Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Someone at YouTube needs glasses

jayd.ml

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 720 posts

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#291

Post by crtasm »

xmprt wrote: post #123
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #104

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.

There's also lots of userscripts available on https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts?q=youtube+shorts

Greasyfork restricts what 3rd party libraries can be pulled in + you have the option of disabling automatic updates in your userscript manager.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#292

Post by kspacewalk2 »

AlienRobot wrote: post #146
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 go to TikTok, shorts. I go to Youtube, shorts. I go to Instagram, shorts. I go to Facebook, shorts. I go to Imgur, shorts. I go to Pinterest, no shorts because it only plays 1 video per screen, but on mobile the screen is smaller so, shorts. I go to Reddit, shorts. I go to Bluesky, shorts. I don't go to Twitter. Tumblr is probably the only social media that isn't filled with vertical videos and that has an algorith…

I guess the likes of Youtube and Facebook are trying unsuccessfully to replicate TikTok. This is effort #2 for Facebook, which is/was also trying unsuccessfully to replicate Youtube with their take on some-attention-span-needed videos.

(Seriously though... Facebook's video playback UI. What the fuck is that? Why is it so bad?)

I guess they don't get that there's going to be only one winner in each niche, unless TikTok goes down for political/national security reasons. Why do I need Youtube shorts if I have TikTok? Why do I need Google+ if I have Facebook? Why do I want Facebook videos if I have Youtube? Unsolved puzzle.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#293

Post by dylan604 »

nanna wrote: post #170
AlienRobot wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I go to TikTok, shorts. I go to Youtube, shorts. I go to Instagram, shorts. I go to Facebook, shorts. I go to Imgur, shorts. I go to Pinterest, no shorts because it only plays 1 video per screen, but on mobile the screen is smaller so, shorts. I go to Reddit, shorts. I go to Bluesky, shorts. I don't go to Twitter. Tumblr is probably the only social media that isn't filled with vertical videos and that has an algorith…

I go to HN, text. Hallelujah.

Waiting for the Show HN browser extension that reformats all HN posts to fit into a shorts frame. Then rather than just displaying the text, it puts it in an annoying animated font. Maybe even adds an AI character to read it to you

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#294

Post by titzer »

swatcoder wrote: post #100
Starlevel004 wrote: post #40

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!

> Do what I tell you to do! Maybe a good opportunity to remember that you watching the videos you want to watch is actually just a workaround Google suffers through in the YouTube product. They have to do it so that you come to the site, but it costs them money and makes it harder for them to optimize the revenue they get from your eyeballs. Strycturally, their goal is to push the line as far as they can, and they sp…

> is actually just a workaround Google suffers through in the YouTube product.

It used to be a Google mantra that "focus on the user and all else will follow." They are so far beyond that they've wrapped around. They actively hate users now.

All Google really cares about is making advertisers happy. Literally nothing else registers as a priority.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#295

Post by jsheard »

leptons wrote: post #285
jsheard wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on how you do it, loading="lazy" helps a bit, but the iframe still gets loaded when it enters the viewport even if the user has no intention of watching the video. The best approach is to initially show a fake facade of the player and only swap in the real iframe after the user interacts with it, which is what Google recommends doing in that article.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#296

Post by dylan604 »

jmb99 wrote: post #225
jsheard wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>What on the YouTube home page could possibly require 12MB of JS alone?

all of the code that hoovers up your analytics on what's been looked at, what's been scrolled past, etc. maybe I'm just jaded, but I'd suspect so much of it is nothing but tracking and does little for making the site function

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#297

Post by PaulHoule »

npteljes wrote: post #185
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.

Not a chance. YouTube needs shorts so that they can compete with TikTok. They HAVE to put it in front of everybody so that they can leverage their existing, vast userbase to quickly bootstrap such a product. It's a fight for market relevance for them. You will most likely not see them let that go.

My experience is that if you have a population doing some activity online it is self-perpetuating

https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/the-flywheel.html

and you might think, "I have (say) N=250,000 people playing game A and I can get them playing game B" you are probably going to be disappointed and very lucky if you get somewhere between 250 and 2500 of them playing your new game.

The two-sided market that makes YouTube impossible to dethrone makes it just as hard to change direction. For one thing you have to change the behavior of the viewers, but you also have to change the behavior of the creators, who know how to make videos, who know how to monetize them, all of that.

Myself I find I don't have a big attention span for short videos. I mean, Chinese girls doing the robot turn on my mirror neurons as much as anything. I can watch a 30 second video and get 30 seconds of fun but I don't want to watch another and another and another. However I cannot get enough of Techmoan talking about tape decks and such

https://www.youtube.com/user/techmoan

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#299

Post by WillPostForFood »

toxik wrote: post #284
AlfredBarnes wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Triggering autoplay by accidentally hovering does add videos to your history though, which is annoying.
Post reply on HN