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Someone at YouTube needs glasses

jayd.ml

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Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#301

Post by titzer »

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.

Webpages are dumptrucks for every bad feature anyone ever thought up and are in a constant state of trying to re-framework their way out of the complete mess of utils that get shipped by default. Need a gadget that implements eye tracking via sidechannels? Yeah, they got that. And then justify that with "analytics" or anti-fraud and abuse, and no "click jacking" or whatever crap, and roll it times 1000.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#302

Post by dylan604 »

silisili wrote: post #256
ChuckMcM wrote: post #240

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 wi…

> Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't see how anyone can stand it anymore.

when you're not an old, and this is all you know, you just accept it without knowing that there was a better world back when the olds were young. not being able to accept this really shows how old man yells get off my lawn you are. YT is not trying to capture you, and probably doesn't care one bit about olds. it's the younger crowds that have been given YT as an absentee parent/babysitter that they have been able to set their hooks in from the beginning. that's the group that will be making them money for years to come

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#303

Post by Agingcoder »

nobodywasishere wrote: post #130
PaulHoule wrote: post #96

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

This is what I’ve done - YouTube is a much better place now.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#304

Post by jmkni »

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.

Except the results will be what the algorithm has determined that people accessing from your IP address at your location using your exact version of your browser on your exact version of your operating system on a screen with your exact width and height and pixel resolution are into lol

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#305

Post by titzer »

pizzathyme wrote: post #112

I always laugh at these shots from the hip criticizing YouTube and Google. As though Google doesn't have a entire team of data scientists and top tier engineers managing this experiment and driving it to optimal results. (Spoiler: they do) If you don't like the service, you can stop using it. And if you do, they have already factored that into their metrics guardrail, and it was the right decision.

Yes, exactly, like the entire marketing team for buggies around 1910. They really figured out what people wanted.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#306

Post by nerdsniper »

princevegeta89 wrote: post #253
matsemann wrote: post #166

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…

This is also an issue on desktop web. YT will arbitrarily change the quality/resolution but doesn’t update the selector displayed in the UI. So for every single video I have to select 4K just in case YT might be serving it at 1080p or some other resolution even though it displays “4K” on the UI element.

Also the compression algorithm is very aggressive and it works reasonably well for general content but for edge cases (like starcraft streams), the 1080p loses enough details to make it hard to see important things like observers and outlines of individual units in crowded clusters. The compression algorithm just isn’t trained/tuned for these types of content, so even on a 1080p screen I need to stream at 4K just to see the details properly.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#308

Post by ibejoeb »

herpdyderp wrote: post #4

You can insert (and tweak) this into uBlock Origin filters: ! YouTube Fix & Customization by Arch v1.8.4 ! (1/11) YouTube 4 Videos Per Row Fix (Home and Channel Pages) / YouTube Fix & Customization 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: 5 !important;) youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-rende…

This filter list is the most up-to-date that I've found to hide shorts with uBlock Origin:

https://github.com/Harren06/ublock-yt-shorts

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#309

Post by [deleted] »

voytec wrote: post #18

FYI: YouTube provides RSS feed for every channel. The URL is as follows: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID And without downloading with yt-dlp, videos can be watched from youtube-nocookie.com in full-window mode (no distractions) under: https://cinemaphile.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID

[deleted]

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#310

Post by zoogeny »

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!

> You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations

This has become increasingly annoying for me. Sometimes I want to find a reference I saw a few years ago on some topic. Even if I know the speaker, the topic, sometimes even the title, I can't find the video. I get a handful of results vaguely related to the search terms and then a never ending list of garbage not even slightly related to my search terms.

I really want my own memory augmentation. A personal tracker for all of the content I have ever consumed in any form, indexed and searchable (like in a personal Elastic Search cluster). The trouble is, I only want it for like 1% of the content I have consumed. The modern web is so hostile in general that aggregating any kind of data about my own usage is so onerous that it might as well be impossible. The friction they have purposefully created worked exactly as they intended.

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