Someone at YouTube needs glasses • Hacker News Board

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#221

Post by didip » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:46 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 agree. YouTube Shorts should be a separate product line. The short form content is polluting the long form ones.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#222

Post by Havoc » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:46 PM UTC

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...

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#223

Post by guiomie » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:46 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.

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.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#224

Post by alpaca128 » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:47 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'm glad I'm not the only one who gets annoyed by these details.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#225

Post by jmb99 » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:47 PM UTC

jsheard wrote: post #23

iMerNibor wrote: post #13

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

They clearly need to conserve bandwidth for the most important assets - the 12 whole megabytes of Javascript.

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.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#226

Post by ashf023 » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:47 PM UTC

II2II wrote: post #64

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.

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

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#227

Post by aenopix » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:48 PM UTC

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) ```

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#228

Post by godelski » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:48 PM UTC

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?!?!?

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#229

Post by whiplash451 » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:48 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'm afraid the pressure from tiktok is just too high.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#230

Post by Jensson » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 4:49 PM UTC

scubbo wrote: post #157

bryanhogan wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Would you share those extensions so that other people can join you in this good situation?

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...