[HN Gopher] Someone at YouTube needs glasses
___________________________________________________________________
Someone at YouTube needs glasses
Author : jaydenmilne
Score : 907 points
Date : 2025-04-30 15:18 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jayd.ml)
(TXT) w3m dump (jayd.ml)
| blahaj wrote:
| > Unfortunately, using an advanced analytics package I've
| projected that around May 2026 the YouTube homepage will just be
| one video, and by September there will be no videos at all on the
| homepage.
|
| Doesn't exactly that already exist with TikTok?
| jsheard wrote:
| It already exists _on YouTube_ under the Shorts tab, which is
| just "we have TikTok at home".
| anentropic wrote:
| Yes this change is super annoying
| herpdyderp wrote:
| You can insert (and tweak) this into uBlock Origin filters:
| ! 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;)
|
| (source:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1g5l9mc/comment/ls...)
| gadrev wrote:
| Magic, thank you. Works, at least for now, until they mess up
| with the layout again. So much better...
| a123b456c wrote:
| Didn't the new Chrome update break uBlock, or is that just for
| my test cell? I've been in mourning...
| orev wrote:
| Vote with your clicks. Switch to Firefox
| ge96 wrote:
| re-enable it or if not there is ublock origin lite which I
| believe is legit
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| > ublock origin lite which I believe is legit
|
| It is, just not as capable as before due to the Manifest v3
| changes.
| satiated_grue wrote:
| Yes, but it still works fine with Firefox.
| bloppe wrote:
| That's not the only extension Firefox still allows that's
| blocked in Chrome. FF also blocks 3rd party cookies and has
| shown no interest in Google's "privacy sandbox" tracking
| features. Funny how much better a browser can be without a
| massive conflict of interest
| lolinder wrote:
| I agree with you that Firefox is better, but it's not for
| lack of conflict of interest. No browser that is funded
| by any means other than user payments or donations is
| going to be free of a conflict of interest, and in
| Firefox's case Google funds them.
| bloppe wrote:
| Sure, but it matters _why_ Google is funding them. Google
| funds Mozilla in order to keep them afloat as a foil to
| detract from antitrust scrutiny. That 's only credible if
| Google _does not_ exert any kind of pressure over them as
| a condition for that funding. If they did exert that kind
| of pressure, it would completely defeat the purpose of
| funding them in the first place.
|
| So I don't consider that to create a conflict of
| interest.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Mozilla drags its feet on browser improvements to appease
| the overlord.
| darepublic wrote:
| well if you are still gonna browse on chrome don't settle for
| the ublock originless experience.
|
| * 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!
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Use Brave if you want to stick with a Chromium browser. Their
| ad blocker still works great.
| thamer wrote:
| The following CSS equivalent worked for me, using the "Custom
| CSS by Denis" Chrome extension[1]: 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; }
|
| I first tried it with the "User JavaScript and CSS"
| extension, but somehow it didn't seem able to inject CSS on
| YouTube. Even a simple `html { border: 5px solid red; }`
| would not show anything, while I could see it being applied
| immediately with the "Denis" CSS extension.
|
| 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...
| ibejoeb wrote:
| This filter list is the most up-to-date that I've found to hide
| shorts with uBlock Origin:
|
| https://github.com/Harren06/ublock-yt-shorts
| noname120 wrote:
| See here for the other forks:
| https://devnoname120.github.io/useful-
| forks/?repo=gijsdev/ub...
| therein wrote:
| Add this to the list.
|
| 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.
| puttycat wrote:
| The YouTube abominations keep piling up: Vertical videos on a
| desktop, endless ads (thanks to the Chrome manifest change that
| disables decent adblockers), useless feed.
|
| I highly recommend installing an extension that hides the home
| feed and sidebar recommendations, which at least makes YT non-
| distracting again.
| wsc981 wrote:
| I think in (South-East) Asia the people like vertical videos
| for some reason. Seems how many people record videos on their
| phones - at least in Thailand.
| michaelteter wrote:
| I don't have the numbers, but I'm pretty sure that Asia (lots
| of people) use phones as their primary (sole, even) device.
|
| 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 :)
| soylentcola wrote:
| > shoot in whatever orientation fits the content or
| situation best.
|
| 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.
| cardanome wrote:
| The most infuriating thing is that there is no technical
| reason for vertical filming sucking so much.
|
| 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.
| duped wrote:
| There's a good chunk of the world whose only device to
| interact with the internet is a smart phone or tablet
| GuB-42 wrote:
| For most developing and recently developed countries, the
| gateway to modern technology is the smartphone.
|
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Nothing about using a phone requires users to hold it
| vertically to take video.
| greenchair wrote:
| Asian people like watching vertical videos on a desktop?
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| uBlock Origin lite is V3. And blocks youtube ads
| datax2 wrote:
| I'm not a fan of this trend either. My suspicion is this change
| is to increase scrolling to pump more ad space; it makes sense
| from a business standpoint. But this combined with the Algo
| changes makes it hard to keep coming back looking for new content
| VS just consuming the people/content I know and enjoy.
| adamc wrote:
| Makes sense and yet it doesn't, because the more they degrade
| my experience, the more I turn away from youtube.
| jessyco wrote:
| I wish we could go back; A lot of googles UI/UX is based on the
| next billion users experiences. I'm unsure how much influence
| this has on a day to day design choices they make. My experience
| right now on a 1440p monitor is 5 visible videos, 2 video ads, a
| ton of tags that I can't turn off for finding videos.
|
| 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.
| shanehoban wrote:
| Glad I'm not the only one who noticed and hates this change!
| mmmlinux wrote:
| Doesnt doing this make youtube impressions go up, since they are
| showing you the video with less immediate competition around it.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Fewer thumbnails mean impressions go down
| qoez wrote:
| This https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-remove-
| youtu... and yt-dlp to download things from only subscriptions
| that interest me (and watch later offline) changed my life.
| iMerNibor wrote:
| What gets me the thumbnails are now so big, they're blurry since
| the images need to be stretched to fit now!
|
| The preview is 530x300px on a 1920x1080 screen vs the image shown
| being 336x188px
|
| How this passed any sort of QA is beyond me
| jsheard wrote:
| They clearly need to conserve bandwidth for the most important
| assets - the 12 whole megabytes of Javascript.
| jmb99 wrote:
| Genuine question. I'm assuming that, since YouTube is owned
| by one of the largest tech companies in the world that
| they've optimized their delivered JS to only what is
| necessary to run the page.
|
| 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.
| jsheard wrote:
| Fun fact: Googles own web performance team recommends
| avoiding YouTube embeds because they're so obscenely
| bloated. Placing their <iframe> on a page will pull in
| about 4MB of assets, most of which is Javascript, even if
| the user never plays the video.
|
| https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/performance/th
| i...
|
| YouTubes frontend people just don't care about bloat, even
| when other Googlers are yelling at them to cut it out.
| leptons wrote:
| We lazy-load Youtube iframes, fixes the problem pretty
| easily.
| jsheard wrote:
| Depends on how you do it, loading="lazy" helps a bit, but
| the iframe still gets loaded when it enters the viewport
| even if the user has no intention of watching the video.
| The best approach is to initially show a fake facade of
| the player and only swap in the real iframe after the
| user interacts with it, which is what Google recommends
| doing in that article.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >What on the YouTube home page could possibly require 12MB
| of JS alone?
|
| 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
| titzer wrote:
| Webpages are dumptrucks for every bad feature anyone ever
| thought up and are in a constant state of trying to re-
| framework their way out of the complete mess of utils that
| get shipped by default. Need a gadget that implements eye
| tracking via sidechannels? Yeah, they got that. And then
| justify that with "analytics" or anti-fraud and abuse, and
| no "click jacking" or whatever crap, and roll it times
| 1000.
| jsheard wrote:
| > Assuming 60 characters per line, that's 200k lines of
| code?
|
| 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.
| ars wrote:
| That's the full YouTube player - you were assuming it just
| has the code for the homepage, but actually it gets the
| entire player right at the start.
| bryanhogan wrote:
| The perfect oppurtunity for more AI, image upscaling! /s
|
| 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.
| cucubeleza wrote:
| they want more money, less videos more ads, probably the UX/UI
| team was against it but you know how those big techs are
| charlesabarnes wrote:
| I've recently noticed that the thumbnails on the homepage are
| higher resolution than the thumbnails on the subscriptions page
| sd9 wrote:
| Same for me. How strange.
| geuis wrote:
| Their mobile site is also terrible. It's like the designers
| forgot that people watch videos in landscape mode. For example,
| comments won't load unless you rotate to portrait mode first. I
| mean, come on.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Mobile web? On the Android app you can definitely put the
| comments side-by-side with a landscape video.
| meroes wrote:
| Haha so it's not just me with that issue
| calf wrote:
| Their TV app changed grid layout of playlists to list that
| scrolls down so slowly, this makes my 100+ video playlist
| useless! Argh.
| andypants wrote:
| Also when clicking from a search result to a video, it replaces
| the url instead of pushing to navigation history. So when I
| click into a video and try to go back, it takes me to the
| homepage instead of the search results! It only happens on
| mobile!
| dmart wrote:
| My guess would be that this is in support of the preview hover
| feature. For a while now, you can watch an entire video just by
| hovering over it, complete with captions, scrubbing and audio.
| This wouldn't be very useful if the thumbnails were still tiny
| like in the past. Personally, I like this feature and don't often
| need to look at tons of thumbnails at once, but to each their
| own.
| voytec wrote:
| FYI: YouTube provides RSS feed for every channel. The URL is as
| follows:
| https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID
|
| And without downloading with yt-dlp, videos can be watched from
| youtube-nocookie.com in full-window mode (no distractions) under:
| https://cinemaphile.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID
| entropie wrote:
| You can use the wonderful mpv player to view videos directly
| from a yt-url (yt-dlp backend).
| avipars wrote:
| i made a tool to extract the rss feed from a channel too!
|
| https://shorts.aviparshan.com/rss-feed
| eddyg wrote:
| The _excellent_ "Play"(1) app (available for iOS, macOS, Apple
| TV and Vision Pro) can also use these feeds, plus give you the
| ability to conveniently save other videos to "watch later".
| Highly recommended!
|
| (1) https://marcosatanaka.com/
| grobibi wrote:
| In addition to the main purchase price, this app charges
| 3.99/month for: -following channels -following playlists
| -removing shorts and many more features on top of those.
| microflash wrote:
| There's open source Unwatched[1] if you want something for
| free.
|
| [1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unwatched-for-
| youtube/id647728...
| Fiely wrote:
| In the past several months, I've moved to using an RSS Reader +
| Watch Later Playlist + DF Tube extension (you could use
| whatever to nuke parts of the UI you dislike). This has greatly
| improved how I use YouTube. This method allows me to be
| significantly more intentional with what I'm watching and how
| much time I'm spending. The only frustrating part is that YT
| shorts still come through RSS, but they are much easier to
| avoid in a reader than YT's UI.
| crtasm wrote:
| You can change the first 4 characters of the channel ID to
| UULF to only get "Videos" (no shorts)
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71192605/how-do-i-get-
| yo...
| Fiely wrote:
| This is very useful, thank you for sharing.
| Arnavion wrote:
| Doesn't seem to work for any of the ~50 URLs I tried with.
| Eg:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCS0N5b
| a...
|
| ... works but:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UULFS0N
| 5...
|
| ... is 404.
|
| I'm guessing it's only a feature of playlist URLs which
| that SO answer is about, not RSS feed URLs.
| AlfredBarnes wrote:
| I used this to make a Youtube viewer "application" that lists
| my subscriptions most recent videos, and i can watch them when
| i get a chance. Just a list. no thumbnails, no click bait, no
| random algorithm recommendations, just stuff i want to watch.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Pssst! Keep this on the down-low or they'll take all of this
| away from us. >smile<
|
| Seriously, though, w/o RSS feeds Youtube would be completely
| useless to me. I keep waiting for Google to kill them.
| maxglute wrote:
| Can also use google sheet + app scripts + youtube api to add
| new videos from channels in playlists. Sheet can trigger every
| few hours to keep things up to date.
|
| 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.
| brendanfinan wrote:
| YouTube is removing videos and moving to Shorts-only in a couple
| months, so this shouldn't be an issue for long
| herpdyderp wrote:
| What does this mean? Does this mean that there will be no more
| video UI (only the shorts UI)? Does this mean that only shorts
| will show up on the homepage? etc. (Also a source would be
| nice.)
| luxurytent wrote:
| I think OP is being sarcastic, throwing a hint to how popular
| TikTok (and thus short videos) are over long form content
| akulkar4 wrote:
| Parent comment needs a /s.
| enlyth wrote:
| Does it though? It's blatantly obvious sarcasm
| markus_zhang wrote:
| OK finally something to cute my addiction.
| enlyth wrote:
| The most placebo button I've ever seen is that "Don't show
| Shorts" where it says something like "We'll show you less
| Shorts" and then they reappear 30 minutes later
|
| I guess every content platform is moving to forcefully shoving
| slop into your face now
| jaydenmilne wrote:
| YouTube should just show ads, that's what makes money anyway
| right?
|
| Cable TV figured this out a long time ago.
| insin wrote:
| I make an extension which lets you fix this to your liking
| (choose the minimum number of videos you want per row, while also
| fixing the spacing issues overriding the underlying --ytd-rich-
| grid-items-per-row CSS variable causes), plus many, many more
| annoyances and what I felt were missing options and features for
| YouTube, like being able to completely hide Shorts:
|
| 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:
|
| https://imgur.com/LUnpz9e
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I actually didn't notice until recently. Guess I'm also in the
| test group.
|
| 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.
| Twirrim wrote:
| As a subscriber, I get 6 algorithm suggested videos (even split
| 50/50 on subscribed vs suggested).
|
| 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.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Let's not forget 'shorts' Yes, you can hide them, but they will
| be back there the next session.
| sailfast wrote:
| So who is building their competitor? Any shot in hell at this
| because of their huge library?
| SmartestUnknown wrote:
| I think it is not just the library but the huge costs
| associated with storage, encoding and bandwidth. YouTube has
| innovated significantly to make it as cheap as possible to run
| such a service and it is likely that it would take an enormous
| amount of money for any competitor to replicate it.
|
| (Disclaimer: I work at Google but no connection to YouTube)
| bluGill wrote:
| Peertube is trying. There are a bunch of different servers with
| some interesting content.
|
| 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.
| boramalper wrote:
| I wish PeerTube had a "flagship" instance like
| mastodon.social [0] for Mastodon or lemmy.world [1] for
| Lemmy. The lack of a generalist instance with open sign-ups
| hinders the adoption.
|
| [0] https://mastodon.social/
|
| [1] https://lemmy.world/
| slater wrote:
| of course there are competitors, but they're either pay-to-play
| (Vimeo?), or overrun with fash or fash-adjacent content
| (Rumble, etc.)
| bobsmooth wrote:
| There is no competitor. Video hosting is too expensive.
| lukaslalinsky wrote:
| The nastiest trick for me is that no matter how times I tell
| YouTube not to show me shorts on the home page, they always sneak
| back in.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Yeah, they changed it to "stop showing as often". I love the
| gaslighting forced features, so much...
| hansvm wrote:
| The "fix" I've seen them testing is changing the wording to
| "show less shorts."
| Starlevel004 wrote:
| It used to be 12 videos until about a year ago. If you zoom in
| and out the thumbnails don't change size!
|
| 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!
| zippergz wrote:
| Yes, this search thing is absolutely infuriating.
| codedokode wrote:
| They think that people are idiots and unable to deal with
| more that 3 search results. Or maybe they think their search
| is so good that the wanted video is always within those 3.
| subscribed wrote:
| No, they promote algorithmic "results" because they care
| about money from ads.
| swatcoder wrote:
| > 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.
| titzer wrote:
| > is actually just a workaround Google suffers through in the
| YouTube product.
|
| 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.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| If people stop watching, advertisers will not be happy
|
| 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
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| I think we need to be careful with the language like
| "this is what the users want" when something along the
| lines of "this is what triggers of pattern of compulsive
| behavior in users" is closer to the truth
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| Outside of legislation, there isn't a way to make a
| distinction. Corporations and most individuals are going
| to do whatever is legally permissible in order to
| maximize revenue.
|
| 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.
| falcor84 wrote:
| As for a business model, I think that we should pay
| creators, either directly e.g. via Patreon, or slightly
| indirectly via smaller creator-led platforms like Nebula.
| slater wrote:
| I just wish they'd fix the "sort by date" bug in search. I
| search for something, it gives me endless results. If I then
| choose to sort by upload date, whoopsie, no results found!
| seafoamteal wrote:
| Zooming out actually makes the thumbnails bigger, because they
| grow to fill the space ceded by the rest of the UI. Just
| incredible design all the way through.
| zoogeny wrote:
| > You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant
| and unrelated algorithmic recommendations
|
| 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.
| pianom4n wrote:
| The dummy "loading" grey boxes it shows are still this size.
| Such a great "user experience."
| mirrorlake wrote:
| I quite like the 2x3 grid of videos. No complaints, actually.
| CryZe wrote:
| It's 1.5x3 if you have a 21:9 screen. It's so bad.
| mirrorlake wrote:
| Yeah, the Steam HW survey shows that 16:9 resolutions form a
| majority (60%+) of their users with 1080p + 4K, so it makes
| sense as a default design choice for a company that only
| wants to target one ratio.
|
| As a former user of 16:10, I feel your pain, though.
| vinnymac wrote:
| I can't speak for the desktop experience lately, but just last
| weekend I opened the YouTube app on iOS to this peak user
| experience:
|
| https://files.catbox.moe/vzo65c.JPG
| cucubeleza wrote:
| well at least was funny
| gh0stcat wrote:
| This reminds me of Pinterest, a platform I used to love for
| finding art and inspirational content as an artist myself.
| Without ad blockers, I would say 1/3 to 1/2 of all "pins" or
| images are actually ads, some of which are the nefarious
| "shopping" ads which look just like images and when clicked, take
| you directly to the sellers site. With the ad blocker, it is full
| of weird holes that just make the page look terrible. It feels
| honestly terrible as a consumer to have the experience degraded
| this much, its like having a storefront and half of the items on
| display are actually garbage you need to toss aside. And
| unfortunately there isn't an obvious better choice or option.
| Also don't even get me started on the scammy ads that are ai
| generated images or just all of the pins that are ai generated
| slop...
| rozab wrote:
| For a long time the grid of videos on the homepage has been
| slightly misaligned. I imagine the different rows belong to
| different teams. This means you can't hover your mouse in the
| gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos
| autoplaying when moused over.
|
| 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
| kotaKat wrote:
| THIS. THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS.
|
| 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.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| It's even worse on mobile. You don't even need to hover for
| an autoplay video to show in your history.
| jtbayly wrote:
| I can't think of other examples, but this exact problem is a
| constant frustration for me on multiple sites. I can't scroll
| with my cursor on the page without crap happening that I
| don't want to happen.
|
| 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.
| krisoft wrote:
| > I can't scroll with my cursor on the page without crap
| happening that I don't want to happen.
|
| 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!
| eastbound wrote:
| Couple this with the no-bezel iPhones, and there is no
| way to hold your phone without touching the screen and
| accelerating the video (or clicking on ads).
| s3p wrote:
| This may be a dumb question, but when you have video doing
| autoplay (as in the video starts playing while you're
| scrolling looking at multiple videos - you haven't clicked on
| one), does it show up in your watch history?
| magackame wrote:
| Just tested. If you hover for 10s+ then it does get added
| to your watch history.
|
| 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?
| jaymzcampbell wrote:
| This drives me absolutely nuts on Netflix too, perhaps more
| so.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| You can just... turn it off:
| https://www.youtube.com/account_playback
|
| 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.
| SupremumLimit wrote:
| It just turns itself back on in a couple of weeks. Dark
| patterns ahoy.
| saratogacx wrote:
| Put your mouse up in the header on or near the scrollbar,
| scrolling will flow below to the video list.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| > This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between
| columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when
| moused over
|
| 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.
| Levitating wrote:
| > It resets itself every 15 days or so
|
| Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It seems to do that all the time. Try hiding YouTube shorts
| and they just come back.
| nobodywasishere wrote:
| If you turn off watch history it completely disables
| shorts as a whole (with no recommendations on the
| homepage as a side effect, but one I'm willing to live
| with). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795204
| nullc wrote:
| The no recommendations at all sure feels like malicious
| compliance with California privacy law.
|
| 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.
| OJFord wrote:
| Yup yup yup. If you actually care about recommending
| things I'll want to watch, my subscriptions list is the
| strongest signal there is _anyway_ , surely!
| xp84 wrote:
| The word "want" is the key there -- they have zero
| interest in what you 'want' to watch, they have every
| interest in what will compel you to watch for the longest
| time! Maybe a certain person wants to watch a few
| 2-minute cute cat videos, and subscribe to those
| exclusively. But research showed Google that those
| people's watch minutes per day can be tripled if you fill
| their homepage with "Trump did WHAT?" videos (or whatever
| effectively baits their rage, makes them more afraid, or
| stokes some addiction or anxiety).
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Short term yes, but long term it turns people away from
| YouTube.
|
| 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...
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Gambling has been around forever. Hyper aggressive slot
| machines do nothing to dissuade addicts, and dark
| patterns on the web are the same. They are trying to
| build addiction, and addiction doesn't care that
| something hurts to do, _you need it_.
|
| 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.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| This is what I've done - YouTube is a much better place
| now.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I love how passive aggressive the home page becomes: it
| momentarily displays a grid of thumbnails, then erases
| them and says, "Your watch history is off. You can change
| your setting at any time to get the latest videos
| tailored to you" with a button to do that.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| If you are not being sarcastic, yes, it happens all the
| time. Probably to maximize whatever metric they're
| measuring.
|
| I'm fearing the day they'll just remove that toggle for
| good.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| > 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.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Constantly. They also keep resetting the settings to not
| show shorts or video games in the feed.
|
| 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.
| shrx wrote:
| First it was "hide shorts".
|
| Then it was "hide shorts for X days" (I think 30?).
|
| Now it is "show fewer shorts".
| cobbaut wrote:
| There is an 'unhook' add-on for Firefox that blocks all
| shorts forever. Highly recommended.
| acaloiar wrote:
| Those who disable watch history probably know this, but
| others probably don't -- when you disable watch history
| your "subscriptions" page effectively becomes your home
| page. And on your subscriptions page, shorts cannot be
| removed like on the actual home page. So if you disable
| watch history, you implicitly must enable shorts.
|
| Like a relative commentor said -- a product manager on
| the "Shorts" team is doing a helluva job boosting their
| team's stats.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| > Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?
|
| 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.
| eatbitseveryday wrote:
| Many websites do this. Facebook resets your feed sorting
| preferences, as does LinkedIn (sort by Recent, then refresh
| the page, it will be Top again).
| walt_grata wrote:
| I used to have a cronjob to change them to what I want
| daily. Only worked for sites with an API, but was better
| than the user hostile "we know your preferences better
| than you" garbage.
| RankingMember wrote:
| See also: Spotify's "repeat" functionality. I turn it off
| whenever I see it on, but somehow it's always back on
| within a few days.
| driverdan wrote:
| In addition to what others said, they gaslight users by
| regularly resetting blocked accounts from recommendations.
| They also lose your play history after a while and start
| showing old videos you've watched as never been viewed.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| You can also set this in your browser with the _reduce
| motion_ parameter.
|
| Absolutely no sites, including YouTube, honour the parameter.
| But you can at least tell the site that you'd prefer it
| another way.
| mubou wrote:
| > You can also set this in your browser with the _reduce
| motion_ parameter.
|
| 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.
| 47282847 wrote:
| Firefox: open about:config and add
| ui.prefersReducedMotion as a Number and set it to 0 (no)
| or 1 (yes) to override the OS setting.
|
| Chrome: command line switch:
|
| --force-prefers-reduced-motion --force-prefers-no-
| reduced-motion
| mubou wrote:
| Ohh!! Thanks so much for this, I greatly appreciate it.
| delecti wrote:
| That setting _can_ be fairly sticky. Mine has stayed off
| since I initially disabled it, shortly after they added the
| "feature". I have no idea why it's not sticky for you. Maybe
| they fuck with me less because I have premium?
| lolinder wrote:
| I don't have premium and it's sticky for me but only on a
| single computer, I have to reset it if I switch computers
| or browsers. Same with dark mode. So maybe it's stored as a
| cookie and they wipe their cookies?
| wpm wrote:
| Yes, it's stored client-side in a cookie.
|
| 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.
| malfist wrote:
| YouTube is a small and scrapy startup. Sometimes they
| have to move fast and break things
| tredre3 wrote:
| > It resets itself every 15 days or so, but at least one can
| have some peace in the meantime.
|
| 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.
| al_borland wrote:
| > It resets itself every 15 days or so
|
| 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?
| hbn wrote:
| I set that a long time ago and it never disabled. Maybe
| something with your browser?
| xnzakg wrote:
| Hmm, on one hand I agree that autoplaying videos should be
| illegal but on the other hand the clickbaitiness of YouTube
| thumbnails has reached a point where it's almost better. (cue
| deArrow comment)
| tuetuopay wrote:
| Why I do agree, the autoplay is a distraction preventing me
| from reading the video title and which channel posted it.
| Also, the clickbaitiness ends up being a feature for me: they
| have a specific "style" that's recognizable almost
| immediatly. A bit like AI-generated images, that have some
| eerie feeling to them. This way, I know I don't want to watch
| them.
| zootboy wrote:
| I know this is just a weird workaround, but you can put your
| mouse cursor on top of the scroll bar. The scroll wheel still
| works like normal there (at least in my tests on Linux /
| Firefox).
| karmakaze wrote:
| I never noticed that weird space between videos not stopping
| autoplay--I always just kept moving my mouse around until it
| stopped. You can start by entering the thumbnail space, but to
| stop it you have to enter another thumbnail space or get very
| close to it--the main spacing between won't stop autoplay.
| There's hysteresis between the start/stop edges.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| This bugged me so much and yet I ended up noticing a simple
| workaround: keep the mouse in the top bar where the search box
| is.
|
| 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.
| matsemann wrote:
| What kills me with the autoplay (at least on mobile), is that
| the video continues from where it was when you click it. But
| the autoplay had no sound, and I probably didn't watch it
| closely. So I always have to scroll back to the beginning, as
| I've just now been put in the middle of a sentence a bit into
| the video. Especially for channels which actually gets straight
| to the point (like Numberphile) it's annoying. Such a stupid
| design.
|
| 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.
| AlfredBarnes wrote:
| Also if you do watch shorts, they are ALL added to your liked
| Videos.
| toxik wrote:
| Uh no they're not
|
| It's easy to like them by accident though
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Triggering autoplay by accidentally hovering does add
| videos to your history though, which is annoying.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| Mobile? There's also another sneaky piece of crap Google
| pulls - even if you're a Premium user and set your video
| preferences to high quality, they only play videos for you at
| 480p, even though higher resolutions up to 4k are all
| available.
|
| 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.
| toxik wrote:
| I get "premium 1080p" most of the time, but yeah not being
| able to set it directly is annoying.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| This is also an issue on desktop web. YT will arbitrarily
| change the quality/resolution but doesn't update the
| selector displayed in the UI. So for every single video I
| have to select 4K just in case YT might be serving it at
| 1080p or some other resolution even though it displays "4K"
| on the UI element.
|
| 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.
| odo1242 wrote:
| Actually, when I uploaded stuff on YouTube I'd notice
| sometimes that it was best to, even if the source footage
| was 1080p, upscale / upload it at 4k or 8k resolution so
| that people with sufficiently good internet could view it
| without as much compression. (In fact, when the original
| video uploaded is upscaled to 4k, even the 1080p version
| of the final video looks closer to the source footage)
|
| 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
| Gracana wrote:
| This definitely works. I've uploaded 720p drone footage
| (which already looked pretty crappy), and youtube
| avc1-encodes it with low bandwidth settings. The video
| looks like absolute garbage. If I upscale it to 2k (it
| has to be above HD for this to work), youtube will
| vp09-encode it _and_ use a significantly higher bitrate,
| and the resulting video retains most of the original
| detail. I consider this a requirement for all of my
| uploads.
| Nathan2055 wrote:
| The desktop issue was an intentional change that happened
| sometime in like 2017 or so.
|
| 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.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| > 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'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.)
| debugnik wrote:
| > The idea is that [...] a few seconds later the new
| buffer hits and you jump up to the new quality level.
|
| 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.
| Karsteski wrote:
| This shit was one of the reasons I stopped paying for
| YouTube premium and went back to aggressively blocking all
| ads. You try to give them money and they spit in your face
| regardless.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| I'm using Revanced - it removes a lot of shit like this.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| I have Premium and I always get a high resolution, if my
| connection allows for it.
| veloxo wrote:
| YouTube Auto-HD browser extension:
| https://github.com/avi12/youtube-auto-hd?tab=readme-ov-
| file#...
| numpad0 wrote:
| That is what paperclip maximization does to your life. Stupid
| designs frustrate you more and make you engage more.
|
| They're making slot machines, effectively.
| malfist wrote:
| All of social media is carefully tuned Skinner boxes. Even
| hacker news (maybe not as carefully)
| mvdtnz wrote:
| What's even more insane is that if you hover a video for 5
| seconds it thinks you "watched" it and it goes into your
| watch history.
| joezydeco wrote:
| Does the creator get credit for that? I've got a few
| friends that need a few million views and I could easily
| write a mouse driver to take care of that.
| cannonpalms wrote:
| It would probably hurt more than help, by way of
| retention metrics.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I found this "feature" triggers on videos I didn't even
| hover the mouse over.
| morsch wrote:
| YMMV. If I trigger autoplay, it's almost always on purpose,
| and I tend to read the subtitles. Jumping into the video
| right where I was works well for me! Losing my position would
| be very annoying.
| adolph wrote:
| Also you can preview the video without taking an ad hit.
| Clearly the stable genius behind previews has left some
| revenue on the table.
| ggus wrote:
| My YT mobile pet peeve is that when you toggle the captions,
| an useless "Subtitles/CC Turned ON" is shown for 5 seconds..
| OVER THE CAPTIONS!
|
| Most useless message ever, placed exactly where you do not
| want it to be.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| I can never tell if the toggle is CC on or off until I wait
| and see captions or realize nobody has talked yet.
| teekert wrote:
| YouTube is now full screen.
| kevincox wrote:
| I call these features "dead birds" because they remind me of
| gifts that an outdoor cat will leave on your doorstep. They
| took quite the effort to do and were made with good
| intention, but ultimately I don't want them.
| PeeMcGee wrote:
| Thank you for that.
| behringer wrote:
| Careful there are programmers here watching. Pretend to
| like the bird.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Hissssss!
| crm9125 wrote:
| Good thing they're fucking blind I guess.
| malfist wrote:
| I highly recommend uninstalling the YouTube app and just
| using the browser. It has all the same features and it
| actually works reliability. And at least Firefox lets you
| keep paying a video without keeping the screen up
| mrighele wrote:
| Why do you even need _different teams_ for the homepage ?
|
| 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)
| stavros wrote:
| Because everyone always runs A/B tests to decide whether to
| add a feature, but never runs them to decide whether to
| remove one.
| OJFord wrote:
| To be fair you've started to answer it yourself: I'd bet
| 'search' is at least one team.
| afiori wrote:
| The homepage has many similarities to a landing page /
| marketing funnel.
| wijwp wrote:
| > and a list of videos
|
| Are we just going to gloss over this like the list of videos
| is random? haha
| robertoandred wrote:
| Generating a list of video IDs is different from rendering
| them on the page.
| wijwp wrote:
| Well at least now I've got you up to 2 teams being
| acceptable :)
| anoldperson wrote:
| Being deliberately obtuse, or ignoring the context?
| mrighele wrote:
| Of course no, the search is handled by a different team,
| but does that team also work on the frontend ? I would
| expect them to have a quite different set of skills from
| those that do frontend work, at least at Google's size.
|
| And if not the case, I would expect at least one team to be
| responsible for the final result
| jerf wrote:
| "Why do you even need _different teams_ for the homepage ?"
|
| 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.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| I'm glad I'm not the only one who gets annoyed by these
| details.
| tedunangst wrote:
| I always open videos in new tabs and they start from the
| beginning.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| > This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between
| columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when
| moused over.
|
| 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.
| xattt wrote:
| > 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.
|
| If anything, I feel like that this is by design to
| hyperstimulate their core audience seeking instant
| gratification.
| n2d4 wrote:
| Which ones are misaligned? At least the ones shown to me are
| perfectly aligned on my computer (both Safari and Chrome on a
| Mac).
|
| 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
| insin wrote:
| It's probably an adblocker, I explained why they get
| misaligned ([is-in-first-column] attribute adding extra
| margin) if a video gets hidden and the rest flow to fill in
| its place here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43848061
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| This bit of information makes the entire thread hilarious
| to read.
|
| 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.
| insin wrote:
| Hehe, you need to be a big enough nerd to know to do this
| when you see it's misaligned:
|
| https://github.com/insin/control-panel-for-
| youtube/blob/cf18...
| graynk wrote:
| You can disable autoplay. Both on desktop and on mobile (not
| sure about TVs)
|
| It's buried in the settings but it's there.
| efitz wrote:
| If you didn't look away fast enough then they want to count it
| as a view so they can profit.
| burnte wrote:
| The video grid is mind boggling now, they keep making the
| thumbnails bigger, and now they don't even show two rows of 3,
| it's a row of 3 then a row of 3 but with only 2 links! There's
| a giant blank box for no reason!
|
| 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!
| lolinder wrote:
| Do you have an ad blocker? I've always seen blank boxes in
| the spots where ads would have gone.
| curiousgal wrote:
| > _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._
|
| Wait what? Thumbnails are useless. DeArrow has been god sent.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| NewPipe is the better app by far in terms of usability, despite
| having no budget in comparison. It's impressive how far you can
| get by just not adding bs
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| > you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while
| you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over
|
| 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.
| ardit33 wrote:
| I personally love the autoplay (on hovering), as often I just
| want to see some part of the video without having to click on
| it and see a bunch of ads before any playback.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I noticed this exact same thing! I looked in every menu for the
| setting to change it back. Nothing.
| InMice wrote:
| Thank you for writing this post! I opened youtube a few days ago
| to this as well. On a 24" 1440p monitor its ridiculous. It's
| incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of
| dollars per year and the result is changes like this. Thank you
| again for writing this post. After searching it seems like
| they've been "testing" this in segments for a while now.
|
| 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.
| drewbeck wrote:
| "It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid
| millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like
| this."
|
| 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.
| pwg wrote:
| Most likely what happened is some MBA ran a short A/B test of
| smaller vs. bigger video thumbnails, and the A/B results showed
| more "engagement" with the larger size thumbs, and so, of
| course, to meet his/her performance goals, the MBA had the page
| altered to the version that showed "more engagement".
| cowsup wrote:
| I think it also helps them figure out which videos keep
| people on YouTube longer. If I scroll to a section of the
| page that has 6 videos, and I stare at them for 10 seconds,
| then scroll down, they'll know that one or two of those
| videos must have been somewhat interesting. But if I stare at
| 6 videos, then scroll away 2 seconds later, it knows that
| nothing in that batch was worthwhile.
|
| The fewer videos they have in focus at a time, the more
| accurate their algorithms can be.
| htx80nerd wrote:
| >It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid
| millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like
| this.
|
| 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.
| gorbachev wrote:
| You assume the UX team has any say in any of this.
|
| 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.
| MyFedora wrote:
| I think this change came from the UX team.
|
| 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...
| Root_Denied wrote:
| It's infuriating that a plugin/extension is needed to bring
| back what should be the a setting, if not the default, in the
| UI for this.
| gtowey wrote:
| This is inevitable when a company has a revenue model where
| they claim to serve both users and advertisers. The wants of
| each will always be diametrically opposed. The customer with
| the deepest pockets always wins, which are the advertisers.
|
| 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.
| p3rls wrote:
| It's not enough to have hindustantimes.com articles for local
| American news on google-- even YouTube must be sacrificed. The
| rivers of enshittification must flow.
| the_other wrote:
| Vote with your attention.
| dcchambers wrote:
| I am BEGGING someone, anyone at Google/YouTube to let me
| permanently disable YouTube Shorts.
|
| 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.
| timbit42 wrote:
| Have you looked at the "YouTube-shorts block" add-on?
| louthy wrote:
| Not the OP, but I want to turn off Shorts too. I do most of
| my youtube access via Apple TV -- where Shorts are
| particularly annoying when scrolling through Subscriptions --
| so this wouldn't be an option.
|
| It just needs to be a preference!
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Not the OP, but I have given up on trusting low-audience
| browser extensions. Too many stories of the author selling
| out and injecting analytics/malware into the product.
| xmprt wrote:
| What I've been doing is using high audience extensions
| (like Tampermonkey) and getting ChatGPT to write a script
| for it which does what I need it to. Much more effective
| and trustworthy than relying on another extension
| developer. If Tampermonkey can't do it then I'll just write
| the entire extension on my own and load it as a developer
| extension.
| crtasm wrote:
| There's also lots of userscripts available on
| https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts?q=youtube+shorts
|
| Greasyfork restricts what 3rd party libraries can be
| pulled in + you have the option of disabling automatic
| updates in your userscript manager.
| skyyler wrote:
| 300k users is low-audience to you?
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Unless it is a top-10 app, it is a no go. The top
| applications have millions of users.
|
| 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.
| skyyler wrote:
| I understand being cautious, but this extension is
| featured in the chrome store and has quite a few users
| and only requests access to youtube sites.
|
| Not exactly fly-by-night...
| louthy wrote:
| > I am BEGGING someone, anyone at Google/YouTube to let me
| permanently disable YouTube Shorts.
|
| Absolutely this! I was looking to see if it was an option
| yesterday. Annoyingly not :/
| Maken wrote:
| But how else are they going to compete with TikTok?
| codedokode wrote:
| I notice that many short videos seem to be simply cuts from
| longer videos posted to promote them. So they were not made
| for short video section and just try to misuse short videos
| to increase long video visibility.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| There is now a _huge_ industry of solo editors who spam
| YouTubers advertising "increasing revenue by re-using the
| content you already made!"
|
| 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!"
| edm0nd wrote:
| Yeah there are even platforms that simply let you upload
| a long form video and it will use "AI" to churn out 5-10
| short form videos from it.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| I did watch a few shorts out of curiosity and it seems
| they're just "stream clips" most of the time
| aargh_aargh wrote:
| But there's no way to click from the short to the long
| video. I'd like to do that. It's someone else doing the
| cuts, presumably for their own benefit, rather than to
| promote the original.
| input_sh wrote:
| Shorts creators _can_ link back to the full video,
| assuming both are posted on the same channel. You can 't
| link to _someone else 's_ video though.
|
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| Sorry bro. They get paid to propagandize you. No amount of
| complaining will change that.
|
| Remember, with normal videos you (primarily) decide what to
| watch, but in shorts, you decide what not to watch.
| ysavir wrote:
| The games, too. Clicking to hide them hides them for at most 30
| days, then you have to tell them once more that it's of no
| interest.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| there are games on youtube now? isn't that a bit of a
| security risk?
| bryanhogan wrote:
| I'm happy with the extensions that I've been using, makes using
| YouTube much better and protects me from the wonderful world of
| "Shorts".
| scubbo wrote:
| Would you share those extensions so that other people can
| join you in this good situation?
| Jensson wrote:
| I use youtube shorts block, it turns shorts videos into
| normal videos so you can still view them if you like, just
| using the normal players with comments etc.
|
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-shorts-
| bloc...
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| Use the unhook extension, and on mobile revanced
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| The unhook extension can get rid of them.
|
| It also gets rid of that nonsense they did to the search page.
| dcchambers wrote:
| Works for the website but not the mobile app (where shorts
| are pushed even harder).
| climb_stealth wrote:
| It's funny/sad how even firefox is making it worse now. I
| tend to browse youtube in firefox because the youtube app
| is such a pain, and doesn't have tabs and other niceties.
| And then only view individual videos in the app because the
| player works better and it's nicer to interact with
| comments.
|
| 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_
| zppln wrote:
| So much this. They haven't even paywalled it behind Premium.
| They know they're dealing crack. Such a disgusting company.
| pier25 wrote:
| Same.
|
| 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.
| AwaAwa wrote:
| > half the results are irrelevant
|
| Better than the results on google these days, so YT is at
| least doing better.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| They are fucking up the product that they are dominating a
| market with in order to be an also-ran in another market
| that's hot. It's Windows 8 all over again.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Google is the Microsoft of today.
| dylan604 wrote:
| My fave is where something clearly has been cropped from a
| 16:9 source to fit the portrait mode.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| As a recommendations engineer I've never been that impressed
| with YouTube, I think they cribbed the YouTube interface from
|
| 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.
| duped wrote:
| What I don't understand is why YouTube penalizes creators for
| creating short "traditional" videos yet also penalizes them if
| they aren't creating shorts.
|
| I mean, I do know, it's ads and the attention economy, but
| still. Pick a lane. This is why I pay for Nebula.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I love short form video content, but I don't want it from
| YouTube. And if YouTube feels they need to have it to be
| competitive then don't put it on my desktop.
|
| EDIT: I said "do put it on my desktop" -- I meant to write
| "DON"T put it on my desktop".
| mopsi wrote:
| On Firefox, you can get rid of Shorts with _Enhancer for
| Youtube_ extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-...
| niels8472 wrote:
| I used ublock origin remove it from the page.
| nobodywasishere wrote:
| You can disable watch history on your account, which completely
| disables it. No need to install any extension (which may not
| work on all your devices)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795204
| vault wrote:
| Not sure what you mean with "completely disables it". I have
| watch history disabled and still see shorts in search results
| or subscriptions results
| https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
| ryandrake wrote:
| Turning off Watch History only disables shorts on the main
| page, not in search results or the side-bar. It's a good
| start but incomplete solution.
| nobodywasishere wrote:
| If you click on one though and go to swipe (unless it's in
| your subscriptions) it doesn't allow you to "scroll". You
| can watch them when necessary but it's impossible to get
| sucked into an infinite feed.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| It's not complete but it does limit them quite a bit
| veqz wrote:
| Just block the html elements which show YouTube shorts? Use
| ublock, select, and block.
| oceanhaiyang wrote:
| Ublock origin allows you to block any part of a page. Solved!
| sheepdestroyer wrote:
| If it still works for you, it's because you've temporarily
| workarounded its automatic disablement, and that won't last
| much longer...
| film42 wrote:
| Same. Shorts are actually a great product in terms of capturing
| attention, but I don't want them on youtube. I hear someone
| from the back shouting, "you're not the customer, you're the
| product!" but I pay for youtube premium... that makes me the
| customer; and I pay for the long-form content without ads! But
| 50% of Youtube shorts are just ads or product marketing. I
| never feel good after going on a youtube shorts binge. Please,
| youtube, let me turn it off.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| You're still the product. Paying to remove ads doesn't change
| this. You're still being tracked. Unless something has
| changed recently, you're still being recommended videos.
| sapiogram wrote:
| No, I think Youtube really is the product. With Premium,
| you don't see any ads (at least the ones Youtube makes
| money from), and there's no way "tracking" makes them
| anywhere near as much money as a simple premium
| subscription.
| Zambyte wrote:
| > and there's no way "tracking" makes them anywhere near
| as much money as a simple premium subscription.
|
| Who places ads everywhere else on the web?
| stuaxo wrote:
| I am so done "capturing attention" it's ruined the internet.
| leptons wrote:
| I miss the internet of 1991. It really all went downhill
| fast once ads started getting involved.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I have seen an article somewhere they are not even good for
| marketing.
|
| 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.
| fsckboy wrote:
| all they show you is a thumbnail, so the shortness is not
| capturing your attention, the provocative picture is
| nullc wrote:
| > but I pay for youtube premium
|
| I found your error.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I go to TikTok, shorts.
|
| 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.
| nanna wrote:
| I go to HN, text.
|
| Hallelujah.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Waiting for the Show HN browser extension that reformats
| all HN posts to fit into a shorts frame. Then rather than
| just displaying the text, it puts it in an annoying
| animated font. Maybe even adds an AI character to read it
| to you
| withinboredom wrote:
| 4.99 in the app store
| isoprophlex wrote:
| And not to forget god damned linkedin of all place which for
| me now puts shorts-like content in the feed. Convergent
| tiktok-ification.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| its a shame that shorts have taken so much of the market
| share. Our children will never know about jorts
| barbazoo wrote:
| I go to Old Navy, shorts.
| Zambyte wrote:
| I don't see shorts on Bluesky, but I remember seeing
| something about video feeds a while back. Do you use video
| feeds?
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| I guess the likes of Youtube and Facebook are trying
| unsuccessfully to replicate TikTok. This is effort #2 for
| Facebook, which is/was also trying unsuccessfully to
| replicate Youtube with their take on some-attention-span-
| needed videos.
|
| (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.
| jackcooper wrote:
| Summary of the proposed solutions to block YouTube Shorts:
|
| -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
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Or just view all videos via DuckDuckGo
| s3p wrote:
| Thank you so much for this. I hate YT Shorts but never
| thought to look for extensions to block them.
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| Unhook made YouTube actually useful for my friend who has
| ADHD, since it lets you hide all recommendations in front
| page + side bar.
|
| Luckily Google hasn't "manifest away" this type of extensions
| (yet).
| leptons wrote:
| None of these workarounds are available on Chromecast, which
| is where I do almost all of my Youtube watching.
| mrandish wrote:
| I've been running the SmartTube app on my Chromecast (and
| on a Fire TV) for over a year and it's _fantastic_. Of
| course, you 'll need to side load it but once installed
| it'll update itself directly. There are lots of tutorials
| online covering how to side load it on various Android-
| based streaming sticks.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| I have never seen a better youtube client than SmartTube.
| I recently switched from a Shield to an AppleTV 4k and
| the lack of SmartTube is close to a deal breaker. If
| android had a better jellyfin client, I would be back on
| the shield.
| gregorymichael wrote:
| Huge +1. Please.
| diabllicseagull wrote:
| I've been using an Unhook, the extension, and couldn't have
| been happier.
| esolyt wrote:
| Youtube Unhook extension does that and it does a lot more to
| improve Youtube's UI.
| huslage wrote:
| I want something that blocks them from the AppleTV App. Even if
| I did like them, it's so stupid to watch shorts on a TV.
| rsanek wrote:
| >Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to
| emphasize a word or phrase, put _asterisks_ around it and it
| will get italicized.
|
| More guidelines available at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| afavour wrote:
| Are you still using YouTube despite this frustration?
|
| 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.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| I just use freetube most of the time and don't experience
| shorts at all, and if I do I don't notice
| neom wrote:
| This works: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-
| shorts-bloc...
|
| 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
| npteljes wrote:
| Not a chance. YouTube needs shorts so that they can compete
| with TikTok. They HAVE to put it in front of everybody so that
| they can leverage their existing, vast userbase to quickly
| bootstrap such a product. It's a fight for market relevance for
| them. You will most likely not see them let that go.
| amluto wrote:
| Someone may believe this, but it's utter nonsense. The users
| who don't want to see shorts _aren't using TikTok_.
|
| 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.
| npteljes wrote:
| I don't think so. I think users who don't want to see
| shorts, and aren't using TikTok are a minority. Short form
| video is hugely popular. And even if they are not in a
| minority, it doesn't really matter (to YouTube), because
| they are not going anywhere - there is nowhere to go.
|
| 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.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| What's really funny is that I reckon if Youtube's
| persistence finally managed to get me to like short
| content, the first thing I'd probably do is... ditch them
| for TikTok.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My experience is that if you have a population doing some
| activity online it is self-perpetuating
|
| 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
|
| https://www.youtube.com/user/techmoan
| npteljes wrote:
| I was thinking that Shorts is popular, and it seems like it
| is. What I estimates I find put it from half as many users
| as TikTok to on par with TikTok. With regards the flywheel,
| I think that it works better than your example, and I think
| that the existence of the myriad product bundles that we
| see are why. That strategy works so well against
| competitors that sometimes antitrust comes into the
| picture, to break something up that's too encompassing.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Personally, I don't hate Shorts but god I wish that the order
| of Shorts on the homepage would be the same one that you get
| when swiping down.
|
| 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...
| polotics wrote:
| create a new folder, put two files there:
|
| 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
| insin wrote:
| Here's a more comprehensive BYO Shorts-hiding extension which
| uses CSS instead of running JavaScript every time an element
| is added or removed anywhere in the DOM, and also supports
| the mobile version (CSS selectors are extracted from the
| https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube Hide Shorts
| feature)
|
| https://gist.github.com/insin/ef93c7d87b1f97f1c9411e6128d520.
| ..
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| I had to switch to freetube which is a much better experience
| xigoi wrote:
| Use the NewPipe Android app.
| conductr wrote:
| Yes please!!! I too hate Shorts. I hate that I get sucked into
| them in a downward doom scroll even more. I'd love nothing more
| than to completely disable it. But, i think this is also why
| they will never let me.
|
| 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
| EGreg wrote:
| Right here folks we see the consequences of not having open
| source alternatives.
|
| Not your software, not your control.
| unclad5968 wrote:
| If you're on android you can use screenzen. Not sure if they
| have an ios app.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| I cancelled YouTube premium and stopped using YouTube entirely
| because of this
| whiplash451 wrote:
| I'm with you, but unfortunately Youtube is trading you(s) for
| many more zombies in the subway. Stats rule.
| fossuser wrote:
| The annoying bit is similar to reels, shorts are good for
| engagement.
|
| 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.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| So you don't buy Oreos, and think the best way to eat them is
| not to have them in the house. I agree. That's why I don't
| have TikTok on my phone. So why can't I keep YouTube Shorts
| disabled? I'm telling them I don't want it. If I'm the kind
| of person who doesn't keep Oreos in the house to avoid eating
| them, why would I go to a grocery store that insists on
| slipping a pack of Oreos into every third bag of carrots?
| therein wrote:
| It all checks out if you recognize YouTube clearly doesn't
| consider the app and the website to be your turf. You are
| in their home, they have oreos all over the place and they
| will offer it to you over and over again. You'll ask if
| they have water, they'll bring it with a box of oreos.
| You'll ask where the bathroom is, and find an Oreo waiting
| for you by the sink in case you'd like to indulge.
| fossuser wrote:
| This is the correct model.
|
| 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.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| In my analogy, YouTube was the grocery store, not my
| home. I don't think of it as a place that I own, but a
| place that I go shopping for vegetables (educational
| long-form content). I already made the decision not to
| enter the candy store on the same block (TikTok), and
| while I accept that the grocery store sells candy too, I
| would find it intolerable for them to be following me
| around waving Oreos in my face as I browse the vegetable
| aisle, when I keep telling them I don't want Oreos
| because I'm on a diet. In fact they're the ones asking me
| if I want to see candy in the vegetable aisle and I keep
| telling them no.
|
| 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.
| littlekey wrote:
| >find an Oreo waiting for you by the sink in case you'd
| like to indulge.
|
| this is a hilarious image. "ooh, don't mind if i do".
| williamdclt wrote:
| > why can't I keep YouTube Shorts disabled?
|
| > 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
| didip wrote:
| I agree. YouTube Shorts should be a separate product line. The
| short form content is polluting the long form ones.
| guiomie wrote:
| Atleast let me disable shorts on the TV app. I can't scroll
| thru my subscribed channels feed without being spammed with all
| the shorts, this makes content discovery awful and im just not
| using the app as much.
| navigate8310 wrote:
| Please give this https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube a try
| whiplash451 wrote:
| I'm afraid the pressure from tiktok is just too high.
| -__---____-ZXyw wrote:
| I use invidious, and if I can't because it's down or something,
| I use a FF extension called "unhook". I hadn't been on to
| youtube proper in a good few years, but with unhook, I can
| block everything (suggested videos of all kinds, comments,
| etc). I can re-enable comments by clicking on the extension in
| the toolbar and unchecking comments. Easy peasy.
|
| 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.
| undersuit wrote:
| I want Shorts to format properly on my 1440x2560 screen. All
| the interaction controls on hidden off the side of the screen.
| Still have black bars on the left and right of the video too.
|
| 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.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| (sorry for the repost but it's long thread)
|
| This filter list is the most up-to-date that I've found to hide
| shorts with uBlock Origin:
|
| https://github.com/Harren06/ublock-yt-shorts
| maxglute wrote:
| They've increased shorts length to >60s so now it's blending in
| with 2-3 minute long videos which overlaps with the sweet spot
| of no nonsense videos. Some shorts are improving, but the
| shorts UI on desktop is trash.
| RankingMember wrote:
| Or at least let me turn off endless repeat. It is an absolutely
| ridiculous way to watch video to have it auto-repeat endlessly.
| htx80nerd wrote:
| >no matter how many times I select "show me less of this"
|
| 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
| meltyness wrote:
| Yeah this is late-stage 'growth.' Hamstring your other products
| to reconcentrate activity, 'rebalance' usage to Shorts content by
| making the original offering, long-form content less usable,
| lower quality, less interesting; and so shall it remain until
| some congress finally forces these players cut a dividend instead
| of this moronic buybacks situation, hysterical that <well-liked
| female northeast senator and presidential primary candidate whose
| policy positions had been featured here> abruptly stopped talking
| about this for no apparent reason.
|
| It's kind of conceptually like a Shepard's tone, though, which is
| maybe interesting.
| presbyterian wrote:
| I've stopped using YouTube directly. This is only for Apple
| users, but I started using the app Play[1]. It manages my
| subscriptions, keeps a watch later list (with smart tags and
| filtering, if you'd like), and you can even play videos directly
| in the app (and it remembers your place, better than YouTube
| itself does sometimes), though I still open it in the browser so
| I can use SponsorBlock.
|
| [1]: https://marcosatanaka.com/#play
| II2II wrote:
| On the extrapolation to zero videos by September 2026: it is
| already here.
|
| 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.
| jaydenmilne wrote:
| Its oddly relaxing.
|
| 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.
| 3D39739091 wrote:
| This is exactly the best part about the Linux experience
| right now. There is nothing that's there because a PM is
| trying to get a promotion.
| jaydenmilne wrote:
| "Feed Me Seymour"
| WorldPeas wrote:
| does anyone know why when I do this all my recommended videos
| are always "10 hours star pattern" or the like? does youtube
| figure any cookie-less machine is usually just a stick pc in a
| restaurant serving screensavers?
| ashf023 wrote:
| Yeah I find this so strange. Why not take the opportunity to
| throw a bunch of heavily cached shorts recommendations in our
| faces when signed out? I don't understand how the anon home
| page is not both a money maker and extremely cacheable and
| cheap to serve
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| The only explanation I can imagine is that the risk of
| turning someone off YouTube by showing them the "wrong"
| vidoes is worse than the views or attention capture lost this
| way.
|
| 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!
| jmkni wrote:
| Except the results will be what the algorithm has determined
| that people accessing from your IP address at your location
| using your exact version of your browser on your exact version
| of your operating system on a screen with your exact width and
| height and pixel resolution are into lol
| kccqzy wrote:
| I like that too. It reminds me of the classic Google home page:
| just a search bar so you have to search to get started.
| troupo wrote:
| Here are more screenshots/data points
| https://x.com/nikitonsky/status/1916085438915150006
| radicality wrote:
| If you have a FireTV stick or something Android based for your
| TV, I can recommend SmartTubenext for browsing/watching YouTube.
|
| I still use AppleTV for pretty much everything else, but got a
| firetv stick just to use that.
| https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube
| bravetraveler wrote:
| List view, gang
| pimlottc wrote:
| It's because they want you to get hooked when the videos auto-
| play on hover, and that's less likely with small thumbnails.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Fun thing to open first thing in the morning as I wait for my
| coffee to brew at YouTube
| segphault wrote:
| The quality of the content on YouTube has declined so
| aggressively that the terrible UX almost doesn't even matter
| anymore. They optimize to promote the most cancerous, low-effort,
| viral clickbait trash and the algorithm makes it incredibly
| difficult for anything else to survive or be discoverable. The
| culture of YouTube is absolutely vile.
| bluGill wrote:
| Turn off watch history. That disables the homepage. Which in
| turn means you only see things you directly link to, or things
| you have subscribed to (after going to the subscriptions page).
| jszymborski wrote:
| Another reason to use FreeTube.
|
| https://freetubeapp.io/
| Alifatisk wrote:
| That advanced analytics package for projection gave me a good
| chuckle
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| Idk but I prefer the modern one as the other one I feel there are
| too many videos and I'm unable to see them well
| guywithahat wrote:
| > I miss YouTube before they turned the pain dial all the way
| towards money.
|
| 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.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| And on the iOS app, I can now only see 1.5 at a time because the
| thumbnails are so huge.
|
| 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.
| ringeryless wrote:
| almost like they think a desktop monitor is a portrait mode phone
| screen... it's not like we dont have media query API, google, but
| hey, it fits with the general dumbing down and phonification of
| all interfaces that should have stopped by now.
|
| 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.
| loosescrews wrote:
| A 32" monitor should be 4k. If anyone needs glasses, it might be
| the author of this blog post as that is the typical market for
| low pixel density displays.
| jaydenmilne wrote:
| I agree, but I didn't buy this one
| kasabali wrote:
| 1440p@32" is very close to 96 ppi (ie. pixel density as the god
| intended).
|
| 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.
| pizzathyme wrote:
| I always laugh at these shots from the hip criticizing YouTube
| and Google. As though Google doesn't have a entire team of data
| scientists and top tier engineers managing this experiment and
| driving it to optimal results. (Spoiler: they do)
|
| 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.
| jaydenmilne wrote:
| Yup! That's the point, I'm mourning what was and shaking my
| fist at a cloud.
|
| 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.
| pizzathyme wrote:
| Don't disagree at all
| bluGill wrote:
| I have a background in human machine interaction and I can tell
| you without even being there to tell you that a lot of changes
| didn't have proper UX design work done on them.
|
| 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.
| pizzathyme wrote:
| This is certainly true. UX design and user feedback is only
| one piece of Google's decision making process
| skeaker wrote:
| The flaw with this angle is that their success can be
| attributed to momentum rather than any good decision-making.
| They have no real competition for long-form video content. If
| they make a terrible decision, they can still be successful as
| their market has nowhere else to go to.
|
| 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.
| titzer wrote:
| Yes, exactly, like the entire marketing team for buggies around
| 1910. They really figured out what people wanted.
| pizzathyme wrote:
| If Youtube is going the way of buggies in 1910, then there is
| a lot of money to be made by shorting their stock right away.
| If that's your position I would go big
|
| 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
| leptons wrote:
| I hate Youtube Shorts so much that I just installed
| "SmartTubeNext" app on my Chromecast (suggested in the comments
| here about Youtube hate). So that expert team is making
| decisions that drive away users from their apps. The great
| thing about SmartTubeNext is that even though I pay Youtube to
| not show ads, the content I watch is often littered with in-
| video ads, which SmartTubeNext will automatically skip. So, is
| me leaving the Youtube app part of their "optimal results"?
| They've optimized so much they created an app that I absolutely
| hate. I pay for youtube, and now I'm cancelling my subscription
| because this other app doesn't show ads and doesn't force me to
| see "shorts" and other things I don't want in my Youtube
| experience. It seems to me that they are optimizing for paying-
| user cancellations.
| Root_Denied wrote:
| >As though Google doesn't have a entire team of data scientists
| and top tier engineers managing this experiment and driving it
| to optimal results. (Spoiler: they do)
|
| 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.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Also disturbing is how absolutely awful it is at basic design.
| You can even see it on the screenshot that the Videos on the
| third row aren't properly aligned.
|
| 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.
| chao- wrote:
| My YouTube changed recently from 6-wide to 4-wide. I wonder why I
| get 4 across instead of everyone else's 3? Still annoying, and I
| still much, much prefer 6 videos across.
| pier25 wrote:
| Absolutely. It's like they only test youtube on small laptop
| displays.
|
| 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:
|
| https://gumroad.com/
| hkchad wrote:
| This happened to me last week, used uBlock origin to set it back
| to 8 video's per row.
| rcfox wrote:
| Could you share how you did that?
| Yizahi wrote:
| My homepage on 14" laptop has degraded from 12-16 previews (4 in
| row) to 9 (3 in row), lately since around late 2024 has a
| whopping 4 (four) previews. Amazing evolution. Such courage.
|
| 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 :(
| schnable wrote:
| This inspired me to check out my YouTube.com home page, and I
| have zero videos. I just see a message telling me I should turn
| Watch History on.
| alex1138 wrote:
| One thing that made Youtube work well in its early days was a
| robust and interesting recommendations system (for those who are
| old, like me). There was also a robust Trending section
|
| 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
| rambambram wrote:
| I thought it was just me experiencing this last week. I thought I
| accidentally changed some setting, even checked my browser's zoom
| mode, and then just lived with it.
|
| 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.
| soegaard wrote:
| FWIW - the YouTube app on Apple TV has a similar issue. The video
| previews are so large, that one can't get a proper overview.
| musesum wrote:
| My chain of thought:
|
| 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
| jaggs wrote:
| I hate to be that guy, but how many of us are actually paying for
| this service? Yeah we pay with ads and attention, but is there
| another company that's prepared to store over 500 hours of new
| content every single minute? Yeah it sucks, but free is as free
| does.
| kcb wrote:
| many of us, YouTube Premium is pretty popular.
| fernvenue wrote:
| Exactly, and maybe YouTube have a plan, have a god damn plan...By
| the way, I use https://github.com/KcodeGG/UserStyles this to make
| YouTube back to old style :)
| npteljes wrote:
| Honestly, this, and the other reasons in the thread (like the
| resetting preferences) is the reason why I don't invest
| emotionally into platforms anymore. Been burned too many times.
| In most cases, I won't fight the system at all - I'll use the
| defaults, and if I don't like it, I'll go elsewhere. This have
| freed up so much mental energy for me.
|
| 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?
| WorldPeas wrote:
| >zero thumbnails on the homepage I have this manually enabled,
| but also consider it could be true if they take the instagram/x
| approach where you just have no thumbnail and are just dropped
| down the video flume right out of the gate. Don't worry. We know
| what you want.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| It's painful, but every single person in this comment thread is
| no longer part of youtube's target demographic.
| leptons wrote:
| Pretty sure I am one of their target demographics as long as I
| keep paying for their subscription.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| that's not what a demographic is
|
| 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
| iorekz wrote:
| >Presumably by then we'll have our mandatory NeuraLinks and the
| YouTube algorithm will be able to inject real-time ML generated
| content (and ads) straight into our brains
|
| exactly what happens on a black mirror episode. Recommended!
| jaydenmilne wrote:
| There's nothing new under the sun, I thought I was being
| clever.
|
| I'll have to watch it!
| lykahb wrote:
| Displaying more videos gives more choice to the users. It may
| also be slightly better for collecting data about the user. But
| that's reducing the impact of the algorithmic feed and is
| opposite to what tiktok does. I unironically agree with the
| prediction that the endgame is just one video.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Youtube on AndroidTV is even worse. Most of the pic is taken by
| the first video which is always a massive ad.
|
| They've made it terrible.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| I love how YouTube makes it impossible to resize your browser
| window to cover the title and description and all the flying
| animated like and view numbers. If you try to resize vertically,
| it pillarboxes the video to make the title box fit.
|
| 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.
| Havoc wrote:
| Yes, for all their A/B testing they could really do with a bit
| more common sense.
|
| 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...
| aenopix wrote:
| Ublock Origin in Firefox:
|
| ``` ! 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) ```
| godelski wrote:
| There's just so much low hanging fruit at YouTube (and other
| places) that it's wild. I can't believe this shit goes on. No, it
| isn't just OP I see 3 videos in the first row, and 2-3 in the
| second. First row contains a fundraiser video or membership video
| each time. And the info about ads takes up so much space a
| frequently click on it instead of the fucking video I'm trying to
| watch.
|
| 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?!?!?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This feels symptomatic of Google getting more and more desperate
| to have Youtube generate net revenue. All of the changes pointed
| out (and all of the 'shorts' that litter the site) are explained
| as 'additional monetization.'
|
| 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.
| silisili wrote:
| Between shorts, search results, the ads, and the content...I
| treat youtube links like pinterest links these days. Basically,
| I'll only click it if I think I really, really need to see it.
|
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > 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
| silisili wrote:
| That tracks. It feels like as soon as you fall out of that
| 18-25, or 18-30 demo, the world leaves you behind. Now I
| understand why we always thought old people were so cranky!
| ryandrake wrote:
| I'm still using an 8 year old phone. Nobody has made a
| phone yet where the feature set would motivate me to but
| a new one. Stickers? Emojis? Camera filters and effects?
| Social media integration? None of this is even remotely
| interesting to elderly-me. The only reason I'm likely to
| get a new one any time soon is that the companies stopped
| supporting the old one with software updates, effectively
| _forcing_ me to throw away a perfectly working phone to
| keep up with security patches.
|
| Same with computers. My daily driver is from 2017. I'm
| just not interested in anything new they're coming out
| with.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I went from a 6S+ to a 15 because I was in the same boat
| where the end of support/updates made it impossible to
| use. Also, the battery is shot so it lives on a cable
| full time. Hoping I can get as many years out of the new
| one. I have very few apps because I don't trust any of
| you app builders to respect my privacy. If there was
| something in between a smart phone and a feature phone,
| I'd be interested.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This response captures it perfectly. I started at Google in
| 2006 and the "mini kitchens" (essentially a convenience
| mart) were just getting "re-organized" The new CFO was out
| to "cut unnecessary costs."[1] While Google was banking
| billions of dollars in "Free Cash Flow" every QUARTER than
| were cutting the 'unnecessary' costs that were something
| like $12,000 per employee per YEAR. So with 20,000
| employees, that is about 1/4 billion dollars a year, or
| roughly 3% of the free cash flow. I called Eric on it at a
| TGIF[2]. The gist was "We're going to lose all these great
| employees because you want to keep more of the free cash
| than you currently do?"
|
| 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 :-)
| dylan604 wrote:
| >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,
|
| 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.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| You're leading edge in this regard, the fall off is, in
| my experience, somewhat exponential. It never quite
| reaches zero though. Which is why we have people who
| still have AOL mail addresses.
| dylan604 wrote:
| we have people with AOL mail addresses still because it
| still works. if they pulled the plug on it, nobody would
| be using it any more. now i'm curious who actually is
| paying for those servers, and how they make money doing
| it. just not actually curious enough to look it up
| carlosjobim wrote:
| There's a million videos uploaded to YouTube each second. If
| you're only seeing low quality videos it's because you're
| only looking in the wrong places.
| silisili wrote:
| I don't doubt good videos exist - I'm blaming YouTube for
| boosting the awful ones so it's all I see in my first page
| of search results, and the 'creators' who make them.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| As for search results, I cannot help you.
|
| As for recommendation, the algorithm works perfectly if
| you make the effort to "Like and subscribe(tm)" 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.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| On the topic of A/B testing, it would be really neat if there was
| a way to opt out of it.
|
| 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.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| complain as you might about reddit but only it and cnn (to my
| knowledge) allow the kind of "old." url-based opt-outs
| barbazoo wrote:
| If you're referring to old.reddit.com or whatever it is,
| sure, but I can't imagine that users of that site aren't part
| of a/b tests all the time anyway even though what you see is
| the old stylesheet.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| that's likely true, it's just a different branch, LTS, if
| you will
| Narishma wrote:
| They've recently started infecting old reddit with some of
| the new crap like notifications for every little thing. You
| can still disable them for now, tediously one by one.
| quantike wrote:
| One other point of annoyance with the new UI is that the videos
| actually aren't aligned vertically.
|
| 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!
| barbazoo wrote:
| And it might add the auto-played videos to your history,
| impacting future recommendations.
| insin wrote:
| If you're using an adblocker, it's because YouTube video grid
| items have an [is-in-first-column] attribute which gives them
| extra margin-left, throwing off alignment when videos flow to
| fill in gaps created by promoted videos which were hidden.
|
| 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.
| Narishma wrote:
| That one's not on Youtube. It's a bug caused by ad blockers.
| nvarsj wrote:
| I still don't know how to "go back" after viewing a video on the
| mobile app. It's so confusing. I just keep swiping stuff and
| eventually it works.
|
| 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 :).
| jayshah5696 wrote:
| Goal for them to not watch too much content. I changed my YouTube
| account and increased from 3 width to 4. So probably if you are
| watching too much to discourage they are doing this.
| wobfan wrote:
| The bottom graphic is the best thing I've seen this week. That
| alone made me happy today. Thanks, stranger.
| JasserInicide wrote:
| Mobile-first design. Get used to it, we haven't even started to
| see the worst of it
| quantadev wrote:
| I don't even let Youtube suggest videos to me, nor do I use their
| jank Subscription system. I simply maintain a markdown file with
| a direct link to the '/videos' page of each channel I care about.
|
| 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.
| steelzzdev wrote:
| This is painfully accurate. I just opened YouTube on my 4K
| monitor and counted four videos before the ads and algorithm
| sludge took over. It's like they're actively hostile to screen
| real estate now.
|
| 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.
| titzer wrote:
| Well, I've been holding this one in for a while but now's the
| time, so it's flame on.
|
| 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?
| Agingcoder wrote:
| First of all , I agree with all your points. I used to not use
| YouTube because it was unusable ( try to watch an educational
| video when you get interrupted every 5 minutes ...). Most of my
| problems got fixed by paying for YouTube premium, and disabling
| search history, much to my surprise. It's expensive though, and
| it won't solve everything, but it makes YouTube significantly
| better.
| titzer wrote:
| I object to YouTube premium as it amounts to extortion. It's
| a reward for making a product worse. What a perverse
| incentive system, and we shouldn't let them get away with it.
| seydor wrote:
| When you open any video on youtube.com the video players menus
| appear for a split second (some CSS is not hiding them). Keep
| getting this on chrome/windows
| nottorp wrote:
| Hmm interesting. My laptop is about the only place where I
| occasionally open Youtube. I get 3 videos per row and it looks
| just fine(tm) because it's a 14 inch screen.
|
| 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?
| Timpy wrote:
| This is totally orthogonal to the issue but I think the best fix
| possible is to block the YouTube home page. I have gained value
| from algorithm-curated feeds in the past but it's no longer a net
| positive in my life. I recommend checking out News Feed
| Eradicator[0], Distraction Free YouTube[1], and set up some
| extremely aggressive uBlock Origin rules.
|
| [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/news-feed-
| era...
|
| [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/df-youtube/
| 0x2a wrote:
| Unhook is also good. https://unhook.app/
| ginko wrote:
| The iphone and its consequences have been a catastrophe for web
| design.
| nickvec wrote:
| I stopped using YouTube a few years ago. It's just so many ads
| that I no longer enjoy using the platform.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| I just use an adblocker.
| xoxxala wrote:
| Another recommendation for the Unhook extension. Literally cannot
| use YT without it now.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Jokes aside, I just keep my watch history off so the homepage is
| blank
| magackame wrote:
| Let's also not forget about automatic title and audio
| translations...
| ssalazar wrote:
| Some of this is probably driven by mobile usage and unifying the
| experience between mobile <> desktop. But the truth is a team
| almost certainly tested this and measured an improvement of some
| topline performance metric. (Hacker News articles comparing YT
| before and after screenshots is not one of their topline
| metrics.)
| cucubeleza wrote:
| it's just a big company doing big company things, don't care
| about the user, only thing that matters is money and power, like
| dictators
| _QrE wrote:
| People see videos on the front page of YouTube? I've turned
| YouTube history off, and all I get is a warning that says that if
| I want "the latest videos tailored to me", I need to turn that
| on. This is without being signed in.
|
| Honestly, I think I prefer this. It makes my use of YouTube a
| little more deliberate since there's no clickbait to click,
| initially.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| The huge thumbnails are also in the subs tab.
| rfolstad wrote:
| Why does the youtube miniplayer suck so much?! X has the best one
| i've seen on any platform. You can actually pop the player out of
| the browser and move it anywhere you want and it has 0 chrome
| just a window with the video in it amazing!
| cpersona wrote:
| Well YouTube no longer shows videos on the landing page if you're
| not logged in so the tongue-in-cheek conclusion is prescient in
| this case.
| schainks wrote:
| I already have no videos on my homepage! Just turn off all the
| suggested video in your account settings. I only use youtube to
| watch channels I've subscribed to or videos people send me.
|
| 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.
| Eavolution wrote:
| I found YouTube completely insufferable until installing ublock
| origin, sponsorblock, and youtube redux to return to a more old
| school interface. How a single website single-handedly justifies
| 3 extensions in my browser I will never know but those geniuses
| at google have managed it.
|
| Can't recommend youtube redux alongside disabling watch and
| search history highly enough.
| SnorkelTan wrote:
| I'm not a webdev, but I suspect an overwhelming majority of their
| traffic is on mobile devices. So that's where a majority of eng
| time is probably spent. Not that it shouldn't be fixed.
| mrandish wrote:
| I use a combination of add-ons to fix YouTube that let me:
|
| * 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.
| amai wrote:
| Google must not only sell Chrome, but also Youtube. Tiktok might
| be interested to buy it.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It's the same with Google news on Mobile. I found an old Nexus
| one in a drawer the other day and tried charging it up, it still
| worked fine. When I opened Google News (from~12 years ago!) it
| was just a list of categories and 8-10 headlines within each
| category, a small picture for the top story in each category.
|
| 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.
| fHr wrote:
| I mean I applied as SWE 2 but they don't even proceed with any
| app, at least I solved meanwhile around 1000 lcs. So I can't
| solve it for you sadly and people working there are probably to
| much in the ad business then doing actual core changes these
| days, to hard probably need for 1 small css change 7 higher
| manager approvals....
| daemonologist wrote:
| I've seen it display *two* videos at the top of the home screen
| (plus an ad and five "shorts"). Kind of comical when it happens.
| ryandrake wrote:
| One thing I don't like about the "old" style (that I haven't seen
| anyone here mention yet) is that it has all that whitespace on
| either side of the list. So much monitor space wasted! The new
| site uses it all. I wish sites would stop limiting their content
| to a small vertical strip of the screen. I bought a gigantic
| monitor and I rather like being able to use all of its pixels.
| sprremix wrote:
| This makes me appreciate my newly discovered "Remove YouTube
| Suggestions"[0]-extension a lot more. My homepage looks like
| this[1] and I absolutely do not get the feeling I'm "missing out"
| on any content. I just go to my subscriptions page, look at some
| videos and then close YT :)
|
| [0] https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions
|
| [1] https://i.imgur.com/zst96wo.png
| SurgeArrest wrote:
| Can I also have an option to block/disable all YouTube Shorts on
| AppleTV and Samsung TV apps? Shorts is the biggest disservice to
| civilization - promoting time-wasting behaviours.
|
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Also add a "stolen content" option for reporting. There is an
| insane amount of content that has been blatantly ripped of from
| others to produce cheap AI generated Shorts. Unless you own the
| stolen content, there's nothing you can do, even if it's
| clearly an Instagram video or a Reddit posts run through an AI.
|
| 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.
| littlekey wrote:
| Yeah I learned early on with "engagement" is that the only
| winning move is not to play. Just ignore the voting arrows,
| and definitely don't leave a comment on the video.
| Razengan wrote:
| Someone at HN needs glasses too, until then we're stuck with this
| borderline hostile text/UI size and colors trying to be as
| unreadable as possible.
| crawsome wrote:
| Similar with Reddit. The redesign serves you less content and
| more ads, and zooms everything in. There's no profit in giving
| you everything you want all at once.
| youtubeuser wrote:
| > Unfortunately, using an advanced analytics package I've
| projected that around May 2026 the YouTube homepage will just be
| one video, and by September there will be no videos at all on the
| homepage.
|
| Lmao
| efields wrote:
| I believe YouTube is crushing it as a content provider.
|
| 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.
| Root_Denied wrote:
| > 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.
| esotericsean wrote:
| I got this view the other day and was shocked. Went and found a
| browser plugin to fix it. But I wish our voices could be heard or
| we could give some feedback.
| calmbonsai wrote:
| I've said it before. The secret to sanity when consuming YoutTube
| content is to never consume it on YouTube. The interface has been
| actively user-hostile for over 15 years.
| hapticmonkey wrote:
| People need to realise that all this AB testing is going to
| lead YouTube developers to one final version: An endless TikTok
| style scroll of (soon to be AI-generated) recommended videos.
|
| 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.
| UnreachableCode wrote:
| Highly recommend https://untrap.app/ if you want to remove some
| of the shit from YouTube like shorts, comments or the
| recommendation bar to the right of videos. It has a safari
| extension on iOS too (this costs about 3 bucks). Disclaimer: not
| my software
| lajosbacs wrote:
| Let's not forget defaulting the audio to an automatic
| translation. That is so dumb that I still a have hard time
| believing that there is not an option to disable this. They don't
| even get any ad revenue out of this, it is just idiotic.
| almosthere wrote:
| They should isolate shorts from real YouTube.
| CryZe wrote:
| For me they made it so large that I can only see 3 full
| thumbnails. The rest don't even fit the screen anymore.
| https://i.imgur.com/11iI4sI.jpeg
| xanadu132 wrote:
| never realized how annoying this was until now
| n00bs wrote:
| It sure would be nice if they fixed the YouTube Apple TV app so
| you didn't have to select which YouTube account you want to use
| every single time you launch the app on Apple TV. I guess someone
| thought it was better than the blank screen that used to greet
| greet folks when they loaded the Apple TV app after 24 hours. But
| this is just comically lame for folks who don't ever switch
| accounts nor want to.
| rng-concern wrote:
| On my roku youtube app, you can only see 2 videos in full. Yes
| that's right, 2 videos. You can technically see 6 but there's so
| much cutoff on the right and bottom that you can't see what those
| videos are.
|
| It's insane. I don't use it on roku anymore.
| cbmuser wrote:
| The problem is simply that managers at Google think that designs
| have to change all the time.
|
| The idea that a design is perfect does not exist at Google.
| debunn wrote:
| I wonder if this reduction in videos on screen is a result of an
| experiment due to "The Paradox of Choice" / "Choice Overload"?
|
| https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/economics/the-par...
| mcpar-land wrote:
| The extra time required to scroll through the giant thumbnails
| turned into "we saw a XX% increase in engagement time when we
| A/B tested larger thumbnails!"
| Animats wrote:
| Never visit the home page of any social media site.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Pretty sure this is intentional to encourage doom scroll and to
| make the giant video titles and shocked-face-tiles easier to see
| and thus click on. Whatever gets you to click faster and make
| those ad dollars.
|
| 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
| twalichiewicz wrote:
| I ranted about this a couple of weeks ago: two [?]- taps has
| become my default just to make most sites readable.
|
| When did 32-pixel headlines and 18-pixel body copy become
| "desktop friendly"?
| nullpilot wrote:
| For the past decade or so my bookmark has been set to
| /feed/subscriptions and I can only recommend that. The one or two
| times a year I end up on the front page act as proof it should
| remain that way.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| Obviously the model at the end of the post is a joke, but it
| implies that after September 2026 there will be negative videos
| on the screen. What does it even mean to be a negative video?
| There will be videos, but mirrored? There will be videos but the
| colors will be reversed? Will they play backwards? Is a negative
| video where multiple ads overlap each other?
| 333c wrote:
| I think a negative video is a requirement that _you_ upload one
| before you may continue
| dade_ wrote:
| Only ads.
| nzeid wrote:
| Anyone else's YouTube home page just a white screen telling you
| to type in the search box? Because after reading this blog I
| might ask the author for some stock tips.
| killerz3 wrote:
| If you have a new account or use it less frequently, there are no
| videos .... It just says start watching so we could recommend you
| something like this . What are they trying? All they want to show
| users are targeted ads , won't even show any video
| recommendations until you give the algo something to target you
| with ads.
| Macacity wrote:
| Funnily, when loading the page, it still display 5 of the
| placeholder boxes per row
| ugh123 wrote:
| It's possible at that size (32") you're triggering 'leanback' UI
| mode, which is optimized for longer distance (TV like) viewing.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Even if true, it's indicative of the UX disease of trying to
| guess what the user persona needs instead of fucking asking us
| simoncion wrote:
| > It's possible at that size (32") you're triggering 'leanback'
| UI mode...
|
| 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.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Blame all the children on their iPads who can't read.
| buybackoff wrote:
| It's not the count if thumbnails, it's the algo that either does
| not work at all or works only for them. _Average_ engagement and
| zero control. Paid or free, they do not care.
| 555watch wrote:
| Has anyone commented already about the absurdity of watching
| Youtube Shorts? A wide empty white space, with a narrow vertical
| strip of content that is often stretched and split into two
| smaller videos.
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