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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

#41

Post by virtualized »

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, not the bullshit rambling filler videos. The effect is that I often unsubscribe from the whole channel even though there is some interesting content.

- The video controls cover part of the video for no apparent reason.

- The volume control slider disappears for no reason when you move the cursor away from it.

- There are wrong defaults like showing annotations or autoplay.

- Annotations are abused so much that you cannot leave them enabled.

- Obvious missing feature: Next/previous buttons for videos that belong to a series. Playlists are used as a bad workaround.

- I can only use YouTube on my Desktops because that's where the ad blocker works.

- Obvious missing feature: Donations to content creators.

I don't think this is a big company problem. It is a culture problem. When your boss has no taste and does not take criticism very well, you end up with wrecks like Twitter, Google+ or YouTube.

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

#42

Post by cstrahan »

MichaelBurge wrote: post #19
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).

What's wrong with it, exactly? The video player gives me fewer problems than other players, and the site as a whole seems to have everything needed to watch videos.

Among other things:

They ought to have a clear indicator of thumbs up/down ratio on each video thumbnail (a couple pixel bar at the bottom colored green/red would easily do the trick). That would save plenty of time that would otherwise be spent watching some troll video or annoying commentary/reaction edit of some other person's work.

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

#43

Post by kschiffer »

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.

That is actually a neat idea. Trying it out now :)

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

#44

Post by roansh »

Why does it need permission to Read and Change the data on _all_ of the websites that a user visits?

There are so many cool extensions but most of them need access to every single domain - even if its functionality doesn't need it. Which is what keeps me (and probably a lot many other people) away from installing them.

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

#45

Post by witty_username »

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,…

> 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.

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

#46

Post by shortstuffsushi »

roansh wrote: post #44

Why does it need permission to Read and Change the data on _all_ of the websites that a user visits? There are so many cool extensions but most of them need access to every single domain - even if its functionality doesn't need it. Which is what keeps me (and probably a lot many other people) away from installing them.

I don't think you have the option to say "this app needs Read and Change for just this one domain," it's pretty much an all or nothing sort of deal. This one uses it to edit the page on YouTube, so it has to require it for all.

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

#47

Post by roansh »

shortstuffsushi wrote: post #46
roansh wrote: post #44

Why does it need permission to Read and Change the data on _all_ of the websites that a user visits? There are so many cool extensions but most of them need access to every single domain - even if its functionality doesn't need it. Which is what keeps me (and probably a lot many other people) away from installing them.

I don't think you have the option to say "this app needs Read and Change for just this one domain," it's pretty much an all or nothing sort of deal. This one uses it to edit the page on YouTube, so it has to require it for all.

There is! In extension's manifest.json you can mention for which URLs your extension needs permission. This extension is asking for "http://*/*", "https://*/*". Which is all of them.

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

#48

Post by tnorthcutt »

shortstuffsushi wrote: post #46
roansh wrote: post #44

Why does it need permission to Read and Change the data on _all_ of the websites that a user visits? There are so many cool extensions but most of them need access to every single domain - even if its functionality doesn't need it. Which is what keeps me (and probably a lot many other people) away from installing them.

I don't think you have the option to say "this app needs Read and Change for just this one domain," it's pretty much an all or nothing sort of deal. This one uses it to edit the page on YouTube, so it has to require it for all.

You do have that option. WikiTube, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, only requires read & change permissions for "all wikipedia.org sites".

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

#49

Post by pjc50 »

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,…

Recommendations are mostly awful

Yup, it's amazingly bad. 'Related' videos are mostly OK, but reccomendations seem to be just a 'related' video based on something you watched ages ago. I guess most youtube viewers are browsing omnivores and don't really care how bad the stuff is as long as it makes the time pass.

At least Amazon let you fix their reccomendations.

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

#50

Post by slmkbh »

n4r9 wrote: post #40

This is fantastic, it's always been a pain to move between Youtube videos at social happenings. Out of curiosity, are there any plans to make this a collaborative feature, perhaps just over the local network by integrating with Chromecast?

Well, there always is (slightly nsfwish url) http://twoyoutubevideosandamotherfuckingcrossfader.com/
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