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Someone at YouTube needs glasses

jayd.ml

251–260 of 720 posts

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#251
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 always open videos in new tabs and they start from the beginning.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#253
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…

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…

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.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#254

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 op…

complain as you might about reddit but only it and cnn (to my knowledge) allow the kind of "old." url-based opt-outs

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to do that all the time. Try hiding YouTube shorts and they just come back.

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

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.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#256

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 sit…

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.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#257

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!

And it might add the auto-played videos to your history, impacting future recommendations.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It resets itself every 15 days or so Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?

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.

First it was "hide shorts".

Then it was "hide shorts for X days" (I think 30?).

Now it is "show fewer shorts".

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#259
post #29
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.

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.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#260

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.

Ublock origin allows you to block any part of a page. Solved!

If it still works for you, it's because you've temporarily workarounded its automatic disablement, and that won't last much longer...
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