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Someone at YouTube needs glasses

jayd.ml

281–290 of 720 posts

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#281
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still the product. Paying to remove ads doesn't change this. You're still being tracked. Unless something has changed recently, you're still being recommended videos.

No, I think Youtube really is the product. With Premium, you don't see any ads (at least the ones Youtube makes money from), and there's no way "tracking" makes them anywhere near as much money as a simple premium subscription.

> and there's no way "tracking" makes them anywhere near as much money as a simple premium subscription.

Who places ads everywhere else on the web?

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I get "premium 1080p" most of the time, but yeah not being able to set it directly is annoying.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#283
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but I have given up on trusting low-audience browser extensions. Too many stories of the author selling out and injecting analytics/malware into the product.

What I've been doing is using high audience extensions (like Tampermonkey) and getting ChatGPT to write a script for it which does what I need it to. Much more effective and trustworthy than relying on another extension developer. If Tampermonkey can't do it then I'll just write the entire extension on my own and load it as a developer extension.

[deleted]

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also if you do watch shorts, they are ALL added to your liked Videos.

Uh no they're not

It's easy to like them by accident though

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#285
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fun fact: Googles own web performance team recommends avoiding YouTube embeds because they're so obscenely bloated. Placing their on a page will pull in about 4MB of assets, most of which is Javascript, even if the user never plays the video. https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/performance/thi... YouTubes frontend people just don't care about bloat, even when other Googlers are yelling at them to cut it out.

We lazy-load Youtube iframes, fixes the problem pretty easily.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#286
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 You can disable autoplay at https://www.youtube.com/account_playback , then uncheck "Video previews". It resets itself every 15 days or so, but at least one can have some peace in the meantime.

That setting can be fairly sticky. Mine has stayed off since I initially disabled it, shortly after they added the "feature". I have no idea why it's not sticky for you. Maybe they fuck with me less because I have premium?

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#287
post #280

This is totally orthogonal to the issue but I think the best fix possible is to block the YouTube home page. I have gained value from algorithm-curated feeds in the past but it's no longer a net positive in my life. I recommend checking out News Feed Eradicator[0], Distraction Free YouTube[1], and set up some extremely aggressive uBlock Origin rules. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/news-feed-era...…

Unhook is also good. https://unhook.app/

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#288
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 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 it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage.

If anything, I feel like that this is by design to hyperstimulate their core audience seeking instant gratification.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#289
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…

Why do you even need _different teams_ for the homepage ? The home page is made up of: a search bar with some extra buttons that link to different pages, a sidebar with some more buttons and a list of videos. What are the multiple teams for ? And even assuming it is necessary, there is really no single person responsible for the page so that issues like this can be seen and fixed ? And since we are talking about pet…

To be fair you've started to answer it yourself: I'd bet 'search' is at least one team.
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