It was called "why c++ is terrible" or something like that. Cleared/disabled again and back to normal (blank home page).
And shorts, just let us turn them off in the subscription page exactly like the posts.
It’s utterly baffling that a multi-billion dollar video empire doesn’t provide much of an option to their users in terms of settings.
In a better world with an actual open web, we would not have to rely on the graces of the hosting company to offer us a better UI. Our browsers would act as true "User Agents" and render the web page in a way that is best for the user.
Browsers should be able to by default pick and choose what elements of a web page get rendered, without having to reach for extensions. Browsers should be able to render things in a different order, and easily allow the user to override things like styling, size and so on. Browsers should provide this kind of flexibility by default! They should not just be canvases following orders, for the web developer to program against the user's interests.
Instead, we just punted, and handed over all of the control to the web developer. Now they decide what gets shown and not shown. They decide the layout. They decide everything!
The number of times I clicked “show less” and it has zero effect on the number of shorts.
But if you're in the same boat, at least use something that has an adblocker, like Brave, Vivaldi or Opera.
I complain about it to Google. They ignore it. They couldn't possibly give a shit.
I should probably complain to my congressman. Who also won't do shit even if they actually give a shit.
Worth a try.
Settings -> media -> "Block YouTube Shorts".
There are also other settings related to YouTube. Brave is the only thing I'd use for YouTube on mobile.
There should absolutely be a better answer here.
Youtube Shorts? Crickets.
It's IMPOSSIBLE to disable it with parental controls and it has the exact same slop as the other vertical video services.
Which kinda sucks because I'm fine with my kids watching horizontal youtube videos by certain creators, but I'd rather not they have access to the infinite pool of shorts unfiltered.
In the Android app it's literally just one line, which I have to scroll down to... like two pages.
On a 1080p monitor, my unmodified Subscriptions page currently has 6 fully-visible thumbnails, consisting of 3 livestreams from people I only subscribe to for videos, 1 watched video, 1 stream VOD (which I'll never watch), and 1 unwatched video, so that's a score of 1/6. Scroll down and you start getting into more watched videos, stream VODs, the unwanted Shorts shelf, thumbnails for Upcoming videos (i.e. videos which can't be watched), and videos from people I don't even subscribe to (via YouTube's recently-added Collaborations feature).
With everything in Control Panel for YouTube enabled and a minium of 5 videos per row configured, I have 15 unwatched or partially watched (up to a configurable %) videos every time. Same thing for Home, in which other things I don't want such as Mixes and Playlists can also be hidden.
It also tends to have fixes for the other things people rightfully complain about when YouTube comes up in these threads, such as (reads down the page) blocking ads and hiding promoted content, hiding Shorts everywhere, automatically switching to the original audio for auto-dubbed videos, hiding Related videos when they appear below the video pushing comments even further down, fixing the new oversized video controls and huge videos in the Related sidebar, etc. etc.
There’s your problem. You have normal hardware. The rich SV folks at google are probably all using 6k monitors. (only half joking)
I didn't know I wanted 6 videos in a row, but now that I have it, it's so much better. Also linking youtube logo to subscriptions is great.
I'll give you an example. I'm super into game development. I also love the NBA. NBA videos are posted nearly every day and I click on them. Gamedev videos, not so often. So what do I get? Tons of NBA content because that's what I click on in my recommended. What I want, though, is for the recommendations to think about what I would _like_ to watch and not just what I _do_ watch. I think a curation site would help alleviate this problem, especially if I could steer it more than Youtube's.
On your personalized level: Don't let the algorithm work against you; instead, help it work for you. If you're being inundated with NBA videos and want fewer of them, then pick one or more of them and declare that you're "Not interested." This slows the flood of any over-abundant topic.
URLIST was really great for this sort of things but they never made enough money.
Back in my day on the cattle ranch, the cattle had unique magnetic identifiers on their ears. They put their head in the feeder and get fed only what the rancher wants each specific one to to eat.
Netflix's revenue is subscription based long form videos. That should be a viable business model. Instead, they seem to be willfully heading in the direction of serving slop to an audience that's not fully engaged. This road leads them into direct competition with YouTube and TikTok.
When my son moved out of the house recently, he went on the additional household plan. What struck me was that the user interface steered heavily toward the option that includes ads. We had to search for the small print to let him pay Netflix a few dollars more for the non-ads version.
In the late 90's and early 2000's there was a sense that ads were a reasonable tradeoff for free services on the internet. If the last 20 years have taught us anything, it's that the perverse incentives are a catastrophe.
Even on macs many are using scaling factors that render close to 1080p.
The issue really would be why YouTube can't bother managing more layouts. It still blows my mind there's only one single YouTube experience per platform, when their viewership basically span the world's population.
YouTube has gotten worse with every release. Endless, pointless UI changes. Sneaky resolution downgrades. When your video says "Auto 1080p" it's like 480p quality, manually choose 1080p and watch it change.
Amazon has been working overtime to make your experience worse. The latest innovation is to eliminate invoices for US customers. This wasn't a mistake, as it was rolled out gradually over a few months, with workarounds quickly plugged as users become aware of them. Oh, there still is a "view invoice" button but it's just a redirect to order summary now.
Dark patterns galore since cancelling Prime. Every checkout flow I'm hit with a minimum of two clicks where I have to decline or change something. Ordering a packet of laundry soap feels like buying a used car.
The employees that implement this stuff dare to call themselves "engineers" yet their entire energy is devoted to making their customer's lives more miserable, which they are somehow paid a disgusting amount of money to go do.
Real engineers solve problems.
These people invent new problems to then go solve, likely because they are chasing their next promotion.
There's a lot of folx who got into this business for all the wrong reasons and we're now seeing the results of that on a massive scale.
If these changes are not hurting user metrics are they really making their lives miserable? When you are optimizing an experience for billions of users, numbers are the only thing you can trust.
The difference is stark. I use YouTube on the Apple TV to play mostly background videos; 8 hour AI generated lofi mixes, burning fireplaces, things like that. Ambiance. Its all that gets recommended now when I pull up the app; but only on the TV.
This behavior is somewhat desirable: but the issue is, the youtube apple TV app is an abhorrent experience that feels deeply tailored to stop you from getting to any content that is not expressly recommended. And these videos are all that get recommended. A new Linus Tech Tips video might be in my feed on desktop/mobile; but finding that video on the TV literally requires me to search "Linus Tech Tips" and go to their channel -> all videos.
I certainly don't mind the platform raising the prominence of videos I tend to watch on that platform; but to me it feels like I should be able to at least scroll down on the home page a bit to get a more "centralized" view into everything my account watches and would be recommended.
And it’s like Youtube thinks I only want to watch the last three genres at any moment. If I branch out, then it pops another favorite genre from the set.
Sometimes I’ll go months or even years forgetting about video genres I love until I randomly remember it.
Feels like a wasted opportunity, and it should have more in common with music apps.
! YouTube frontpage - 3 columns 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: 3 !important;)
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-posts-per-row: 3 !important;)
! Optional: Hide the "Shorts" section to maintain clean 3x3 grid
youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer:style(display:none !important;)
The tyranny of distance (you can do x where x is usually 'ignore feedback' and you can get away with it separated by hundreds of miles, where otherwise you might get punched in the face) kills me with companies like this. You can't just ignore all of us (the customer isn't always right but it wouldn't kill you to listen every once and a while and if you don't, we'll gradually stop using your product). But you can, because listening to The People isn't where the product managers decide it should be or isn't where the ad dollars are or whatever
It's an emperor has no clothes situation. They know it we know it everybody knows it but we're all (corporate, anyway) just going to ignore it and plug our ears
---
! YouTube 7 Videos Per Row Fix (Home and Channel Pages)
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;)
youtube.com###contents.ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;)
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 7 !important;)
! YouTube 7 Videos Per Row Fix (Channel Page margin fix)
youtube.com##ytd-rich-item-renderer:style(margin-right: calc(var(--ytd-rich-grid-item-margin)/2) !important; margin-left: calc(var(--ytd-rich-grid-item-margin)/2) !important;)
! YouTube 7 Videos Per Row Fix (Font Size fix)
youtube.com###video-title.ytd-rich-grid-media:style(font-size: 1.4rem !important; line-height: 2rem !important;)
youtube.com###metadata-line.ytd-video-meta-block:style(font-size: 1.2rem !important; line-height: 1.8rem !important;)
youtube.com###video-title.ytd-rich-grid-slim-media:style(font-size: 1.4rem !important; line-height: 2rem !important;)
I like to think that it was the feedback I submitted that pushed them to change it. However, it was more likely a change in viewership that would cause them to revert it back. I know my viewing habits definitely changed, I found myself spending more time looking through the thumbnails and then giving up to go watch content on other platforms.
4.51.08/web_20251117_11_RC00
They’re also testing the same on the web, half the time I get the normal sidebar, half the time I get a 300% zoomed one where I can only see like 3 video thumbnails before having to scroll (jokes on them, I don’t - but then again I block ads so I don’t count either way).
Bet the idea to force outdated TTS whose robotic droning that is the pinnacle of annoyance on every single user who speaks more than one language was worth a nice bonus.
well thats the thing, people is so lazy and dumb that whetever new feature is available, they didnt bother to find or turn on that shit
this is the power of "default", you cant test something is working on hyperscale if you didnt make it default like youtube does
The outrage over this seems completely overblown. Do people not see the setting to switch audio?
Well, the game is clearly very important to these people, it is increasingly visible. They are clearly very emotionally engaged. I'd say things are going really well!
Youtube was once a miraculous technical website running circles around Google video. I'm told they used a secret technology called python. Eventually Google threw the towel and didn't want to compete anymore. They were basically on the ground in a pool of bodily liquids then the referee counted all the way to 1.65 billion.
Some time went by and now you can just slap a <video> tag on a html document and call it a day. Your website will run similar circles around the new google video only much much faster.
The only problem is that [even] developers forgot <s>how</s> why to make HTML websites. I'm sure someone remembers the anchor tag and among those some even remember that you can put full paths inthere that point at other website that could [in theory] also have videos on them (if they knew <s>how</s> why)
If this was my homepage I would definitely add a picture of Dark Helmet.
Looks like he also forgot <s>how</s> why.
Nobody else has the money, the infrastructure and the content to build a YouTube alternative.
There's probably a market out there for video hosting that doesn't suck. I think a video search / discovery platform on top of Vimeo might be useful.
Common recommendation is font-size: 14px on html element, but I often encounter websites that are way off in scaling.
Personally I configure my browser's default font size (1rem) to something nice and readable, but I'm sure that the number of people who do this is <10%. Probably closer to 1%.
But either way I would recommend against hardcoding a size in px.
https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/netflix-new-homepage-...
» I think that anyone who is technically sufficiently well-versed, is going to avoid that hellscape like the plague. So then, who is the actual audience for this stuff? My guess would be: the old folks' home around the corner, which, sooner or later, will be forced to upgrade those TVs to smart-TVs. And once those old folks put in their credit card numbers or log in with their Amazon accounts, there goes a lot of people's inheritance.
My own elderly father is wise to the scam, but not confident in his ability to navigate the dark patterns. So now, he is afraid to input his credit card information into anything digital, essentially excluding him from cultural participation in the digital age. « [1]
With that frame (the target audience for smart TVs is old people), "needing glasses" is not all that far-fetched.
There are already zero videos if you visit with no youtube history. That seems... fine?
since August 2023 [0]
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/139222780?hl=en&ms...
It was pushing me heavily to sign in; which I do _not_ want to do.
End result was I just stopped watching YT.
ytd-rich-item-renderer {
max-width: 265px;
}
/* Show full length title instead of ellipsis cutoff at two lines. */
a.yt-lockup-metadata-view-model__title {
display: inline !important;
}
youtube.com##.ytd-rich-item-renderer:style(max-width:265px; !important;)
youtube.com##.yt-lockup-metadata-view-model__title:style(display:inline; !important;)I only put 2+2 together when I was running yt-dlp and realizing there was a "Sleeping 5.00 seconds as required by the site..." before downloads would kick in and... wellp. It all makes sense now.
As an ISP representative, I am getting absolutely pissmad that YouTube is gaslighting our users and making them think that our service is "terrible" because of perceived buffering on every video load because YouTube wants to play a shitty cat and mouse game against adblockers for all.
Now I get cat influencers and influencers selling me on them ... while they tell me how to pick a cat. Maybe I find kinda raw cat footage, with a title that is misleading, annoying music, text bubbles popping all over it :(
I just want what I searched for ... youtube doesn't give me that.
It's not that unlike when I open the home page, I've no control and so much of that isn't what I'm looking for...
Every time they tweak the algorithm, content creators scramble to figure out what changes they made so they can exploit it. That's why every few months all the major channels change their styles to all be the same. Gotta exploit that algo!
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 5 !important)
Ive had that for a couple years.
At the same time Google Product Managers (or whatever euphemism for middle management they use at Google) are dumbfoundingly short shighted and myopic. They canibalize and destroy the value of the website to make some engagement or ad numbers go up, persumably in a short term play for promotion. When the consequences of their efforts to enshittify become apparent, they are long gone to another FAANG or moved up to executive level where severance packages mean they suffer no consequences. Its a shame there is no incentive to make the best product for the long term usefullness.
and I've paid full subscription price for a couple of years now to avoid the ads, and I can barely stand what it has evolved into. My screen is 80% games, shorts, "ads" and categories I didn't ask for.
If you want to read more the search keywords are: "Animal 20" "Neuralink"
> Animal 20 was seen "pulling on port connector which is now dislodged (no longer secured)". The next day, Animal 20 was "picking at incision and occasionally pulling on implant". Soon, infections developed. On Dec. 20, UC Davis staff found antibiotic resistant E. coli and Candida glabrata, a fungal infection, at the surgical site. They discussed a "necropsy next week", meaning they planned to euthanize Animal 20.
Fucking cowards.
I thought Apple TV was a subscription service? Does Apple make TVs now?
It's taking them 5 years stealing Chinese algorithms.
Like a sibling commenter mentioned, I used to happily pay for Premium, but I'd rather put up with the misery (and ad-block) than give them a single cent ever again. Why should I reward pervasive enshittification?
Sort yourselves out, Youtube.
First was the disgusting pink tones in the progress bar. Then the oversized thumbnails / less videos per page. Then the horrible over sized player controls. And now the oversized suggestions on the side bar.
Not to mention the obnoxious amount and duration of ads.
It's getting worse and worse.
These are all symptoms that something is very wrong.
Also recommend DeArrow and SponsorBlock.
But also flip content creators a $5 every once in a while. That's more revenue than they'll ever get from you watchin their videos.
At some point it’ll become so shit people will look at trying to sidestep their frontend entirely. In other news YouTube is clamping down on ability to download videos…what a coincidence
This is already true. If you sign out of YouTube or turn your "Watch History" off you see zero videos on the home screen.
I am being a bit obtuse of course, if you have any sort of identifying tokens it does show videos, but the irony was too good to waste on mere facts.
The founder of NeuraLink has recently proposed to deploy sentient robots to watch criminals, removing the need for incarceration. There is a lot of synergy possible here with mandatory neural links. The bot could not only watch us but also press our buttons. "Criminal", being such a flexible concept, should pose little problem to globalizing this paradigm. For one thing, it will make it possible to harvest any number of clicks necessary, so advertising becomes obsolete, and so does content.
God, I hope I'm not a prophet.
These are slap drones [1] from Banks’s The Player of Games [2].
but after recent EU balooney request like chat control etc, I cant be so sure anymore
But then again, this is already possible, and has the advertising industry shit-scared, thus all the interest in blocking AI-related scrapers since they circumvent the whole “wasting human time” element.
That TVs have lower information density than desktop browsers? Like, yeah, obviously.
That if you don't sign in to YouTube and don't pay to remove the ads, that you'll get prompted to sign in and you'll see ads? That doesn't seem particularly problematic.
Sure it's mildly funny that a funny projection is true in a very contrived way, but it doesn't really stand up to any criticism. I use YouTube almost exclusively through the Apple TV app, and it's fine, I'd even say it has improved a little over the last few years. I like the low information density because I sit approximately 3m from the screen and navigate with a TV remote.
The point is that I made a joke projection in my last post in April that by next May there would be only one video on the homepage, because obviously that would be ridiculous, right? Then I turned on my TV and it happened.
See the previous blog post: https://jayd.ml/2025/04/30/someone-at-youtube-needs-glasses....
1. https://emilio-gomez.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/steamos-...
2. https://preview.redd.it/new-big-picture-mode-is-finally-publ...
I think you got it -- that's the point right there, nothing more...
