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Someone at YouTube needs glasses

jayd.ml

261–270 of 720 posts

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#261
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how else are they going to compete with TikTok?

I notice that many short videos seem to be simply cuts from longer videos posted to promote them. So they were not made for short video section and just try to misuse short videos to increase long video visibility.

But there's no way to click from the short to the long video. I'd like to do that. It's someone else doing the cuts, presumably for their own benefit, rather than to promote the original.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#263
post #143

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.

Same. Shorts are actually a great product in terms of capturing attention, but I don't want them on youtube. I hear someone from the back shouting, "you're not the customer, you're the product!" but I pay for youtube premium... that makes me the customer; and I pay for the long-form content without ads! But 50% of Youtube shorts are just ads or product marketing. I never feel good after going on a youtube shorts bing…

> but I pay for youtube premium

I found your error.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#264

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

If you're referring to old.reddit.com or whatever it is, sure, but I can't imagine that users of that site aren't part of a/b tests all the time anyway even though what you see is the old stylesheet.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#265
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 means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over.

Nobody cares about coherent UI/UX anymore. They certainly don‘t care about your fringe usages. Do new stuff. Do good enough. Expensive designers with a clear vision and attention to detail? Sounds slow. And expensive.

The move towards forced autoplay and infinite scroll will continue in any media app. AB tests show it is what humans crave.

I tend to select some text in long textblocks to keep a point of reference while reading. Medium and other new generation slop loves to open an obtrusive menu above my selection.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#266
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

The only explanation I can imagine is that the risk of turning someone off YouTube by showing them the "wrong" vidoes is worse than the views or attention capture lost this way.

I can imagine my mom opening YouTube (hypothetically) for the first time and seeing an anime video, or my younger cousin being shown a Top Gear video, and them deciding that YouTube is "that app with the weird videos" that's not for them. It's not a carefully thought out conclusion, but in the era of a hundred competitors, it's plausible that superficial decisions like that have a lot of impact on the app usage.

Or it could just be that someone with a forceful personality on the YouTube team decided this is how we're going to do it and nobody could oppose them, not every decision is scientifically planned and executed like it's often assumed from the outside!

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#268
I don't even let Youtube suggest videos to me, nor do I use their jank Subscription system. I simply maintain a markdown file with a direct link to the '/videos' page of each channel I care about.

This way I'm always in control of what I see. Sure Youtube can still slather me with ADs injected into videos every 2 minutes, and much of the content I watch has ADs right in the video, but at least I feel more in control by never giving Youtube the chance to unleash their algos on me to entice me into as much fake AI-Generated garbage recommendations as they can jam onto a page. That's no longer a problem. I no longer dig thru their dumpster fire of a home page.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#269

It used to be 12 videos until about a year ago. If you zoom in and out the thumbnails don't change size! The worst casualty of the current design is the search. You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations. No? Fuck off? Do what I tell you to do!

Zooming out actually makes the thumbnails bigger, because they grow to fill the space ceded by the rest of the UI. Just incredible design all the way through.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#270
post #205
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This may be a dumb question, but when you have video doing autoplay (as in the video starts playing while you're scrolling looking at multiple videos - you haven't clicked on one), does it show up in your watch history?

Just tested. If you hover for 10s+ then it does get added to your watch history.

EDIT: or did you mean on autoplay as in part of a playlist playing in the small player in the corner while you are on the home page?

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