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Ask HN: New YouTube hover feature? Does anyone else find this annoying?

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Re: Ask HN: New YouTube hover feature? Does anyone else find this annoying?

#51
post #10

People do quite a bit of complaining about the YouTube main page but I can honestly say that I have never once intentionally used it. Why would people go there?

I don't have a Alphabet or Google or YouTube account, and I greatly dislike the company, but I will say that their recommendations are usually pretty good.

Re: Ask HN: New YouTube hover feature? Does anyone else find this annoying?

#52

"Does anyone else find this annoying as hell?" I find it annoying that an unpleasant user experience is generally viewed solely as a problem of the particular website and not a problem of the software available to access websites. For example, the user cannot simply switch to a browser that only supports a subset of the HTML protocol, e.g., one that does not support autoplay. Instead users must expend energy to try t…

> I do not use a browser to interact with YouTube. … so you use command line?

that makes sense assuming they just YouTube-dl the videos they want to watch... Certainly not my preferred method but you do you.

Re: Ask HN: New YouTube hover feature? Does anyone else find this annoying?

#53
post #42

Alternative to YouTube (same content, better UX/UI/frontend): https://invidious.io/ https://yewtu.be/

Thanks! I appreciate this! Does it use the same recommendation algorithm? I don't have a YouTube account but (sadly) do still watch a lot of the recommended videos

No, I think there are fewer and different videos in the sidebar.

Re: Ask HN: New YouTube hover feature? Does anyone else find this annoying?

#54

I quite like it, after having seen it in the, ahem, adult spaces . But seriously though, it's a good enough feature for just checking out whether a video is interesting enough to watch or whether the title and thumbnail are just clickbait, which they often are for making the creators money. It saves me a click or new tab which is even more annoying than hovering over a video.

They're also experimenting with rolling out 'most watched' graphs on the timebar when you're seeking in a video so you can see which parts are the most popular.

Personally I'm all for it. It's kind of embarrassing for Youtube to be lacking good usability features that adult entertainment sites have.

Re: Ask HN: New YouTube hover feature? Does anyone else find this annoying?

#55

"Does anyone else find this annoying as hell?" I find it annoying that an unpleasant user experience is generally viewed solely as a problem of the particular website and not a problem of the software available to access websites. For example, the user cannot simply switch to a browser that only supports a subset of the HTML protocol, e.g., one that does not support autoplay. Instead users must expend energy to try t…

> I do not use a browser to interact with YouTube. … so you use command line?

Yes, I search from command line, get JSON returned. Extract info I need from JSON, titles, descriptions, URLs, etc., and then download videos from command line, using tiny shell scripts. (I do not use youtube-dl because I rarely ever need to download videos that use a dynamically-generated sig value.) Additionally, I have scripts to download lists of all videos from any given YouTube channel. No browser or Javascript needed.

Re: Ask HN: New YouTube hover feature? Does anyone else find this annoying?

#57
post #48

You can disable it with the "inline playback" toggle here: https://www.youtube.com/account_playback If you don't happen to be in some or other test group, that is. No guarantees :) Absolutely maddening that feature.

Perfect! Thank you.

Re: Ask HN: New YouTube hover feature? Does anyone else find this annoying?

#58
I like the autoplay feature(already existed before this recent change), but I'm not a fan of it making it bigger.

The biggest problem I have with it, seems to be a bug, middle/command clicking the video, will often(not always) open the video in both a new tab, and the existing tab, when what it should be doing is only opening it in the new tab.

Re: Ask HN: New YouTube hover feature? Does anyone else find this annoying?

#59

I quite like it, after having seen it in the, ahem, adult spaces . But seriously though, it's a good enough feature for just checking out whether a video is interesting enough to watch or whether the title and thumbnail are just clickbait, which they often are for making the creators money. It saves me a click or new tab which is even more annoying than hovering over a video.

> I quite like it, after having seen it in the, ahem, adult spaces. Those of us old enough to have witnessed the early days of YouTube remember that their previous video-preview-on-hover feature was also lifted directly from those same adult spaces :)

I remember attempts were made to improve upon by actually following through video contents and adding it to watch history, which not many in that industry did, if any, and were soon reverted back to exact same style as used in the said industry. I thought YouTube one upped the game, but they didn't. That was interesting.
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