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

491–500 of 720 posts

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#491

Post by PeeMcGee »

kevincox wrote: post #463
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…

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.

Thank you for that.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#492

Post by ars »

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.

That's the full YouTube player - you were assuming it just has the code for the homepage, but actually it gets the entire player right at the start.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#493

Post by adolph »

morsch wrote: post #440
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…

YMMV. If I trigger autoplay, it's almost always on purpose, and I tend to read the subtitles. Jumping into the video right where I was works well for me! Losing my position would be very annoying.

Also you can preview the video without taking an ad hit. Clearly the stable genius behind previews has left some revenue on the table.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#494

Post by dang »

jeffbee wrote: post #428
dang wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could I implore you to please stop breaking the site guidelines? I don't have the energy to even list all the times we've asked you already. I don't want to ban you, but you're making it increasingly difficult not to. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Ah yes, but front-paging a headline that implies colleagues at YouTube are blind, that establishes a tone of reasoned civil discourse?

Pointing the finger at others isn't helpful.

You have a history of abusing HN and we need you to stop doing that. You also have a history of posting good things, which is why I'd prefer not to ban you.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#495

Post by gtowey »

Root_Denied wrote: post #434
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 infuriating that a plugin/extension is needed to bring back what should be the a setting, if not the default, in the UI for this.

This is inevitable when a company has a revenue model where they claim to serve both users and advertisers. The wants of each will always be diametrically opposed. The customer with the deepest pockets always wins, which are the advertisers.

I'm also starting to think that no large company will ever act in the best interest of their customers unless required to do so by regulation. As long as those customers are individuals.

Maybe the regulation we need is that companies like Google can't have "ad supported" products that are simultaneously sold as products to users. Either you're selling a product to users, or really running an advertising platform. It can't be both.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#497

Post by littlekey »

therein wrote: post #393
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you don't buy Oreos, and think the best way to eat them is not to have them in the house. I agree. That's why I don't have TikTok on my phone. So why can't I keep YouTube Shorts disabled? I'm telling them I don't want it. If I'm the kind of person who doesn't keep Oreos in the house to avoid eating them, why would I go to a grocery store that insists on slipping a pack of Oreos into every third bag of carrots?

It all checks out if you recognize YouTube clearly doesn't consider the app and the website to be your turf. You are in their home, they have oreos all over the place and they will offer it to you over and over again. You'll ask if they have water, they'll bring it with a box of oreos. You'll ask where the bathroom is, and find an Oreo waiting for you by the sink in case you'd like to indulge.

>find an Oreo waiting for you by the sink in case you'd like to indulge.

this is a hilarious image. "ooh, don't mind if i do".

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#498

Post by jacobgkau »

Nathan2055 wrote: post #374
nerdsniper wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The desktop issue was an intentional change that happened sometime in like 2017 or so. The original functionality of the quality selector was to throw out whatever video had been buffered and start redownloading the video in the newly selected quality. All well and good, but that causes a spinning circle until enough of the new video arrives. The "new" functionality is to instead keep the existing quality video in th…

> In general, it's a behavior that seems to come from the fairly widespread mid-2010s UX theory that it's better to degrade service or even freeze entirely than to show a loading screen of some kind.

> It's the same kind of thought process that led to the YouTube mobile app getting an unskippable splash screen animation last year; to the average person, it feels like the app loads much faster now. It doesn't, of course, it's just firing off the home page requests in the background while the locally available animation plays, but the user sees a thing rather than a blank screen while it loads, which tricks the brain into thinking it's loading faster.

So they decided it's better to show lower-quality content (or not update the screen) than a loading screen, and it's the same school of thought that led to a loading screen being implemented? I agree both examples could be seen as intended to make things "feel" faster, but it seems like two different philosophies towards that.

(Also, I remember when quality changes didn't take effect immediately, but I've been seeing them take effect immediately and discard the buffer for at least the past few years-- at least when going from "Auto" that it always selects for me to the highest-available quality.)

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#499

Post by littlekey »

mrweasel wrote: post #423
SurgeArrest wrote: post #417

Can I also have an option to block/disable all YouTube Shorts on AppleTV and Samsung TV apps? Shorts is the biggest disservice to civilization - promoting time-wasting behaviours. Also, promoting 10-20 minute videos with 2-5 minutes of content is also wasteful. Most videos are extended to 10-20 minutes just to be recommended by YouTube. Finally, videos with AI voice, which I hope can be easily detected, need to have…

Also add a "stolen content" option for reporting. There is an insane amount of content that has been blatantly ripped of from others to produce cheap AI generated Shorts. Unless you own the stolen content, there's nothing you can do, even if it's clearly an Instagram video or a Reddit posts run through an AI. Short form content, especially combined with AI is an abomination foisted upon this world in search of a meag…

Yeah I learned early on with "engagement" is that the only winning move is not to play. Just ignore the voting arrows, and definitely don't leave a comment on the video.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#500

Post by parsimo2010 »

Obviously the model at the end of the post is a joke, but it implies that after September 2026 there will be negative videos on the screen. What does it even mean to be a negative video? There will be videos, but mirrored? There will be videos but the colors will be reversed? Will they play backwards? Is a negative video where multiple ads overlap each other?
Post reply on HN