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Someone at YouTube needs glasses

jayd.ml

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Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#681

Post by dogleash »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #266
ashf023 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I find this so strange. Why not take the opportunity to throw a bunch of heavily cached shorts recommendations in our faces when signed out? I don't understand how the anon home page is not both a money maker and extremely cacheable and cheap to serve

The only explanation I can imagine is that the risk of turning someone off YouTube by showing them the "wrong" vidoes is worse than the views or attention capture lost this way. I can imagine my mom opening YouTube (hypothetically) for the first time and seeing an anime video, or my younger cousin being shown a Top Gear video, and them deciding that YouTube is "that app with the weird videos" that's not for them. It'…

Normies expect platforms to have a vibe that it's full of their kind of person, regardless of how many thousand/million/billion users it has.

It's a fundamentally broken understanding of internet communication, but catering to it is possible and profitable. (I've done it in moderating smaller communities. We've handed out undeserved and unjust bans because getting rid of a high profile nuisance is easy compared to convincing someone to stop getting one-guyed. We also kept the most toxic users around when they're crowd favorites.)

You're spot on. YouTube knows they're the boring old video platform, the bland safe-for-tv default homepage that would be shown to someone with no surveillance profile would only confirm it's not the platform for someone with their taste in TikTok slop.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#682

Post by marssaxman »

eatbitseveryday wrote: post #140
Levitating wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Many websites do this. Facebook resets your feed sorting preferences, as does LinkedIn (sort by Recent, then refresh the page, it will be Top again).

With Facebook, you can get around this by bookmarking https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr and going there instead. It's worked reliably for years - though there's now so little of value there it hardly matters, I suppose.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#683

Post by imbnwa »

chii wrote: post #628
chewbacha wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

were made with good intention Not always true.

The intention was that some product manager wanted their name/team to have made impact at the quarterly review.

Proliferation of middle management as a separate track killed software

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#684

Post by imbnwa »

amelius wrote: post #658
htx80nerd wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this. this is the story of the big company web sites - huge budget - best programmers - terrible design - terrible usability - doesnt make sense - gets worse over time it's unreal. seen on many major sites.

Yes, but they have the largest amount of video content, so they have us by the balls.

And yet they make searching that library as painful as it can be so they can funnel you into an engagement pit

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#685

Post by ChuckMcM »

silisili wrote: post #612
ChuckMcM wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This response captures it perfectly. I started at Google in 2006 and the "mini kitchens" (essentially a convenience mart) were just getting "re-organized" The new CFO was out to "cut unnecessary costs."[1] While Google was banking billions of dollars in "Free Cash Flow" every QUARTER than were cutting the 'unnecessary' costs that were something like $12,000 per employee per YEAR. So with 20,000 employees, that is abo…

This might be too deep for this thread, but... does it ever get better? Of course when I was a child my parents told me how much better my childhood was than theirs...cue uphill both ways stories. But I find myself telling my child the opposite. I'll tell her how Walmart used to answer the phone, JC Penney used to have associates that helped you in each department, Home Depot used to employ skilled workers to answer…

> This might be too deep for this thread, but... does it ever get better?

If I had to point to a single thing that is most indicative to the change-over from 'child' to 'adult' it would be the thought behind this question.

The answer is "it always gets different." Which is dissatisfying to the child who yearns for a parent to make things better, and engaging for an adult that realizes that nothing is forever and things change but they can be an agent for change.

That last bit, owning ones own agency, is where "it gets better" comes from. When you are a child it got better because your parents worked to make it better, their vision of what better was meant they were willing to invest their time, effort, and resources into changing things for the better. When you are the parent, then its on you.

They key difference between nostalgia and maturity is that the former works to recreate what had been before, where the latter works to change what is into something better. One of the services you can do for your child is to show them how "adults" make things better.

So it's interesting to look at "What gets better these days?"

Modern video games are way better than the video games of the 90's.

Putting together a complete computer you can learn to program on can be done for Making things out of plastic is accessible to everyone either by owning a 3D printer or borrowing one at the library or social club.

On line resources for learning any topic including taking college courses are free and easy to find.

Keeping in touch with your friends in "real time" is both trivial and multi-media.

Shopping is different with much of it online rather than in person. Is that better? Is that worse? Kind of a bit of both, but definitely different. The Internet is full of crap ads, which is different, but its a lot faster than it used to be, is that better? Is that worse? A bit of both and definitely different.

I was joking at a conference I attended last week that I remember when grown-ass men could make a living wage developing database software written in BASIC on what was essentially a giant Arduino with an 8 bit processor. Definitely different, and it was fun for them, but it wasn't necessarily different then grown people getting paid to write code in Javascript to make web pages look nice.

Here is the bottom line: Things get better because you, as the adult, work to make them better. The more effective your efforts, the more people will join you in helping you make things better. Conversely, if you do nothing, then things getting worse is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Change is endemic, without effort and maintenance, change tends toward decay.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#686

Post by godelski »

yusina wrote: post #663
godelski wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but this cop-out really pisses me off. It is far too common and frankly, unacceptable. It really is insulting that you'd expect others to accept this as a justification. It's a lazy dismissal and not even a proper excuse. You're excuse for doing something shitty is... that someone else will? What does another person even have to do with it?! Seriously, let them have the blood on their hands. You can't even…

Unsure why downvoted. To many tech folks just shrug an go with the flow even if it's a bad flow _and they know it_.

I suspect for the same reason the comments like I responded to were made: liking my comment means accepting that you are a willing participant in creating shit/harm.

But I still stand, you aren't mindless automata and your actions matter.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#687

Post by gsich »

Eavolution wrote: post #355

I found YouTube completely insufferable until installing ublock origin, sponsorblock, and youtube redux to return to a more old school interface. How a single website single-handedly justifies 3 extensions in my browser I will never know but those geniuses at google have managed it. Can't recommend youtube redux alongside disabling watch and search history highly enough.

Must have. I also recommend the addon to return dislikes.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#688

Post by leptons »

jsheard wrote: post #295
leptons wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We lazy-load Youtube iframes, fixes the problem pretty easily.

Depends on how you do it, loading="lazy" helps a bit, but the iframe still gets loaded when it enters the viewport even if the user has no intention of watching the video. The best approach is to initially show a fake facade of the player and only swap in the real iframe after the user interacts with it, which is what Google recommends doing in that article.

>but the iframe still gets loaded when it enters the viewport even if the user has no intention of watching the video

That doesn't affect page speed scores if the video is "below the fold", and that's all that I really care about. If Google Lighthouse doesn't complain about it, then my job is done.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#689

Post by padzochambers »

0hijinks wrote: post #675
padzochambers wrote: post #671

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 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?

Good shout man. I’ll keep an eye out for them.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#690

Post by autoexec »

al_borland wrote: post #460
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 This is unacceptable to me. I've turned this setting off more times than I care to count. I've submitted feedback a couple times as well. I don't remember doing it lately, which is good. But I should have only ever had to do it once. I have a Google account, there is no reason this setting shouldn't be saved with my accounts, synced to all my devices, and only set once. I pay fo…

> I pay for YouTube Premium

That's your mistake. Never pay someone to remove the same obstacles they've been putting in front of you. It's the definition of racketeering.

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