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Show HN: Search YouTube without stopping the video, and make your own playlists

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Re: Show HN: Search YouTube without stopping the video, and make your own playlists

#111

Post by asavadatti »

soneil wrote: post #64
witty_username wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can only use YouTube on my Desktops because that's where the ad blocker works. Why? The ads aren't that bad. > There are wrong defaults like showing annotations or autoplay. From a business perspective, autoplay is good as it leads to more videos being watched.

> Why? The ads aren't that bad. Honestly, the ads are easily the worst part of youtube for me. I'm logged into my google account, everywhere, all the time. And yet they still appear to go out of their way to find the least relevant ads they can find. Adsense doesn't seem to suffer the same, so this disconnect has always puzzled me.

I get bombarded with so many Lyft ads on my android device. Every other video I play is preceded by a Lyft ad. I finally caved in, downloaded the app and signed up for it. Their ads still haven't stopped.

Re: Show HN: Search YouTube without stopping the video, and make your own playlists

#112

Post by okal »

elbear wrote: post #39
kschiffer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My general distaste for popular culture, I guess… Seriously though: there are of course exceptions, but my experience is that videos with 2+ million views aren't for me, as well as all the videos and channels featured by youtube itself, which usually fall into this category. When I see those, I won't watch them, so might as well just filter them out. Especially true for music. Just a personal preference, really.

Maybe you have become biased by the number of views. You could try, as an experiment, to write a script that hides the number of views as well as likes and dislikes. Then keep track of the videos you liked and disliked and then check how many views they have.

I do something similar with a custom stylesheet for Twitter. It hides follower count, and since I use it almost exclusively on desktop, it works quite well at helping me avoid being biased for/against a potential follow because of their numbers.

Re: Show HN: Search YouTube without stopping the video, and make your own playlists

#113

Post by Artistry121 »

virtualized wrote: post #41
andy_ppp wrote: post #7

I mean YouTube UI is a disgrace really, what is it about big companies that stop them from being able to do design properly (even Apple post Jobs is starting to experience this).

This is my personal experience as a YouTube user: - There are these weirdly looking fixed (Googleish) bars for no other reason than to steal my screen space. - Recommendations are mostly awful (10 things that will shock you!) or videos I have already watched. - The subscription to a whole channel is a dumb concept. I usually care only about specific series of videos, not the whole channel. Example: New movie reviews,…

Ok. Here goes:

1. The interface is complex and defined because of the sheer amount of features present. 2. Recommendations work really well after for me after I started using the "not interested" feature and curating channels. 3. You can add playlist and get notified when new videos are added easily - thus eliminating the need to subscribe to whole channels if you don't like all their content. (I know there are a few I like to see all the content from). 4. They disappear when you mouse away. 5. The volume control slider works... 6. Annotations are not default on for me. Autoplay on by default got me to start using it and is great for Chromecast and music. 7. Annotations can be updated by uploaders and some are good - but the default engine is only sufficient and sometimes difficult to translate. (But still the best I've seen anywhere else on the web for non-intentionally edited ones) 7. I don't see playlists as a bad workaround for this- particularly given you can update them in real time. Also the queue for streaming has this feature. (It would be cool to have the ability to navigate search while playing videos). 8. You just became a cost center for Youtube rather than a cost and revenue center - and your needs won't be catered to. YouTube Red is great and comes with a music subscription service and solves the ad problem. 9. This is a good idea. The workaround currently is Patreon links in the description which add minimal total clicks to donating.

I don't know how the Youtube Team operates but I'm very thankful for their product. They serve up incredible amounts of video on dozens of devices and network types for many use cases and manage to do so in a way that perseveres some discoverability and personalization. Red allows ad free access to insane amounts of content for a reasonable cost.

Thanks for being the man in the arena YouTube team.

Re: Show HN: Search YouTube without stopping the video, and make your own playlists

#114

Post by csydas »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #72
witty_username wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can only use YouTube on my Desktops because that's where the ad blocker works. Why? The ads aren't that bad. > There are wrong defaults like showing annotations or autoplay. From a business perspective, autoplay is good as it leads to more videos being watched.

> Why? The ads aren't that bad. They really are. On desktop they're unskippable (unless you reload - often 10+ times to get something short enough or no ad), they're never relevant or interesting, they're ridiculously long (often over a minute, I've seen them significantly longer than the video). They're noise, and the signal/noise ratio is worse than I've ever seen on TV. If a video's longer than about 10 minutes so…

I think one of the more frustrating issues with advertisements is with the overlay ads as opposed to the pre-play ads. While the pre-play ads cause the same frustrations that TV/radio ads do (obnoxiously loud compared to the content you mean to watch, often irrelevant even when you allow all advertising trackers to run), the overlay ads are exceptionally frustrating because they often obfuscate content. Instructional videos or videos involving subtitles are particularly victimized by overlay ads since it's not just a mild interruption at that point, the ads often are completely blocking important content in the video.

Truthfully, with all of the great minds that are at google, it's a bit shocking they haven't found a way to make the advertisements at least a bit more amicable to their viewing audience. In my mind, there's no reason that some sort of content analysis couldn't be done during the upload to check the overlay boundaries and see if "crucial content" like text is present, and set flags in the meta-data so that the ad software can avoid those time stamps. Or on the sound issue, do some advertisement audio balancing based on the volume of the previous and following video so you don't suddenly get audio blasting through speakers/headphones.

To me these seem like relatively simple user experience tweaks that really would make it easier to digest advertising through the service.

Consequently, using Safari on mac and click-to-plugin, you can force an HTML5 player, which seems to not allow the pre-play ads or the overlay ads at all. I've found the experience much more enjoyable via this method.

Re: Show HN: Search YouTube without stopping the video, and make your own playlists

#115

Post by rjuyal »

cmenke wrote: post #76
rjuyal wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is awesome. By the way is it open sourced as well? Would love to learn from this.

Yep, look here: https://github.com/darajava/youtube-smooth

Hey thanks for this but I replied to @splike and was asking about source code of wikitude.

Re: Show HN: Search YouTube without stopping the video, and make your own playlists

#117

Post by andy_ppp »

Artistry121 wrote: post #113
virtualized wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my personal experience as a YouTube user: - There are these weirdly looking fixed (Googleish) bars for no other reason than to steal my screen space. - Recommendations are mostly awful (10 things that will shock you!) or videos I have already watched. - The subscription to a whole channel is a dumb concept. I usually care only about specific series of videos, not the whole channel. Example: New movie reviews,…

Ok. Here goes: 1. The interface is complex and defined because of the sheer amount of features present. 2. Recommendations work really well after for me after I started using the "not interested" feature and curating channels. 3. You can add playlist and get notified when new videos are added easily - thus eliminating the need to subscribe to whole channels if you don't like all their content. (I know there are a few…

1. Complex can be good, that's not the point, it's a disorganised UI

2. I think the "you need special knowledge" to use an interface rather proves the point right?

3. Again seems like bad UI if that grand parent found this very difficult.

4-7. Sure, you have come up with YouTube workarounds.

8. YouTube ads are a necessary evil I guess.

9. Sure.

The man in the arena is about a couple of guys in their basement daring greatly, not a multi billion dollar company! It's ridiculous to conflate the two things.

Re: Show HN: Search YouTube without stopping the video, and make your own playlists

#118

Post by soneil »

rantanplan wrote: post #70
soneil wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why? The ads aren't that bad. Honestly, the ads are easily the worst part of youtube for me. I'm logged into my google account, everywhere, all the time. And yet they still appear to go out of their way to find the least relevant ads they can find. Adsense doesn't seem to suffer the same, so this disconnect has always puzzled me.

I think there's no mystery there. Video ads are fewer and cost more and Google needs to present "impressions" to their customers. So... are you a human? Then this ad might be of interest to you :P

What really gets me, is a lot of the ads I’ve been getting are stuff 50yo “ad tech” would get right. Lately I’ve been getting a womens' clothing brand which appears to only exist in north america. I’m a male in northern europe. A print ad in a national newspaper would do a better job “targetting” than that.
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