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Someone at YouTube needs glasses

jayd.ml

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Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#321

Post by drewbeck »

InMice wrote: post #49

Thank you for writing this post! I opened youtube a few days ago to this as well. On a 24" 1440p monitor its ridiculous. It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this. Thank you again for writing this post. After searching it seems like they've been "testing" this in segments for a while now. As a result I installed the "Control Panel for Yo…

"It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this."

Unfortunately UX teams aren't actually paid to make great UX, especially at large corps and any place ad-driven. They're paid to move the metrics and move the revenue line.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#322

Post by ssalazar »

Some of this is probably driven by mobile usage and unifying the experience between mobile desktop. But the truth is a team almost certainly tested this and measured an improvement of some topline performance metric. (Hacker News articles comparing YT before and after screenshots is not one of their topline metrics.)

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#323

Post by Agingcoder »

titzer wrote: post #273

Well, I've been holding this one in for a while but now's the time, so it's flame on. YouTube sucks so bad. On the one hand, you have the amazing engineering prowess, enormous hardware resources, reliability and scaling of Google. The amount of sheer bandwidth of video that YouTube can pump is absolutely staggering. Having to deal with fraud, abuse, content moderation, copyright disputes, and to create an ecosystem t…

First of all , I agree with all your points. I used to not use YouTube because it was unusable ( try to watch an educational video when you get interrupted every 5 minutes …). Most of my problems got fixed by paying for YouTube premium, and disabling search history, much to my surprise. It’s expensive though, and it won’t solve everything, but it makes YouTube significantly better.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#324

Post by pwg »

InMice wrote: post #49

Thank you for writing this post! I opened youtube a few days ago to this as well. On a 24" 1440p monitor its ridiculous. It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this. Thank you again for writing this post. After searching it seems like they've been "testing" this in segments for a while now. As a result I installed the "Control Panel for Yo…

Most likely what happened is some MBA ran a short A/B test of smaller vs. bigger video thumbnails, and the A/B results showed more "engagement" with the larger size thumbs, and so, of course, to meet his/her performance goals, the MBA had the page altered to the version that showed "more engagement".

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#325

Post by boramalper »

bluGill wrote: post #132
sailfast wrote: post #35

So who is building their competitor? Any shot in hell at this because of their huge library?

Peertube is trying. There are a bunch of different servers with some interesting content. Some is the keyword here. As you say youtube's huge library is a hard thing to compete with. Still I've found some good content there and I make it a point to look at peertube first to reward those who are there with my eyes.

I wish PeerTube had a "flagship" instance like mastodon.social [0] for Mastodon or lemmy.world [1] for Lemmy. The lack of a generalist instance with open sign-ups hinders the adoption.

[0] https://mastodon.social/

[1] https://lemmy.world/

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#326

Post by titzer »

Agingcoder wrote: post #323
titzer wrote: post #273

Well, I've been holding this one in for a while but now's the time, so it's flame on. YouTube sucks so bad. On the one hand, you have the amazing engineering prowess, enormous hardware resources, reliability and scaling of Google. The amount of sheer bandwidth of video that YouTube can pump is absolutely staggering. Having to deal with fraud, abuse, content moderation, copyright disputes, and to create an ecosystem t…

First of all , I agree with all your points. I used to not use YouTube because it was unusable ( try to watch an educational video when you get interrupted every 5 minutes …). Most of my problems got fixed by paying for YouTube premium, and disabling search history, much to my surprise. It’s expensive though, and it won’t solve everything, but it makes YouTube significantly better.

I object to YouTube premium as it amounts to extortion. It's a reward for making a product worse. What a perverse incentive system, and we shouldn't let them get away with it.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#327

Post by Fiely »

crtasm wrote: post #312
Fiely wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past several months, I've moved to using an RSS Reader + Watch Later Playlist + DF Tube extension (you could use whatever to nuke parts of the UI you dislike). This has greatly improved how I use YouTube. This method allows me to be significantly more intentional with what I'm watching and how much time I'm spending. The only frustrating part is that YT shorts still come through RSS, but they are much easier t…

You can change the first 4 characters of the channel ID to UULF to only get "Videos" (no shorts) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71192605/how-do-i-get-yo...

This is very useful, thank you for sharing.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#328

Post by bloppe »

satiated_grue wrote: post #203
a123b456c wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't the new Chrome update break uBlock, or is that just for my test cell? I've been in mourning...

Yes, but it still works fine with Firefox.

That's not the only extension Firefox still allows that's blocked in Chrome. FF also blocks 3rd party cookies and has shown no interest in Google's "privacy sandbox" tracking features. Funny how much better a browser can be without a massive conflict of interest

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#329

Post by withinboredom »

dylan604 wrote: post #293
nanna wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

4.99 in the app store

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#330

Post by odo1242 »

nerdsniper wrote: post #306
princevegeta89 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cas…

Actually, when I uploaded stuff on YouTube I’d notice sometimes that it was best to, even if the source footage was 1080p, upscale / upload it at 4k or 8k resolution so that people with sufficiently good internet could view it without as much compression. (In fact, when the original video uploaded is upscaled to 4k, even the 1080p version of the final video looks closer to the source footage)

These were unlisted videos, so I’m not a YouTuber or anything, but I’m pretty sure this is one thing some people do to make their videos appear better sometimes

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