Someone at YouTube needs glasses • Hacker News Board

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#111

Post by duped » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:16 PM UTC

dcchambers wrote: post #58

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.

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.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#112

Post by pizzathyme » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:16 PM UTC

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.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#113

Post by kenjackson » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:16 PM UTC

dcchambers wrote: post #58

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.

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".

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#114

Post by jaydenmilne » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:17 PM UTC

hackeman300 wrote: post #68

jeffbee wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Perhaps the incentives of said UX team don't align with those of the user. They might be optimizing for maximal time spent on the site, for instance.

Yup, and that's what I meant by them turning the pain dial all the way towards money. Presumably they can run A/B tests and will no doubt be able to prove that this change makes them $X more money (since it's 1/6 a full screen ad after all). At the cost of being a miserable tasteless change.

The YouTube team has been blindly chasing monetization at the expense of their website being useful and pleasant for a while now. Unfortunately it seems they can get away with it. I wrote this post to just shake my fist at the cloud

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#115

Post by bluGill » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:17 PM UTC

segphault wrote: post #81

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.

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).

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#116

Post by zootboy » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:17 PM UTC

rozab wrote: post #46

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…

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).

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#117

Post by mopsi » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:17 PM UTC

dcchambers wrote: post #58

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.

On Firefox, you can get rid of Shorts with Enhancer for Youtube extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-...

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#118

Post by duped » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:17 PM UTC

wsc981 wrote: post #29

puttycat wrote: post #6

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.

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.

There's a good chunk of the world whose only device to interact with the internet is a smart phone or tablet

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#119

Post by constantcrying » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:18 PM UTC

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.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#120

Post by gwbas1c » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:18 PM UTC

kotaKat wrote: post #52

rozab wrote: post #46

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…

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.

It's even worse on mobile. You don't even need to hover for an autoplay video to show in your history.