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.
were made with good intention
I use YouTube 6+ hours a day and I have for probably 10 years, and I don’t even work there. (I have a few annoying personality limitations which make it so that I usually work better with YouTube on in the background, and NOT on autoplay, autoplay always chooses something I don’t want to see/hear; I know that because I use the tool a lot.)
I can tell you that it has steadily and continually gotten worse in that 10 year time. “I have to come up with stories or I won’t have a job” no you don’t, but even if you did, there are so many things YouTube needs more that enlarged thumbnails with visible compression artifacts.
I did. Not that anyone listened tho.
Using the most commonly version of the product, on the commonly used hardware, at least 2 days a week should be a prerequisite for every product owner.
I am a firm believer that the software should also be developed on commonly used hardware.
Your average user isn't going to have the top-of-the-line MacBook pro, and your program isn't going to be the only thing running on it.
It may run fine on your beefed up monstrosity, and you'll not feel the need to care about performance (worse: you may justify laggy performance with "it runs fine on my machine"). And your users will pay the price for the bloat, which becomes an externality.
Same for websites. Yes, you are going to have a hundred tabs open while working on your web app, but guess what - so will your users.
Performance isn't really product's domain, as in — they would always be happier with things being more snappy; they have to rely on the developer's word as to what's reasonable to expect.
And the expectation becomes that the software should and can only run fine on whatever hardware the developer has, taking all the resources available, and any optimization beyond that is costly and unnecessary.
Giving the devs more modest hardware to develop with (limited traffic/cloud compute/CPU time/...) solves this problem preemptively by making the developers feel the discomfort resulting from the product being slow, and thus having the motivation to improve performance without the product demanding it.
The product, of course, should also have the same modest hardware — otherwise, they'll deprioritize performance improvements.
----
TL;DR: overpowered dev machines turn bloat into an externality.
Make devs use 5+-year-old commodity hardware again.
<flame=ON>
Usually, but not always, it ignores scroll events while an animation is playing…and hovering over a tile in the list cause a pointless zoom-in animation (the result of which occludes parts of adjacent tiles). Sometimes, the animation won't start immediately, but will still play. To prevent the cannot-scroll-while-animating problem, the only safe place for the mouse pointer is over the scrollbar.
Clicking the (completely invisible) track of the scrollbar has random multi-second delays.
Most of the search filters are hidden by default…and can't be shown without waiting for a slow animation. You can click the show-filters widget over 30 times if you're in a hurry, and still the animation hasn't even drawn the first frame. That delay before it starts means that even if you try to wait, you might click one extra time, and then see both the show-filters animation and then the hide-filters animation…all while none of the rest of UI responds. …And then you might realise you want to refine your search terms…which will reset all filters and re-hide the filter options.
Once you find a tile you want to click, be prepared for another two animation delay: one, if the tile isn't already zoomed in, and another while the app mysteriously animates a slew of placeholders instead of just dumping the items information directly into view. It's slow like a 33.6 moder on a noisy phoneline, but now you finely have details about the item you clicked on maybe 7 to 40 seconds ago.
Now maybe you click a screenshot to enlarge, and decide it wasn't the app for you. You hit your mouse's 'back' button or click the app's strangely tiny (given how freaking huge most of the UI is) back button. Nothing happens. You try again, potentially numerous times…because the app ignores those inputs while a screenshot is enlarged. The app's so unresponsive, it at first doesn't occur to you that no amount of waiting or retrying will help. No, you have to click the little close widget on the opposite side of the window, or 'back' will never mean 'back' again.
You try to go back to your search results. The app eventually responds, but decided to discard that data for some reason and has to play more placeholder animations while reloading it and rediscovering your scroll position.
Then you go into another search result and decide the sidebar of other apps people viewed has some interesting items. These don't have animations on the tiles or any details, so you have to click each one of interest, waiting for more placeholders while imagining modems noises and being outpaced by a Colorado glacier that's crossing the road. And when you page back, the item you just came from does /more/ animations while reloading everything via IP Over Avian Carrier With Quality Of Service.
But when burrowing through the people-also-viewed sidebars, don't go too many layers deep, or when you return to your search results, it will have forgotten your scroll position and turned of your search filters. Ah, time for more UI-blocking animations.
But that's okay, right? Nobody ever made an app that responds in milliseconds to every user input, right? And we all know that doing long, blocking operations on the UI thread is right and holy, right? Even routines single-threaded apps never need to yield to other code blocks or process interrupts, …right?
<flame=OFF>
<meta-flame>
Yes, I have reported this to MS via Feedback Assistant. A few times. No, I don't know why they haven't appeared to do anything about this unshippable pile random bits that somehow slopped out of the Bit Bucket.
"Rectify?" No, the only answer is “Games."
</>
May your screams into the void be heard by the stakeholders, and not just people.
You're excuse for doing something shitty is... that someone else will? What does another person even have to do with it?! Seriously, let them have the blood on their hands. You can't even assume that someone else will! If you do it, you guarantee that it happens. Even if it is likely that someone else will, there's a big difference between a certainty. This is literally what creates enshitification.
Plus, the logic is pretty slippery. Certainly you're not going to commit crimes or acts of genocide! You were "just following orders"[0], right? Or parents often say to their children "if everyone jumped off a cliff, would you?" Certainly the line is drawn somewhere, but frankly, it is the same "excuse" given when that extreme shit happened, so no, I won't accept it.
You have autonomy[1], that makes you accountable. You aren't just some mindless automata. You may not be the root cause, but at best you enable it. You can't ignore that you play a role.
And consider the dual: if you don't make it better, who will?
I believe you have the power to make change, do you? Maybe not big, but hey, every big thing is composed of many smaller things, right? So the question is which big thing you want to contribute to.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
[1] https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incent...
But I still stand, you aren't mindless automata and your actions matter.
> Careful there are programmers here watching
And good! Fix your shit. Take some god damn pride in your work! Just because all code is shit doesn't mean it can be infinitely shitty.
This isn't (exclusively) a forum for programmers (in fact, since it belongs to YC, maybe you'd expect businesspeople etc.) For example, I'm not a programmer, and I've never worked anywhere near the IT sector, yet I visit HN often. Also, if you look at the frontpage there are usually many topics not related to programming, or even tech in general.
Most useless message ever, placed exactly where you do not want it to be.
Ie I hovered over one video of some Ronny Chieng commentary of RFK jr yesterday which somehow popped out of blue, and next time half of my feed was hardcore political with current admin (nothing what few Not interested clicks won't solve but then I am battling over-optimization of video platform).
I guess it suits certain audience well and keeps the feed fresh, but such behavior would cater to some maybe other type person better than me.
If you manually increase the quality on that video, it will only apply for that video, and whatever videos you play next, will still be limited to 480p.
All this is just to save costs..A truly fucking shady tactic to fuck over paying users. Fuck Google for what they do and how they cheat naive users.
Also the compression algorithm is very aggressive and it works reasonably well for general content but for edge cases (like starcraft streams), the 1080p loses enough details to make it hard to see important things like observers and outlines of individual units in crowded clusters. The compression algorithm just isn’t trained/tuned for these types of content, so even on a 1080p screen I need to stream at 4K just to see the details properly.
These were unlisted videos, so I’m not a YouTuber or anything, but I’m pretty sure this is one thing some people do to make their videos appear better sometimes
Filmed in HI8 480p, but YouTube's 480p looks like mud and doesn't do the uncompressed analog source justice. You can see this when you select 4K
The original functionality of the quality selector was to throw out whatever video had been buffered and start redownloading the video in the newly selected quality. All well and good, but that causes a spinning circle until enough of the new video arrives.
The "new" functionality is to instead keep the existing quality video in the buffer and have all the new video coming in be set to the new quality. The idea is that you would have the video playing, change the quality, and it keeps playing until a few seconds later the new buffer hits and you jump up to the new quality level. Combined with the fact that YouTube only buffers a few seconds of video (a change made a few years prior to this; back in the Flash era YouTube would just keep buffering until you had the entire video loaded, but that was seen as a waste of both YouTube's bandwidth and the user's since there was always the possibility of the user clicking off the video; the adoption of better connection speeds, more efficient video codecs, and widespread and expensive mobile data caps led to that being seen as the better behavior for most people) and for most people, changing quality is a "transparent" operation that doesn't "interrupt" the video.
In general, it's a behavior that seems to come from the fairly widespread mid-2010s UX theory that it's better to degrade service or even freeze entirely than to show a loading screen of some kind. It can also be seen in Chrome sometimes on high-latency connections: in some cases, Chrome will just stop for a few moments while performing DNS resolution or opening the initial connections rather than displaying the usual "slow light gray" loading circle used on that step, seemingly because some mechanism within Chrome has decided that the requests will probably return quickly enough for it to not be an issue. YouTube Shorts on mobile also has similar behavior on slow connections: the whole video player will just freeze entirely until it can start playing the video with no loading indicator whatsoever. Another example is Gmail's old basic HTML interface versus the modern AJAX one: an article which I remember reading, but can't find now found that for pretty much every use case the basic HTML interface was statistically faster to load, but users subjectively felt that the AJAX interface was faster, seemingly just because it didn't trigger a full page load when something was clicked on.
And, I mean, they're kind of right. It's nerds like us that get annoyed when the video quality isn't updated immediately, the average consumer would much rather have the video "instantly load" rather than a guarantee that the video feed is the quality you actually selected. It's the same kind of thought process that led to the YouTube mobile app getting an unskippable splash screen animation last year; to the average person, it feels like the app loads much faster now. It doesn't, of course, it's just firing off the home page requests in the background while the locally available animation plays, but the user sees a thing rather than a blank screen while it loads, which tricks the brain into thinking it's loading faster.
This is also why Google's Lighthouse page loading speed algorithm prioritizes "Largest Contentful Paint" (how long does it take to get the biggest element on the page rendered), "Cumulative Layout Shift" (how much do things move around on the page while loading), and "Time to Interactive" (how long until the user can start clicking buttons) rather than more accurate but "nerdy" indicators like Time to First Byte (how long until the server starts sending data) or Last Request Complete (how long until all of the HTTP requests on a page are finished; for most modern sites, this value is infinity thanks to tracking scripts).
People simply prefer for things to feel faster, rather than for things to actually be faster. And, luckily for Internet companies, the former is usually much easier to achieve than the latter.
> It's the same kind of thought process that led to the YouTube mobile app getting an unskippable splash screen animation last year; to the average person, it feels like the app loads much faster now. It doesn't, of course, it's just firing off the home page requests in the background while the locally available animation plays, but the user sees a thing rather than a blank screen while it loads, which tricks the brain into thinking it's loading faster.
So they decided it's better to show lower-quality content (or not update the screen) than a loading screen, and it's the same school of thought that led to a loading screen being implemented? I agree both examples could be seen as intended to make things "feel" faster, but it seems like two different philosophies towards that.
(Also, I remember when quality changes didn't take effect immediately, but I've been seeing them take effect immediately and discard the buffer for at least the past few years-- at least when going from "Auto" that it always selects for me to the highest-available quality.)
Except "a few seconds later" can become minutes. Sometimes it just keeps going at the lower quality while the UI claims to play a noticeably higher resolution than the one actually playing. To be clear, I don't care that the "automatic" quality is actually automatic, I care that the label blatantly lies about which resolution is playing. "Automatic (1080p60)" shouldn't look like a video from 2005.
e.g., https://www.t-mobile.com/offer/binge-on-streaming-video.html
> All detectable video streaming is optimized for your mobile device so you can watch up to three times more video using the same amount of high-speed data.
I might be traveling and be on very expensive 3g data, and want to listen to a video and not care about the display but low quality setting means little when you are a premium user.
You have to explicitly change video resolution every time the next video starts playing.
You cannot choose explicit resolution preferences like you used to.
And I get no difference in what happens to resolutions chosen for me between these two quality settings. Seems random/non-deterministic.
If that doesn’t work – reach out to YouTube support – as a Premium subscriber, you get to speak with a human.
There is no way to handle autoplay correctly. It's simply been broken for the past few years. There is also no way to detect autoplay using workarounds. I.e. autoplaying a silent audio, because you can only prove the existence of autoplay, but never its absence, since autoplay could be delayed for whatever reason and happen outside of your timeout based hack.
As a counterpoint I love that feature on desktop and use it all the time.
Often I don't even click videos but just watch them with the preview autoplay (with sound enabled). I also zoom in on my mousepad so that it covers the whole screen and I only need to click through to like the video or for the comments. Much more seemless experience for me.
It's easy to like them by accident though
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.
As to the reason, at least with Youtube and Facebook, the answer is obvious: they want to increase their ad revenue by claiming additional “plays” or “interactions” or whatever they want to call it today. I remember realizing several times over the years that I had been conned when I paid for ads. The top-level numbers looked good, but when I dug in, I realized they were all faked.
Same stuff with the mobile youtube app. If you so much as graze the screen anywhere while watching a video the replay speed doubles. This is so sensitive that even a tiny unintentional finger touch, or a water droplet landing on the screen triggers it. Whoever thought that is a good idea as a feature, i can’t comprehend.
Plus they have no data to see how badly their feature annoys me. From a metrics perspective “the user wanted to fast forward for 5s” looks the same as “a careless finger cradling the phone triggered the fast forward and it took the user 5s to realise what is going on and adjust their hold, now they are annoyed at how fragile this app is”. Someone might have even used the statistics of all the inadvertent activations in their promo package to show what a popular feature they made!
I mean, I suppose you're right. However, that being said, a case is a good idea nonetheless, just as is a screen protector. A good case protects the phone against damage from dropping, just as a good screen protector does the same for the screen.
Sure there is. iPhone or otherwise, I don’t touch the screen when holding my phone.
Might be an issue for people with small hands perhaps. I’m trying to figure out in what circumstances I would be forced to touch my display whilst merely holding my phone but can’t of one, so it must be a size/grip thing, or I’m just holding my phone like a weirdo.
I have it turned on, but leave my mouse to the right of the screen if I don't want autoplay. It's habit now.
EDIT: or did you mean on autoplay as in part of a playlist playing in the small player in the corner while you are on the home page?
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.
Surely you don't expect YouTube, a company that doesn't store any data at all actually, to be able to store a single boolean value somewhere in your account, do you? This would be impossible for a company as broke and small as YouTube.
Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?
I suspect that the managers in charge of some of these features are lobbying for it as a way to artificially increase the engagement stats for their features, but spinning it as actually being good UX instead of a user-hostile move because it's important for "discoverability" or something like that.
Then it was "hide shorts for X days" (I think 30?).
Now it is "show fewer shorts".
Like a relative commentor said -- a product manager on the "Shorts" team is doing a helluva job boosting their team's stats.
Lately the option to disable ambient lighting around video has been reseting to ON for me on every video I open.
I cant even formulate how I feel about that without breaking some rules somewhere
Even while pretending they've not recorded your viewing history they could still make recommendations from your subscriptions or give you the same glurg that they give viewers they know nothing about... but instead they break the site.
It's still better than having shorts on the screen.
A year ago, I had a serious YouTube habit, once I replaced my trash Jellyfin server with a Plex server I can listen to my music collection on my phone anywhere… so no more music from YouTube. I got tired of asmongold and all his imitator gaming YouTubers, fell out of the habit of watching Ukraine warbloggers, etc. I saw other people who got into toxic rabbit holes in YouTube so bad that they decided to physically destroy their computers…
The few of us who go "ew" and recoil are vastly outnumbered by the billions who just watch.
Every complaint about ads on youtube is someone who can't even be bothered to download an adblocker before Chrome killed it. It was one click, but that didn't dissuade the vast majority of eyeballs.
for some people, like me, for example, it turns them away even in the short term, and also in the permanent term, so to speak ha ha, not only in/after the long term.
because, you know, we know our rights and likes. and we wrong and dislike people who disrespect them! :) choice of rhyming words used for effect, but the point is also true.
My preferences change all the time, regardless of Youtube. For example, when I was a kid, I hated mustard.
On the other hand, my Youtube configuration may change independent of my actions.
this is quite bad behaviour.
they should not sneakily change our preferences behind the backs. similarly, all notifications, advertisements, et cetera, should be opt in, not opt out.
many of these cos. do this sort of thing, of course.
they excuse it under the protect of company policy.
Google the ant letter as an example.
sorry, pretext, not protect. an autocorrect error.
I'm fearing the day they'll just remove that toggle for good.
Don't. Nowadays we can just re-introduce it, at least all who read this. iOS, macOS, Windows, Android... All have browser extensions, all can be modified.
Absolutely no sites, including YouTube, honour the parameter. But you can at least tell the site that you'd prefer it another way.
Unfortunately there's no way to set this per-site, at least in Chrome. Similarly, if you disable animations in Windows, you also disable all animations and transitions in websites that support prefers-reduced-motion, causing some sites to feel janky as a result.
They really need to add a per-site toggle for that, and a browser-level option to ignore the OS' setting. Turning off animations in Word shouldn't turn them off in Google Calendar.
Chrome: command line switch:
--force-prefers-reduced-motion --force-prefers-no-reduced-motion
This is unacceptable to me. I've turned this setting off more times than I care to count. I've submitted feedback a couple times as well. I don't remember doing it lately, which is good. But I should have only ever had to do it once. I have a Google account, there is no reason this setting shouldn't be saved with my accounts, synced to all my devices, and only set once. I pay for YouTube Premium; I shouldn't be subjected to all these tactics which I assume are there to increase engagement and watch time. The price I pay is fixed and they don't earn ad revenue off me... why the games?
That's your mistake. Never pay someone to remove the same obstacles they've been putting in front of you. It's the definition of racketeering.
It's also just stored in a cookie/session, so you have to do it in each client and every time you wipe your cookies. Very frustrating.
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.
Or your theory and its view fraud for ad or metric purposes.
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
Bunch of hackers using adblockers that modify the client-side UI to cheat Google out of money and then complaining loudly about a minor UI convenience. How dare Google not optimize for them!
I say this as someone who uses an adblocker myself. But come on.
https://github.com/insin/control-panel-for-youtube/blob/cf18...
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.
Irritating, but the quality is fine for most things and I save a few minutes not watching ads.
If anything, I feel like that this is by design to hyperstimulate their core audience seeking instant gratification.
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)
Conway's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
Conway's law is expressed as "communication structure -> program structure" but it's actually even stronger than that; the arrow is bidirectional. If either the organization wants to break up the homepage into different teams, or if the organization has to have multiple teams work on their homepage for whatever reason, the homepage will reflect the organizational structure. YouTube falls into the second branch, which is that their home page is so complicated it has to be broken up between teams due to sheer organizational size. At YouTube's size you'll even have organizational distinctions you can't even see on the homepage like dedicated reliability engineering teams. At their scale I see at least six teams most likely, the "normal" video team, the shorts team, the sidebar menu, the hamburger menu, the search team, and the team responsible for the top-level all-Google interaction, plus multiple invisible ones like recommendation algorithm, reliability, possibly a dedicated performance team, etc.
You can, organizationally, try to put these all under one manager, but even when you do that it is a surprisingly uphill battle to maintain coherence, even when it is a goal, which it often isn't particularly. There's a lot of reasons few companies have the visual and design coherence of a ~2010 Apple, including arguably even 2025 Apple.
Are we just going to gloss over this like the list of videos is random? haha
And if not the case, I would expect at least one team to be responsible for the final result
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.
It used to be a Google mantra that "focus on the user and all else will follow." They are so far beyond that they've wrapped around. They actively hate users now.
All Google really cares about is making advertisers happy. Literally nothing else registers as a priority.
Unfortunately this seems to be what people want.
There's plenty of YouTube competitors (Substack, Patreon, Vimeo, Twitch etc.) Unfortunately, they just don't have the traction of YouTube
And I would say its mostly not YouTube actually producing the content. They are responsible for the "reward mechanism" of clickbaity/shock content driving views, and in return, more views meaning more money for the creators. But I would really like to hear of another model. If YouTube didn't do it, someone else assuredly will. And traditional media is/was barely any better.
I think it's more fair to say that this is a behavior that is profitable to exploit if you care more about making money than what you do to your customers' or society's wellbeing.
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;)
* download a release zip: https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/releases (expand Assets). * go to chrome://extensions, toggle developer mode on * click load unpacked and select the file you unzipped the release
then you also have to watch out because chrome will, still time later, disable ublock origin. You have to go to your extensions page and find the option for 'Keep it for now' or something. Then you can continue to browse the internet like a real gee! Thanks ublock origin!
Switching over to firefox is the ultimate best option, regardless of any faults that firefox has.
ytd-rich-grid-renderer div#contents {
/* number of video thumbnails per row */
--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 5 !important;
/* number of Shorts per row in its dedicated section */
--ytd-rich-grid-slim-items-per-row: 6 !important;
}
If someone can recommend a better alternative for custom CSS, I'd be interested to hear it. I guess Tampermonkey could work, if you have that.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/custom-css-by-denis...
So I don't consider that to create a conflict of interest.
(try to disable cache, for example...)
i am unclear if Google merely counts on Mozilla acting like a reincarnation of the living-fossil that is the Apache foundation, or if their money steers this.
You can put the relevant CSS into a custom YouTube stylesheet if you like.
(I re-skin many sites, including HN, see my profile page for links to recent-ish CSS.)
It is, just not as capable as before due to the Manifest v3 changes.
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.
Relevant articles:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/simplicity-vs-choice/
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/short-term-memory-and-web-u...
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/working-memory-external-mem...
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.
The fewer videos they have in focus at a time, the more accurate their algorithms can be.
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.
I'm also starting to think that no large company will ever act in the best interest of their customers unless required to do so by regulation. As long as those customers are individuals.
Maybe the regulation we need is that companies like Google can't have "ad supported" products that are simultaneously sold as products to users. Either you're selling a product to users, or really running an advertising platform. It can't be both.
I don't want to ban you, but you're making it increasingly difficult not to.
You have a history of abusing HN and we need you to stop doing that. You also have a history of posting good things, which is why I'd prefer not to ban you.
The YouTube team has been blindly chasing monetization at the expense of their website being useful and pleasant for a while now. Unfortunately it seems they can get away with it. I wrote this post to just shake my fist at the cloud
This is called "appeal to authority" and it's a pretty unintelligent logical fallacy. Do better next time. Maybe read a book or two?
This is called ad hominem, and has no place here.
In this case there's an insult inside the argument, but importantly the insult is not the argument being made. Therefore it is not ad hominem.
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.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71192605/how-do-i-get-yo...
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCS0N5ba...
... works but:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UULFS0N5...
... is 404.
I'm guessing it's only a feature of playlist URLs which that SO answer is about, not RSS feed URLs.
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULFS0N...
This extension is no longer available because it doesn't follow best practices for Chrome extensions.
:(
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unwatched-for-youtube/id647728...
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
What on the YouTube home page could possibly require 12MB of JS alone? Assuming 60 characters per line, that’s 200k lines of code? Obviously ballpark and LoC != complexity, but that seems absurd to me.
all of the code that hoovers up your analytics on what's been looked at, what's been scrolled past, etc. maybe I'm just jaded, but I'd suspect so much of it is nothing but tracking and does little for making the site function
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/performance/thi...
YouTubes frontend people just don't care about bloat, even when other Googlers are yelling at them to cut it out.
That doesn't affect page speed scores if the video is "below the fold", and that's all that I really care about. If Google Lighthouse doesn't complain about it, then my job is done.
The code is minified so there's relatively few characters for each source line, if you run it through a pretty-printer to restore sensible formatting then it turns into well over half a million lines of code.
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.
If you want your own home you can use something like Urbit.
Generally in the web as it is, we are all serfs on other people’s computers.
I don't think it makes sense to say that they are forced by the market to do this to compete with the candy store, when they already know I don't want candy in the first place. Instead, this sort of annoying practice pushes me to leave and visit the organic market instead (Nebula).
I don't think "revealed preference" is the right explanation here either, because these kinds of settings preferences are tailored to an individual account, and I never click on Shorts and always select the "hide" dropdown, so the preference that I have revealed is one that is strongly disinterested in Shorts.
I think the correct explanation is that someone's KPI is attached to increasing Shorts viewership, and they're trying to earn their bonus, even if it's at a cost to the success of the organization as a whole.
That’s a very competitive arena and while you and I may be health conscious - they’re fighting a trench war, you and I don’t matter.
this is a hilarious image. "ooh, don't mind if i do".
> why would I go to a grocery store that insists on slipping a pack of Oreos into every third bag of carrots?
You can see how these are not analogous. The store _is_ slipping Oreos in your vegetables. So yeah… don’t install TikTok _or_ YouTube. I get that you’d rather YouTube to be YouTube-without-shorts, but it’s not a thing anymore, vegetables-without-Oreos is not an option at this grocery store
Even that’s imperfect because Zuck really was interested in the interactions he thought were best despite them not being highest engagement, but you can’t only do that and stay alive in a competitive market.
I don't even touch short form video because I'll get sucked in and suddenly hours go by. Short form video on YouTube makes me want to never open YouTube because I know how easily I can get sucked in.
Long form content (i.e. Veritasium) are nice for sure, but some of it suffers from fluff too.
When I say I don't like short-form video content, I typically mean the tiktok-influenced infinite scrolling algorithm-driven video wall of videos. Where you might click on one thing that looks useful or interesting on your home page and without even thinking about it you start swiping through the videos and suddenly you emerge an hour later form a brain rot video fueled fever dream, with no idea how you just lost an hour of your life to useless shit online.
At least losing an hour to video games or reading online might leave you with a sense of accomplishment or satisfaction. I have never felt anything positive after binging on social media videos.
They previously had a whitelist feature where parents could curate channels and videos for their kids.
That has been silently broken and all related features are disabled or non-functional.
Whoever is pushing Shorts is the equivalent of a drug dealer waiting outside a junior school to sell heroin to kids.
Sociopaths do this kind of thing.
-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
Luckily Google hasn't "manifest away" this type of extensions (yet).
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.
http://www.sebastianmihai.com/idiocracy.html
and no wonder they write papers about "negative sampling" because they don't collect clean data. I made the mistake once of clicking on a video where a Chinese lady transforms into a fox on America's Got Talent and oh my god I am suddenly scheduled for thousands of AI slop videos where some Chinese girl transforms into something on that show with the same music and with the same reaction shots.
There is an answer to the coldest cold start problem and that is have a hand curated collection of about 100 or so content pieces that are of broad interest and stupendously high quality. Instagram will show you videos that are amazing (like somebody cooking a fine meal under rustic conditions) if you're cold and Stumbleupon did the same back in the day. Now Instagram 2025 and Stumbleupon 2012 are not "cold" from the viewpoint of content the way YT Shorts is, but Google has the money to pay professionals to make something -- but their ideology is against it.
This guys posts only shorts: https://www.youtube.com/@hydronyc and he's got the best/funniest plumbing video you YouTube.
The bad shorts are when you scroll to the next short after watching one - never do that, only watch shorts from subscriptions.
That's a delta mixer valve which is $100, plus $100 for the trim. A plumber would charge double for that, so $400 for parts. Usually labor is about the same as parts so I would expect that job to cost $800.
Maybe there was a lot of labor involved, or maybe he's embellishing the story a bit (or leaving out some of the work involved).
All the comments in the video have the same question as you.
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
https://gist.github.com/insin/ef93c7d87b1f97f1c9411e6128d520...
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.
(Seriously though... Facebook's video playback UI. What the fuck is that? Why is it so bad?)
I guess they don't get that there's going to be only one winner in each niche, unless TikTok goes down for political/national security reasons. Why do I need Youtube shorts if I have TikTok? Why do I need Google+ if I have Facebook? Why do I want Facebook videos if I have Youtube? Unsolved puzzle.
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.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-shorts-bloc...
And, Android also has some really nice clients.
I hate that 'feature' so much.
Is it because I'm signed in to youtube, maybe?
The setting propagates to other browsers signed in to the same account, I think.
Maybe part of the issue is that I am logged into the same account across three different devices, or that I have other Google accounts too logged in (but I don't use YouTube in them, only the account with Premium).
Anyway, it should be trivial for Google to make it actually permanent (I would love it it was stored in my account, which I pay for Premium on, instead of local or cookie storage), but lots of people have this problem.
Yeah, you are absolutely right & I misremembered - forgot I copied over my browser profile.
It is definitely a permanent setting for me though, on both laptop & desktop profiles, haven't had to re-set it since I discovered it. (Firefox/linux).
Maybe the difference is in handling multiple google accounts differently. My approach: I tend to create browser profiles for specifiec tasks; the youtube viewing profile (used daily) is permanently signed in to my (non-Premium) youtube account, but when I check my actual gmail mail (for example) which is a different google account, I do it on a different browser profile.
Apologies for confusion over propagation, anyhow & thanks for the correction!
It also gets rid of that nonsense they did to the search page.
But for a while now firefox has been asking every single goddamn time whether I want to open this page in the app instead. With the only extra option to always in open in app. What about no? What about never?
shakes fist at sky
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.
And 98% of it is just grabbing popular snippets of long form videos, cropping them slightly, and overlaying some bubbly animated text (or worse, just closed captions but with a bright font).
It's almost as annoying as the deluge of people who email and say "we can auto-translate your content into 20 languages!"
Also, a channel that posts shorts exclusively needs like 30 million views to be monetized, you're infinitely more likely to reach that threshold creating compilation of cute cat videos than with your own original content (regardless of the niche). I'd be shocked if even 2% of channels earning money from shorts create any original content what so ever.
https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/the-flywheel.html
and you might think, "I have (say) N=250,000 people playing game A and I can get them playing game B" you are probably going to be disappointed and very lucky if you get somewhere between 250 and 2500 of them playing your new game.
The two-sided market that makes YouTube impossible to dethrone makes it just as hard to change direction. For one thing you have to change the behavior of the viewers, but you also have to change the behavior of the creators, who know how to make videos, who know how to monetize them, all of that.
Myself I find I don't have a big attention span for short videos. I mean, Chinese girls doing the robot turn on my mirror neurons as much as anything. I can watch a 30 second video and get 30 seconds of fun but I don't want to watch another and another and another. However I cannot get enough of Techmoan talking about tape decks and such
This would be like Starbucks randomly serving tea to 20% of customers who order coffee because they want to compete more effectively with Lipton. That’s not how competition works.
The analogy fails as well. It would be more like Starbucks asking every customer whether they want tea as well. And I imagine that whichever tea company is partnered with Starbucks at that point is going to be very happy. Product bundling works very well, especially in cases like this, when an established giant decides that they are going now offer the thing as well. YouTube Music worked the same.
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".
Greasyfork restricts what 3rd party libraries can be pulled in + you have the option of disabling automatic updates in your userscript manager.
A browser is my everything app. It is the most security essential tool I use daily, which requires vigilance in how I extend it. More users is a crappy proxy for how likely a developer can sneak through an insidious change.
Not exactly fly-by-night...
It just needs to be a preference!
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:
Who places ads everywhere else on the web?
The do grab your attention, but they have no lasting effect, it is so short and there is so much of it that you quickly forget everything you have watched, including the ads.
They are good for the platforms though, because effective or not, they get paid good money for these ads.
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.
Never again.
I can imagine my mom opening YouTube (hypothetically) for the first time and seeing an anime video, or my younger cousin being shown a Top Gear video, and them deciding that YouTube is "that app with the weird videos" that's not for them. It's not a carefully thought out conclusion, but in the era of a hundred competitors, it's plausible that superficial decisions like that have a lot of impact on the app usage.
Or it could just be that someone with a forceful personality on the YouTube team decided this is how we're going to do it and nobody could oppose them, not every decision is scientifically planned and executed like it's often assumed from the outside!
It's a fundamentally broken understanding of internet communication, but catering to it is possible and profitable. (I've done it in moderating smaller communities. We've handed out undeserved and unjust bans because getting rid of a high profile nuisance is easy compared to convincing someone to stop getting one-guyed. We also kept the most toxic users around when they're crowd favorites.)
You're spot on. YouTube knows they're the boring old video platform, the bland safe-for-tv default homepage that would be shown to someone with no surveillance profile would only confirm it's not the platform for someone with their taste in TikTok slop.
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...
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 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.
Now when I go on mobile Safari and want to switch off 'video previews' (for the thousandth time), and I tap the switch, it stays switched on but the 'Settings saved' thing comes up on the bottom. You have to tap it again to actually switch it off. I wonder if that's a bug or intentional too now...
I highly recommend installing an extension that hides the home feed and sidebar recommendations, which at least makes YT non-distracting again.
The first world had a lot of computers, video cameras and horizontal screens in general before they had smartphones.
I think it plays a part.
I gave up this fight a decade ago, can't believe people still struggle with this concept.
The phone camera sensors often have a aspect ration of 4:3 but the sides are cropped in software. So the videos just get mutilated because convention.
Though at least 4:3 format is making a come-back because it is the prefect comprise format. Looks great on a tablet, is usable in both landscape and portrait mode. On Desktop it leave space to read comments. Perfect for youtube videos.
Since a phone can show portrait or landscape videos in fullscreen (just hold the phone vertically or horizontally), it makes sense to shoot in whatever orientation fits the content or situation best.
The real problem is that computer monitors don’t easily offer orientation switching :)
I'm with you there. It's the same for shooting still photos.
...but that doesn't stop people from shooting portrait video and then constantly panning back and forth because the whole (crowd, landscape, giant sea monster, whatever) doesn't fit in the frame.
Gaming on mobile phones, even MOBA games and first person shooters, seems quite popular here. For me, it's unplayable.
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.
For, perhaps only once in multiple generations, all the "old folks" raging against "the kids" with their new media are correct.
More and more, the movie "Idiocracy" is becoming a documentary.
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.
when you're not an old, and this is all you know, you just accept it without knowing that there was a better world back when the olds were young. not being able to accept this really shows how old man yells get off my lawn you are. YT is not trying to capture you, and probably doesn't care one bit about olds. it's the younger crowds that have been given YT as an absentee parent/babysitter that they have been able to set their hooks in from the beginning. that's the group that will be making them money for years to come
And people quit, lots of people, and the flow moved out. And people who joined had no idea it had been "better" than what it was, this was just the standard which was admittedly still better than other companies. Eventually everyone for whom this affront was to high left leaving an employee base reasonably happy with the status quo.
They continued to "downgrade" the 'lifestyle benefits' the entire time I was there and it continued to piss people off who left.
As margin pressure grew the need to monetize grew and Marissa Meyer who had been the 'brick wall' between the user experience and monetization left the company. Others who felt as she did also left for a variety of reasons. Leaving only those for whom monetization was just the cost of doing business and hey, "We're Google!" right?
This opens up the opportunity for disruption. There is a hysteresis effect though, everyone has a different tolerance for crap. More and more people I know are not "Google" users anymore, they are 'search' users and if their OS pre-loads Bing they use that, sometimes they switch to DDG or Kagi. Once that takes hold in the bulk of the addressable market, Google will go the way of every other tech company before them. I used to point out to people that the "GooglePlex" was the dead hulk of SGI. Like wasps Google was living inside the corpse of a formerly big player. Everyone would tell me, "We're different, we're always going to be around." And like the Zen quotes from "Charlie's War" I would say, "We'll see." :-)
[1] I believe that this statement is perhaps the single most destructive thing any CFO can do. In part because they don't define 'necessary.'
[2] He was not amused :-)
On my mobile device, I have totally de-googled them so that no G apps are on my device. I only use gmail reluctantly from a laptop for accounts that are necessary for work. Haven't used G search in years. Me and the 12 other people on the planet that are the same don't make a fart in the wind of difference to G.
Of course when I was a child my parents told me how much better my childhood was than theirs...cue uphill both ways stories.
But I find myself telling my child the opposite. I'll tell her how Walmart used to answer the phone, JC Penney used to have associates that helped you in each department, Home Depot used to employ skilled workers to answer questions, stores didn't lock up items, etc. Not to even mention about how the internet wasn't an ad laden crap hole.
And without saying as much to her, I feel like my child's life is markedly worse than mine growing up.
So, what gets better these days? I find myself just thinking everything will get continually worse until I expire. But it wasn't always this way. Where was the peak? My mind wants to say late 90s. I'm just hoping that's a local peak, and things will get better again in some fashion.
Growing up as a kid, we didn't even have the internet. Gaming consoles were well off into the future (NES wasn't until my teens), so we did crazy things like play outside. Being able to survive without internet/devices wasn't crazy, it's just how things were. I can't imagine going through life with anxiety level panic at the mere thought of not having a device within arm's reach at all times. The thought of wasting my childhood/teens doomscrolling and trying to think I was so important to call myself an influencer or even caring about what some rando on the internet does that I think I have to follow them is insane. I definitely feel like this is a markedly worse situation than my childhood.
If I had to point to a single thing that is most indicative to the change-over from 'child' to 'adult' it would be the thought behind this question.
The answer is "it always gets different." Which is dissatisfying to the child who yearns for a parent to make things better, and engaging for an adult that realizes that nothing is forever and things change but they can be an agent for change.
That last bit, owning ones own agency, is where "it gets better" comes from. When you are a child it got better because your parents worked to make it better, their vision of what better was meant they were willing to invest their time, effort, and resources into changing things for the better. When you are the parent, then its on you.
They key difference between nostalgia and maturity is that the former works to recreate what had been before, where the latter works to change what is into something better. One of the services you can do for your child is to show them how "adults" make things better.
So it's interesting to look at "What gets better these days?"
Modern video games are way better than the video games of the 90's.
Putting together a complete computer you can learn to program on can be done for < $100 if you're willing to use used keyboards/monitors/mice.
Making things out of plastic is accessible to everyone either by owning a 3D printer or borrowing one at the library or social club.
On line resources for learning any topic including taking college courses are free and easy to find.
Keeping in touch with your friends in "real time" is both trivial and multi-media.
Shopping is different with much of it online rather than in person. Is that better? Is that worse? Kind of a bit of both, but definitely different. The Internet is full of crap ads, which is different, but its a lot faster than it used to be, is that better? Is that worse? A bit of both and definitely different.
I was joking at a conference I attended last week that I remember when grown-ass men could make a living wage developing database software written in BASIC on what was essentially a giant Arduino with an 8 bit processor. Definitely different, and it was fun for them, but it wasn't necessarily different then grown people getting paid to write code in Javascript to make web pages look nice.
Here is the bottom line: Things get better because you, as the adult, work to make them better. The more effective your efforts, the more people will join you in helping you make things better. Conversely, if you do nothing, then things getting worse is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Change is endemic, without effort and maintenance, change tends toward decay.
Same with computers. My daily driver is from 2017. I'm just not interested in anything new they're coming out with.
As for recommendation, the algorithm works perfectly if you make the effort to "Like and subscribe™" to quality channels and videos. It's amazing how good YouTube can be if you curate the algorithm with this – and with dislikes if you have to.
I've gotten recommended videos by creators with <1k subs that I really enjoyed, and many with <10k subs.
I've gotten recommended videos with topics I hadn't really thought about but which I ended up enjoying.
Sure there's about 10% or so that I'm not interested in, but I just mark those as "don't recommend channel" and move on. And the times I just need to check out some stupid clickbait, I make sure to remove it from my history afterwards.
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.
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 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?
I still use AppleTV for pretty much everything else, but got a firetv stick just to use that. https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube
How does something as big as a player redesign go through so little QA on one of the largest websites in the world?
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.
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 :(
Right now, on my 32" 2160p screen, when I either maximize my browser window or put it into "fullscreen" mode, YouTube shows me a centered section with useful information (wide enough to display four videos when visiting the "/videos" endpoint), and empty space to either side of that section that's wide enough to convert this single centered-column layout into a three-column layout... tripling the amount of data on screen.
Both this and whatever "leanback" thing YouTube is testing are both pretty godawful. I do prefer the wasted space, so I know I can rearrange my windows to make use of the space. You never know whether or not a thumb-centric UI will shrink itself down when the viewport's size is reduced.
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!
I'll have to watch it!
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.
As a former user of 16:10, I feel your pain, though.
Dred's HN CSS Madhackery: https://pastebin.com/gLXiqKyd
Dred's HN CSS Madhackery -- Dark Mode: https://pastebin.com/6PF3dCXH
(Both in my HN profile page.)
I'm reading via the first now.
I've recently re-skinned Algolia's search to match this. What the heck, posted:
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?!?!?
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.
The idea that a design is perfect does not exist at Google.
Well, of course. It’s all gonna be Shorts by then.
Can recommend!!
They've made it terrible.
youtube is facing an existential threat from tiktok and nearly every product decision is driven by getting more gen z and alpha kids back to youtube
(Disclaimer: I work at Google but no connection to YouTube)
Some is the keyword here. As you say youtube's huge library is a hard thing to compete with. Still I've found some good content there and I make it a point to look at peertube first to reward those who are there with my eyes.
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 right here is the crux of the problem - profitability rules over any and all functionality.
Even in a scenario where a given design/layout was universally desirable, it will lose out to a design that is more optimal for revenue generation.
Ok, yes, Google is a company that needs to make money, but changes that optimize for revenue over usability have a strong chance of a domino effect down the line of a dwindling user base paying an increasing cost to use a service that is no longer worth it.
> I assume they have the resources to measure _everything_.
I don't disagree with this assessment, but I believe it just means that they know where the inflection point is between functionality (driving engagement and retention) and revenue (increased at the expense of retention and engagement) and try and ride that intersection to maximize both.
> I believe YouTube is crushing it as a content provider.
There's an argument to be made here that YouTube just doesn't have any real competition due to the infrastructural requirements being so heavy and the network effect of having so many people using the platform, and that's different than doing well enough to be able to compete in an environment that had more competition.
Put another way, the way YouTube is run works great up until you have an actual competitor operating at the same scale, at which point it falls over, as opposed to one that could effectively compete against another service.
This feeds back into the point about riding that curve of revenue vs. functionality. If you're right at the intersection of that curve you have very little flexibility with which to adjust in competition with another entity. This just points YouTube believing (not unreasonably so) that they're an effective monopoly and don't need to worry about competition, so it doesn't enter into their calculations. They may never need to worry about it.
None of that is the same thing as being a "good" or "optimal" service for users, and you can't really "crush it" when there's no one of a similar size within the space to compare against.
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.
(Own tool, local-only, inquire if you're interested, email in profile.)
Source currently is CNN, which really isn't a particularly good news source or article selection. I'm working on a version based on The Guardian's RSS feeds.
I find the result far more readable and calming than any current online news presentation.
Starting point was CNN's "lite" page, which turns out to be unordered headlines. First cut organised those heads by section, the link above adds lede lines to those stories, with more prominence and significance to earlier stories and selected sections, less to the fluff bits (sport, entertainment, food, style, etc.).
Lmao
Cable TV figured this out a long time ago.
I guess every content platform is moving to forcefully shoving slop into your face now
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 want high density go full double at ~192 dpi so you get proper scaling. 4k@32" is a shitty in between resolution nobody has asked for.
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.
They're probably right by their metrics, they can probably rigorously prove this makes them more money. But I think its subjectively worse, it feels claustrophobic and prescriptive to me.
Optimal for who, though?
From Google's perspective I'm sure these changes push towards a more optimal revenue generation through ads. They potentially also push a more optimal layout on tablets/phones, or for shorts content.
Meanwhile from a desktop/laptop user perspective these changes are hardly optimal, especially compared to what they were before.
> 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.
Also likely that people find and implement workarounds. Browser extensions or interface layers (e.g. Invidious or reVanced) that block ads and/or grant user specific control over the layout. This represents a hidden cost for Google too, because now you have a subset of your user base eating up resources that you don't see ad revenue for. There's a risk as they optimize more and more for a smaller number of people that this hidden cost grows.
All in all seems like a bad long-term proposition for Google to alienate parts of their userbase that are tech savvy enough to bypass their revenue generation.
That is to say that "If you don't like the service, you can stop using it" isn't really true if you want to watch long-form videos on the internet. There isn't an alternative.
Now they did have AB testing and likely are better at the metrics Google cares about: making money. However they are worse for users in ways that real user testing would catch. Again though, real user testing would likely cost them money.
Clearly people don't want what OP shared. My main point was that they are aware of that, yet they are still optimizing for their company's performance
