I’ve also noticed YouTubes lack of attention to finding me new videos that aren’t maybe in a category I’ve watched before. I find my homepage filled with videos I’ve seen before or just the same categories churning similar videos. Similar to Spotify, the app struggles to push new music and instead just regurgitates old music I’ve previously listened. I don’t get the same refreshing/random feeling YouTube created before.
Someone at YouTube needs glasses
671–680 of 720 posts
Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses
#672Earlier quoted context omitted.
First it was "hide shorts". Then it was "hide shorts for X days" (I think 30?). Now it is "show fewer shorts".
There is an 'unhook' add-on for Firefox that blocks all shorts forever. Highly recommended.
I wish there was something like this for safari on macos.
Lately the option to disable ambient lighting around video has been reseting to ON for me on every video I open.
I cant even formulate how I feel about that without breaking some rules somewhere
Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses
#673The worst thing about YouTube in 2025 is auto-translation. Whoever is behind this doesn’t seem to understand that many people outside the US actually understand two languages rather well. In my case: German and English. I don’t want either to be translated to the other, but no chance. If you switch languages in the UI, you will get the garbage translated titles.
And the auto-dubbing introduced these last weeks makes it so much worse.
Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses
#674YouTube overall quality has been in a slow decline for the last several years and I'm sure it has to do with $$.
The UI is slower in almost all aspects, the grid mentioned here isn't even aligned properly. Playback buttons are slow to respond to hovers and clicks and the 1080p quality is no longer a "true" 1080p quality.
Don't even get me started with shorts because while the baseline functionality of it works, its pretty buggy for what it is. Maybe they are just too busy with scaling the entire thing that UI is an afterthought because the basic functionality is there and now its profits over quality.
Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses
#675I’ve also noticed YouTubes lack of attention to finding me new videos that aren’t maybe in a category I’ve watched before. I find my homepage filled with videos I’ve seen before or just the same categories churning similar videos. Similar to Spotify, the app struggles to push new music and instead just regurgitates old music I’ve previously listened. I don’t get the same refreshing/random feeling YouTube created befo…
As a user, I'm under the impression YouTube uses click follow-through for algorithm feedback. For the past two years, I've consistently gotten more random content with ~100 views suggested to me in the side bar. I often click and check it out. Maybe prime the pump by diving for some random vids?
Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses
#676For 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. THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS. This has been one of the most frustrating things I run into with Youtube scrolling the page. Can’t leave your cursor on the page while scrolling without managing to have the spacing shift the thumbnails just so slightly so that your cursor lands back into a thumbnail for an autoplay to start and add to the metrics.
Because of excessive things like this, I often point at my screen with a pen now and leave the mouse alone. Or take notes on a different laptop to avoid this stuff.
Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses
#677Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tell your product owners that they should actually use the product they’re owning. And not just use it, but be a power user of that tool. Not a professional user, not a casual user; use the tool at least six hours a day. I use YouTube 6+ hours a day and I have for probably 10 years, and I don’t even work there. (I have a few annoying personality limitations which make it so that I usually work better with YouTube on…
>Tell your product owners that they should actually use the product they’re owning I did. Not that anyone listened tho.
What shocked me in the aughts was how bad Lotus Notes was. I was pretty sure that the average IBM executive wasn't using the average version of it.
Using the most commonly version of the product, on the commonly used hardware, at least 2 days a week should be a prerequisite for every product owner.
Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses
#678They trying to turn all video platform UX into reels/shorts/tiktoks. Hell theyre even shooting movies on verticle IMAX cameras now for better translation to phones.
They would rather focus your attention on a single short video you can lock into and then transfer that focus to an ad suddenly. Its perfect for their business model.
Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses
#679Earlier quoted context omitted.
The annoying bit is similar to reels, shorts are good for engagement. It’s similar to why I don’t buy Oreos. I like Oreos, everyone likes Oreos - they’re engineered to be liked, but they’re bad for you. The best way to not eat them is to not have them in the house. Short form videos are the heroin of media consumption - meta having to pivot instagram to it is because they’re facing competitive pressure. Same with You…
IDK a lot of how-to and the like videos I watch can probably be distilled into 30seconds or less. Long form content (i.e. Veritasium) are nice for sure, but some of it suffers from fluff too.
There's a difference between useful 30 second tutorials/how-tos and 99.99% of short form content which is brain rot designed to hook into you and keep you mindlessly scrolling - whether it's out of rage or joy. All they care about is eyeballs on screen no matter how it happens.
When I say I don't like short-form video content, I typically mean the tiktok-influenced infinite scrolling algorithm-driven video wall of videos. Where you might click on one thing that looks useful or interesting on your home page and without even thinking about it you start swiping through the videos and suddenly you emerge an hour later form a brain rot video fueled fever dream, with no idea how you just lost an hour of your life to useless shit online.
At least losing an hour to video games or reading online might leave you with a sense of accomplishment or satisfaction. I have never felt anything positive after binging on social media videos.
Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses
#680FYI: YouTube provides RSS feed for every channel. The URL is as follows: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID And without downloading with yt-dlp, videos can be watched from youtube-nocookie.com in full-window mode (no distractions) under: https://cinemaphile.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID
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…
> DF Tube extension
This extension is no longer available because it doesn't follow best practices for Chrome extensions.
:(