Someone at YouTube needs glasses • Hacker News Board

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#461

Post by droopyEyelids » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 8:28 PM UTC

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #352

titzer wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If people stop watching, advertisers will not be happy Unfortunately this seems to be what people want. There's plenty of YouTube competitors (Substack, Patreon, Vimeo, Twitch etc.) Unfortunately, they just don't have the traction of YouTube

I think we need to be careful with the language like “this is what the users want” when something along the lines of “this is what triggers of pattern of compulsive behavior in users” is closer to the truth

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#462

Post by hbn » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 8:33 PM UTC

tambourine_man wrote: post #73

rozab wrote: 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.

I set that a long time ago and it never disabled. Maybe something with your browser?

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#463

Post by kevincox » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 8:35 PM UTC

matsemann wrote: post #166

rozab wrote: 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…

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…

I call these features "dead birds" because they remind me of gifts that an outdoor cat will leave on your doorstep. They took quite the effort to do and were made with good intention, but ultimately I don't want them.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#464

Post by debunn » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 8:36 PM UTC

I wonder if this reduction in videos on screen is a result of an experiment due to "The Paradox of Choice" / "Choice Overload"?

https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/economics/the-par...

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#465

Post by npteljes » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 8:37 PM UTC

amluto wrote: post #234

npteljes wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Someone may believe this, but it’s utter nonsense. The users who don’t want to see shorts aren’t using TikTok . This would be like Starbucks randomly serving tea to 20% of customers who order coffee because they want to compete more effectively with Lipton. That’s not how competition works.

I don't think so. I think users who don't want to see shorts, and aren't using TikTok are a minority. Short form video is hugely popular. And even if they are not in a minority, it doesn't really matter (to YouTube), because they are not going anywhere - there is nowhere to go.

The analogy fails as well. It would be more like Starbucks asking every customer whether they want tea as well. And I imagine that whichever tea company is partnered with Starbucks at that point is going to be very happy. Product bundling works very well, especially in cases like this, when an established giant decides that they are going now offer the thing as well. YouTube Music worked the same.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#466

Post by Root_Denied » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 8:38 PM UTC

efields wrote: post #430

I believe YouTube is crushing it as a content provider. I assume they have the resources to measure _everything_. They know what they're doing. Your use case may be desirable, but they've determined it's not profitable.

> Your use case may be desirable, but they've determined it's not profitable.

This right here is the crux of the problem - profitability rules over any and all functionality.

Even in a scenario where a given design/layout was universally desirable, it will lose out to a design that is more optimal for revenue generation.

Ok, yes, Google is a company that needs to make money, but changes that optimize for revenue over usability have a strong chance of a domino effect down the line of a dwindling user base paying an increasing cost to use a service that is no longer worth it.

> I assume they have the resources to measure _everything_.

I don't disagree with this assessment, but I believe it just means that they know where the inflection point is between functionality (driving engagement and retention) and revenue (increased at the expense of retention and engagement) and try and ride that intersection to maximize both.

> I believe YouTube is crushing it as a content provider.

There's an argument to be made here that YouTube just doesn't have any real competition due to the infrastructural requirements being so heavy and the network effect of having so many people using the platform, and that's different than doing well enough to be able to compete in an environment that had more competition.

Put another way, the way YouTube is run works great up until you have an actual competitor operating at the same scale, at which point it falls over, as opposed to one that could effectively compete against another service.

This feeds back into the point about riding that curve of revenue vs. functionality. If you're right at the intersection of that curve you have very little flexibility with which to adjust in competition with another entity. This just points YouTube believing (not unreasonably so) that they're an effective monopoly and don't need to worry about competition, so it doesn't enter into their calculations. They may never need to worry about it.

None of that is the same thing as being a "good" or "optimal" service for users, and you can't really "crush it" when there's no one of a similar size within the space to compare against.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#467

Post by mcpar-land » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 8:39 PM UTC

debunn wrote: post #464

I wonder if this reduction in videos on screen is a result of an experiment due to "The Paradox of Choice" / "Choice Overload"? https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/economics/the-par...

The extra time required to scroll through the giant thumbnails turned into "we saw a XX% increase in engagement time when we A/B tested larger thumbnails!"

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#468

Post by kcb » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 8:42 PM UTC

jaggs wrote: post #160

I hate to be that guy, but how many of us are actually paying for this service? Yeah we pay with ads and attention, but is there another company that's prepared to store over 500 hours of new content every single minute? Yeah it sucks, but free is as free does.

many of us, YouTube Premium is pretty popular.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#469

Post by MyFedora » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 8:42 PM UTC

gorbachev wrote: post #426

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…

You assume the UX team has any say in any of this. Some of the revelations from the various lawsuits against Google by the US and other governments over the years have been about this. The company replaced leaders who cared about users with leaders who cared about revenue optimization and those leaders changed the direction of the company to what we all see in all of their products these days.