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Someone at YouTube needs glasses

jayd.ml

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Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#541

Post by hombre_fatal »

puttycat wrote: post #6

The YouTube abominations keep piling up: Vertical videos on a desktop, endless ads (thanks to the Chrome manifest change that disables decent adblockers), useless feed. I highly recommend installing an extension that hides the home feed and sidebar recommendations, which at least makes YT non-distracting again.

Been looking for a comment to post my own pet peeve under:

Pausing a Youtube video overlays the video with a row of more video recommendations.

So if I'm pausing the video to see something in the video, video thumbnails are in the way.

This happens in the Roku app and sometimes in the desktop browser, but for some reason I couldn't trigger it when I tested it just now. Maybe one of my extensions blocks it.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#542

Post by sans_souse »

Biggest gripes: 1) touch screen nav on a user profile is nearly impossible to scroll vertically, as any left/right movements will cause you to jump sections (videos→playlists, etc)

2) Windowed mini-viewer (is a total PITA)

3) The "full screen" mode never seems to lign up where I'm either cropping part of the picture out or I have some stupid white slider-looking thing in one corner of my screen.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#543

Post by fuzztester »

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 too found that my auto play setting was ignored. this is in the YT app.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#544

Post by curtis3389 »

behringer wrote: post #519
kevincox wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Careful there are programmers here watching. Pretend to like the bird.

Hey! Don't blame us programmers for new features! We don't usually write the user stories!

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#545

Post by crtasm »

Arnavion wrote: post #452
crtasm wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Doesn't seem to work for any of the ~50 URLs I tried with. Eg: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCS0N5ba... ... works but: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UULFS0N5... ... is 404. I'm guessing it's only a feature of playlist URLs which that SO answer is about, not RSS feed URLs.

Sorry, my notes were lacking. Change UC to UULF and use it with this URL to get the Videos feed for a channel:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULFS0N...

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#546

Post by nullc »

OJFord wrote: post #279
nullc wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The no recommendations at all sure feels like malicious compliance with California privacy law. Even while pretending they've not recorded your viewing history they could still make recommendations from your subscriptions or give you the same glurg that they give viewers they know nothing about... but instead they break the site. It's still better than having shorts on the screen.

Yup yup yup. If you actually care about recommending things I'll want to watch, my subscriptions list is the strongest signal there is anyway , surely!

If they give you want you want you might just enjoy it and leave satisfied. They don't want you to leave, what you want is largely immaterial except as an input to the machine designed to brainwash you into staying.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#547

Post by fuzztester »

Levitating wrote: post #86
tambourine_man wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> It resets itself every 15 days or so Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?

not op, but have seen the same.

this is quite bad behaviour.

they should not sneakily change our preferences behind the backs. similarly, all notifications, advertisements, et cetera, should be opt in, not opt out.

many of these cos. do this sort of thing, of course.

they excuse it under the protect of company policy.

Google the ant letter as an example.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#548

Post by jaydenmilne »

odo1242 wrote: post #330
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…

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 vide…

I've done this. For example, here's some handycam HI8 footage of STS-106 and a launch tower tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq2eye32EA8

Filmed in HI8 480p, but YouTube's 480p looks like mud and doesn't do the uncompressed analog source justice. You can see this when you select 4K

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#549

Post by fuzztester »

PaulHoule wrote: post #362
xp84 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word "want" is the key there -- they have zero interest in what you 'want' to watch, they have every interest in what will compel you to watch for the longest time! Maybe a certain person wants to watch a few 2-minute cute cat videos, and subscribe to those exclusively. But research showed Google that those people's watch minutes per day can be tripled if you fill their homepage with "Trump did WHAT?" videos (or…

Short term yes, but long term it turns people away from YouTube. A year ago, I had a serious YouTube habit, once I replaced my trash Jellyfin server with a Plex server I can listen to my music collection on my phone anywhere… so no more music from YouTube. I got tired of asmongold and all his imitator gaming YouTubers, fell out of the habit of watching Ukraine warbloggers, etc. I saw other people who got into toxic r…

>Short term yes, but long term it turns people away from YouTube

for some people, like me, for example, it turns them away even in the short term, and also in the permanent term, so to speak ha ha, not only in/after the long term.

because, you know, we know our rights and likes. and we wrong and dislike people who disrespect them! :) choice of rhyming words used for effect, but the point is also true.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#550

Post by moon2 »

> Unfortunately, using an advanced analytics package I’ve projected that around May 2026 the YouTube homepage will just be one video

Algorithm will be 50/50 - it could either be gore or AI slop.

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