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 it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage. Often the video gets inexplicably added to my watch history, and if I do choose to click on it I have to go back to the beginning because I missed the start of the audio
matsemann · 3h ago
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 a stupid design.
Additionally there's a bug on the Android app that it sometimes doesn't show video titles (or the worlds worst A/B test?), so scrolling through I just see talking heads (since it autoplays instead of showing the video thumb) and have to force restart it to actually understand what's going on.
morsch · 26m ago
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.
mvdtnz · 39m ago
What's even more insane is that if you hover a video for 5 seconds it thinks you "watched" it and it goes into your watch history.
joezydeco · 26m ago
Does the creator get credit for that? I've got a few friends that need a few million views and I could easily write a mouse driver to take care of that.
princevegeta89 · 3h ago
Mobile? There's also another sneaky piece of crap Google pulls - even if you're a Premium user and set your video preferences to high quality, they only play videos for you at 480p, even though higher resolutions up to 4k are all available.
If you manually increase the quality on that video, it will only apply for that video, and whatever videos you play next, will still be limited to 480p.
All this is just to save costs..A truly fucking shady tactic to fuck over paying users. Fuck Google for what they do and how they cheat naive users.
nerdsniper · 2h ago
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 cases (like starcraft streams), the 1080p loses enough details to make it hard to see important things like observers and outlines of individual units in crowded clusters. The compression algorithm just isn’t trained/tuned for these types of content, so even on a 1080p screen I need to stream at 4K just to see the details properly.
Nathan2055 · 1h ago
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 the buffer and have all the new video coming in be set to the new quality. The idea is that you would have the video playing, change the quality, and it keeps playing until a few seconds later the new buffer hits and you jump up to the new quality level. Combined with the fact that YouTube only buffers a few seconds of video (a change made a few years prior to this; back in the Flash era YouTube would just keep buffering until you had the entire video loaded, but that was seen as a waste of both YouTube's bandwidth and the user's since there was always the possibility of the user clicking off the video; the adoption of better connection speeds, more efficient video codecs, and widespread and expensive mobile data caps led to that being seen as the better behavior for most people) and for most people, changing quality is a "transparent" operation that doesn't "interrupt" the video.
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 can also be seen in Chrome sometimes on high-latency connections: in some cases, Chrome will just stop for a few moments while performing DNS resolution or opening the initial connections rather than displaying the usual "slow light gray" loading circle used on that step, seemingly because some mechanism within Chrome has decided that the requests will probably return quickly enough for it to not be an issue. YouTube Shorts on mobile also has similar behavior on slow connections: the whole video player will just freeze entirely until it can start playing the video with no loading indicator whatsoever. Another example is Gmail's old basic HTML interface versus the modern AJAX one: an article which I remember reading, but can't find now found that for pretty much every use case the basic HTML interface was statistically faster to load, but users subjectively felt that the AJAX interface was faster, seemingly just because it didn't trigger a full page load when something was clicked on.
And, I mean, they're kind of right. It's nerds like us that get annoyed when the video quality isn't updated immediately, the average consumer would much rather have the video "instantly load" rather than a guarantee that the video feed is the quality you actually selected. 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.
This is also why Google's Lighthouse page loading speed algorithm prioritizes "Largest Contentful Paint" (how long does it take to get the biggest element on the page rendered), "Cumulative Layout Shift" (how much do things move around on the page while loading), and "Time to Interactive" (how long until the user can start clicking buttons) rather than more accurate but "nerdy" indicators like Time to First Byte (how long until the server starts sending data) or Last Request Complete (how long until all of the HTTP requests on a page are finished; for most modern sites, this value is infinity thanks to tracking scripts).
People simply prefer for things to feel faster, rather than for things to actually be faster. And, luckily for Internet companies, the former is usually much easier to achieve than the latter.
odo1242 · 2h ago
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 videos, so I’m not a YouTuber or anything, but I’m pretty sure this is one thing some people do to make their videos appear better sometimes
Gracana · 35m ago
This definitely works. I've uploaded 720p drone footage (which already looked pretty crappy), and youtube avc1-encodes it with low bandwidth settings. The video looks like absolute garbage. If I upscale it to 2k (it has to be above HD for this to work), youtube will vp09-encode it and use a significantly higher bitrate, and the resulting video retains most of the original detail. I consider this a requirement for all of my uploads.
I have Premium and I always get a high resolution, if my connection allows for it.
toxik · 3h ago
I get "premium 1080p" most of the time, but yeah not being able to set it directly is annoying.
Karsteski · 2h ago
This shit was one of the reasons I stopped paying for YouTube premium and went back to aggressively blocking all ads. You try to give them money and they spit in your face regardless.
princevegeta89 · 1h ago
I'm using Revanced - it removes a lot of shit like this.
numpad0 · 46m ago
That is what paperclip maximization does to your life. Stupid designs frustrate you more and make you engage more.
They're making slot machines, effectively.
AlfredBarnes · 3h ago
Also if you do watch shorts, they are ALL added to your liked Videos.
toxik · 3h ago
Uh no they're not
It's easy to like them by accident though
WillPostForFood · 3h ago
Triggering autoplay by accidentally hovering does add videos to your history though, which is annoying.
kotaKat · 4h ago
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.
jtbayly · 3h ago
I can’t think of other examples, but this exact problem is a constant frustration for me on multiple sites. I can’t scroll with my cursor on the page without crap happening that I don’t want to happen.
As to the reason, at least with Youtube and Facebook, the answer is obvious: they want to increase their ad revenue by claiming additional “plays” or “interactions” or whatever they want to call it today. I remember realizing several times over the years that I had been conned when I paid for ads. The top-level numbers looked good, but when I dug in, I realized they were all faked.
krisoft · 2h ago
> I can’t scroll with my cursor on the page without crap happening that I don’t want to happen.
Same stuff with the mobile youtube app. If you so much as graze the screen anywhere while watching a video the replay speed doubles. This is so sensitive that even a tiny unintentional finger touch, or a water droplet landing on the screen triggers it. Whoever thought that is a good idea as a feature, i can’t comprehend.
Plus they have no data to see how badly their feature annoys me. From a metrics perspective “the user wanted to fast forward for 5s” looks the same as “a careless finger cradling the phone triggered the fast forward and it took the user 5s to realise what is going on and adjust their hold, now they are annoyed at how fragile this app is”. Someone might have even used the statistics of all the inadvertent activations in their promo package to show what a popular feature they made!
eastbound · 16m ago
Couple this with the no-bezel iPhones, and there is no way to hold your phone without touching the screen and accelerating the video (or clicking on ads).
saratogacx · 12m ago
Put your mouse up in the header on or near the scrollbar, scrolling will flow below to the video list.
I have it turned on, but leave my mouse to the right of the screen if I don't want autoplay. It's habit now.
jaymzcampbell · 2h ago
This drives me absolutely nuts on Netflix too, perhaps more so.
gwbas1c · 4h ago
It's even worse on mobile. You don't even need to hover for an autoplay video to show in your history.
s3p · 3h ago
This may be a dumb question, but when you have video doing autoplay (as in the video starts playing while you're scrolling looking at multiple videos - you haven't clicked on one), does it show up in your watch history?
magackame · 3h ago
Just tested. If you hover for 10s+ then it does get added to your watch history.
EDIT: or did you mean on autoplay as in part of a playlist playing in the small player in the corner while you are on the home page?
tambourine_man · 4h ago
> 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.
delecti · 3h ago
That setting can be fairly sticky. Mine has stayed off since I initially disabled it, shortly after they added the "feature". I have no idea why it's not sticky for you. Maybe they fuck with me less because I have premium?
lolinder · 1h ago
I don't have premium and it's sticky for me but only on a single computer, I have to reset it if I switch computers or browsers. Same with dark mode. So maybe it's stored as a cookie and they wipe their cookies?
wpm · 13m ago
Yes, it's stored client-side in a cookie.
Surely you don't expect YouTube, a company that doesn't store any data at all actually, to be able to store a single boolean value somewhere in your account, do you? This would be impossible for a company as broke and small as YouTube.
Levitating · 4h ago
> It resets itself every 15 days or so
Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?
bunderbunder · 4h ago
Constantly. They also keep resetting the settings to not show shorts or video games in the feed.
I suspect that the managers in charge of some of these features are lobbying for it as a way to artificially increase the engagement stats for their features, but spinning it as actually being good UX instead of a user-hostile move because it's important for "discoverability" or something like that.
shrx · 3h ago
First it was "hide shorts".
Then it was "hide shorts for X days" (I think 30?).
Now it is "show fewer shorts".
cobbaut · 2h ago
There is an 'unhook' add-on for Firefox that blocks all shorts forever. Highly recommended.
PaulHoule · 4h ago
It seems to do that all the time. Try hiding YouTube shorts and they just come back.
nobodywasishere · 4h ago
If you turn off watch history it completely disables shorts as a whole (with no recommendations on the homepage as a side effect, but one I'm willing to live with). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795204
mattgreenrocks · 55m ago
I love how passive aggressive the home page becomes: it momentarily displays a grid of thumbnails, then erases them and says, "Your watch history is off. You can change your setting at any time to get the latest videos tailored to you" with a button to do that.
nullc · 3h ago
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.
OJFord · 3h ago
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!
xp84 · 2h ago
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 whatever effectively baits their rage, makes them more afraid, or stokes some addiction or anxiety).
PaulHoule · 2h ago
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 rabbit holes in YouTube so bad that they decided to physically destroy their computers…
Agingcoder · 3h ago
This is what I’ve done - YouTube is a much better place now.
eatbitseveryday · 3h ago
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).
walt_grata · 2h ago
I used to have a cronjob to change them to what I want daily. Only worked for sites with an API, but was better than the user hostile "we know your preferences better than you" garbage.
hackyhacky · 4h ago
> Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?
My preferences change all the time, regardless of Youtube. For example, when I was a kid, I hated mustard.
On the other hand, my Youtube configuration may change independent of my actions.
RankingMember · 1h ago
See also: Spotify's "repeat" functionality. I turn it off whenever I see it on, but somehow it's always back on within a few days.
tambourine_man · 4h ago
If you are not being sarcastic, yes, it happens all the time. Probably to maximize whatever metric they're measuring.
I'm fearing the day they'll just remove that toggle for good.
jeffhuys · 2h ago
> I'm fearing the day they'll just remove that toggle for good.
Don't. Nowadays we can just re-introduce it, at least all who read this. iOS, macOS, Windows, Android... All have browser extensions, all can be modified.
OtherShrezzing · 4h ago
You can also set this in your browser with the _reduce motion_ parameter.
Absolutely no sites, including YouTube, honour the parameter. But you can at least tell the site that you'd prefer it another way.
mubou · 3h ago
> You can also set this in your browser with the _reduce motion_ parameter.
Unfortunately there's no way to set this per-site, at least in Chrome. Similarly, if you disable animations in Windows, you also disable all animations and transitions in websites that support prefers-reduced-motion, causing some sites to feel janky as a result.
They really need to add a per-site toggle for that, and a browser-level option to ignore the OS' setting. Turning off animations in Word shouldn't turn them off in Google Calendar.
47282847 · 1h ago
Firefox: open about:config and add ui.prefersReducedMotion as a Number and set it to 0 (no) or 1 (yes) to override the OS setting.
Ohh!! Thanks so much for this, I greatly appreciate it.
tredre3 · 1h ago
> It resets itself every 15 days or so, but at least one can have some peace in the meantime.
It's also just stored in a cookie/session, so you have to do it in each client and every time you wipe your cookies. Very frustrating.
tuetuopay · 3h ago
This bugged me so much and yet I ended up noticing a simple workaround: keep the mouse in the top bar where the search box is.
By all UI logic this should not scroll as this element is not scrollable (it's the top bar above the scrollable content), but YouTube and Google in their infinite UX wisdom kept the scroll mouse events go behind the hovered element. I won't complain about this one too.
zootboy · 4h ago
I know this is just a weird workaround, but you can put your mouse cursor on top of the scroll bar. The scroll wheel still works like normal there (at least in my tests on Linux / Firefox).
n2d4 · 2h ago
Which ones are misaligned? At least the ones shown to me are perfectly aligned on my computer (both Safari and Chrome on a Mac).
Is it maybe caused by an adblocker? (I have YouTube premium, so no ads.)
Edit: Actually, the picture in the article shows a misalignment in the "Breaking News" section. It's odd, because the sections align perfectly for me on various screen sizes
insin · 2h ago
It's probably an adblocker, I explained why they get misaligned ([is-in-first-column] attribute adding extra margin) if a video gets hidden and the rest flow to fill in its place here:
This bit of information makes the entire thread hilarious to read.
Bunch of hackers using adblockers that modify the client-side UI to cheat Google out of money and then complaining loudly about a minor UI convenience. How dare Google not optimize for them!
I say this as someone who uses an adblocker myself. But come on.
insin · 1h ago
Hehe, you need to be a big enough nerd to know to do this when you see it's misaligned:
Hmm, on one hand I agree that autoplaying videos should be illegal but on the other hand the clickbaitiness of YouTube thumbnails has reached a point where it's almost better.
(cue deArrow comment)
tuetuopay · 3h ago
Why I do agree, the autoplay is a distraction preventing me from reading the video title and which channel posted it. Also, the clickbaitiness ends up being a feature for me: they have a specific "style" that's recognizable almost immediatly. A bit like AI-generated images, that have some eerie feeling to them. This way, I know I don't want to watch them.
burnte · 1h ago
The video grid is mind boggling now, they keep making the thumbnails bigger, and now they don't even show two rows of 3, it's a row of 3 then a row of 3 but with only 2 links! There's a giant blank box for no reason!
They added fuchsia to the timeline bar so that it now clashes in an ugly way with everything else on the page.
Don't like Shorts? TOO BAD!
lolinder · 1h ago
Do you have an ad blocker? I've always seen blank boxes in the spots where ads would have gone.
alpaca128 · 3h ago
I'm glad I'm not the only one who gets annoyed by these details.
xattt · 3h ago
> 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 it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage.
If anything, I feel like that this is by design to hyperstimulate their core audience seeking instant gratification.
karmakaze · 3h ago
I never noticed that weird space between videos not stopping autoplay--I always just kept moving my mouse around until it stopped. You can start by entering the thumbnail space, but to stop it you have to enter another thumbnail space or get very close to it--the main spacing between won't stop autoplay. There's hysteresis between the start/stop edges.
graynk · 2h ago
You can disable autoplay. Both on desktop and on mobile (not sure about TVs)
It's buried in the settings but it's there.
efitz · 2h ago
If you didn’t look away fast enough then they want to count it as a view so they can profit.
mrighele · 3h ago
Why do you even need _different teams_ for the homepage ?
The home page is made up of: a search bar with some extra buttons that link to different pages, a sidebar with some more buttons and a list of videos. What are the multiple teams for ? And even assuming it is necessary, there is really no single person responsible for the page so that issues like this can be seen and fixed ?
And since we are talking about pet peeves, on my laptop when you open the homepage you get a placeholder with 4 videos per row, and then you get 3 videos per row (or 5 shorts per row)
jerf · 2h ago
"Why do you even need _different teams_ for the homepage ?"
Conway's law is expressed as "communication structure -> program structure" but it's actually even stronger than that; the arrow is bidirectional. If either the organization wants to break up the homepage into different teams, or if the organization has to have multiple teams work on their homepage for whatever reason, the homepage will reflect the organizational structure. YouTube falls into the second branch, which is that their home page is so complicated it has to be broken up between teams due to sheer organizational size. At YouTube's size you'll even have organizational distinctions you can't even see on the homepage like dedicated reliability engineering teams. At their scale I see at least six teams most likely, the "normal" video team, the shorts team, the sidebar menu, the hamburger menu, the search team, and the team responsible for the top-level all-Google interaction, plus multiple invisible ones like recommendation algorithm, reliability, possibly a dedicated performance team, etc.
You can, organizationally, try to put these all under one manager, but even when you do that it is a surprisingly uphill battle to maintain coherence, even when it is a goal, which it often isn't particularly. There's a lot of reasons few companies have the visual and design coherence of a ~2010 Apple, including arguably even 2025 Apple.
stavros · 3h ago
Because everyone always runs A/B tests to decide whether to add a feature, but never runs them to decide whether to remove one.
wijwp · 2h ago
> and a list of videos
Are we just going to gloss over this like the list of videos is random? haha
robertoandred · 2h ago
Generating a list of video IDs is different from rendering them on the page.
wijwp · 1h ago
Well at least now I've got you up to 2 teams being acceptable :)
OJFord · 3h ago
To be fair you've started to answer it yourself: I'd bet 'search' is at least one team.
afiori · 2h ago
The homepage has many similarities to a landing page / marketing funnel.
tedunangst · 3h ago
I always open videos in new tabs and they start from the beginning.
curiousgal · 1h ago
> it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage.
Wait what? Thumbnails are useless. DeArrow has been god sent.
Traubenfuchs · 3h ago
> This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over.
Nobody cares about coherent UI/UX anymore. They certainly don‘t care about your fringe usages. Do new stuff. Do good enough. Expensive designers with a clear vision and attention to detail? Sounds slow. And expensive.
The move towards forced autoplay and infinite scroll will continue in any media app. AB tests show it is what humans crave.
I tend to select some text in long textblocks to keep a point of reference while reading. Medium and other new generation slop loves to open an obtrusive menu above my selection.
herpdyderp · 4h ago
You can insert (and tweak) this into uBlock Origin filters:
Didn't the new Chrome update break uBlock, or is that just for my test cell? I've been in mourning...
orev · 4h ago
Vote with your clicks. Switch to Firefox
thamer · 36m ago
The following CSS equivalent worked for me, using the "Custom CSS by Denis" Chrome extension[1]:
ytd-rich-grid-renderer div#contents {
/* number of video thumbnails per row */
--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 5 !important;
/* number of Shorts per row in its dedicated section */
--ytd-rich-grid-slim-items-per-row: 6 !important;
}
I first tried it with the "User JavaScript and CSS" extension, but somehow it didn't seem able to inject CSS on YouTube. Even a simple `html { border: 5px solid red; }` would not show anything, while I could see it being applied immediately with the "Denis" CSS extension.
If someone can recommend a better alternative for custom CSS, I'd be interested to hear it. I guess Tampermonkey could work, if you have that.
well if you are still gonna browse on chrome don't settle for the ublock originless experience.
* download a release zip: https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/releases (expand Assets).
* go to chrome://extensions, toggle developer mode on
* click load unpacked and select the file you unzipped the release
then you also have to watch out because chrome will, still time later, disable ublock origin. You have to go to your extensions page and find the option for 'Keep it for now' or something. Then you can continue to browse the internet like a real gee! Thanks ublock origin!
satiated_grue · 3h ago
Yes, but it still works fine with Firefox.
bloppe · 2h ago
That's not the only extension Firefox still allows that's blocked in Chrome. FF also blocks 3rd party cookies and has shown no interest in Google's "privacy sandbox" tracking features. Funny how much better a browser can be without a massive conflict of interest
lolinder · 1h ago
I agree with you that Firefox is better, but it's not for lack of conflict of interest. No browser that is funded by any means other than user payments or donations is going to be free of a conflict of interest, and in Firefox's case Google funds them.
bloppe · 55m ago
Sure, but it matters why Google is funding them. Google funds Mozilla in order to keep them afloat as a foil to detract from antitrust scrutiny. That's only credible if Google does not exert any kind of pressure over them as a condition for that funding. If they did exert that kind of pressure, it would completely defeat the purpose of funding them in the first place.
So I don't consider that to create a conflict of interest.
kevin_thibedeau · 18m ago
Mozilla drags its feet on browser improvements to appease the overlord.
bigstrat2003 · 1h ago
Use Brave if you want to stick with a Chromium browser. Their ad blocker still works great.
ge96 · 3h ago
re-enable it or if not there is ublock origin lite which I believe is legit
celsoazevedo · 2h ago
> ublock origin lite which I believe is legit
It is, just not as capable as before due to the Manifest v3 changes.
gadrev · 4h ago
Magic, thank you. Works, at least for now, until they mess up with the layout again. So much better...
therein · 1h ago
Add this to the list.
youtube.com##ytm-paid-content-overlay-renderer
The `this video includes sponsored content` that covers and takes over the click into a video.
Whoever designed that, implemented that, approved that, needs to be fired and blacklisted from doing user-facing code changes.
Starlevel004 · 4h ago
It used to be 12 videos until about a year ago. If you zoom in and out the thumbnails don't change size!
The worst casualty of the current design is the search. You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations. No? Fuck off? Do what I tell you to do!
swatcoder · 4h ago
> Do what I tell you to do!
Maybe a good opportunity to remember that you watching the videos you want to watch is actually just a workaround Google suffers through in the YouTube product.
They have to do it so that you come to the site, but it costs them money and makes it harder for them to optimize the revenue they get from your eyeballs.
Strycturally, their goal is to push the line as far as they can, and they spend a lot of product design and engineering effort to do so. They're only going to get better at it as time goes by.
And of course this principle doesn't just apply to YouTube, but at pretty much all media sites once they get large enough to pivot from growing their audience to optimizing its profitability.
titzer · 3h ago
> is actually just a workaround Google suffers through in the YouTube product.
It used to be a Google mantra that "focus on the user and all else will follow." They are so far beyond that they've wrapped around. They actively hate users now.
All Google really cares about is making advertisers happy. Literally nothing else registers as a priority.
SJC_Hacker · 2h ago
If people stop watching, advertisers will not be happy
Unfortunately this seems to be what people want.
There's plenty of YouTube competitors (Substack, Patreon, Vimeo, Twitch etc.) Unfortunately, they just don't have the traction of YouTube
zoogeny · 2h ago
> You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations
This has become increasingly annoying for me. Sometimes I want to find a reference I saw a few years ago on some topic. Even if I know the speaker, the topic, sometimes even the title, I can't find the video. I get a handful of results vaguely related to the search terms and then a never ending list of garbage not even slightly related to my search terms.
I really want my own memory augmentation. A personal tracker for all of the content I have ever consumed in any form, indexed and searchable (like in a personal Elastic Search cluster). The trouble is, I only want it for like 1% of the content I have consumed. The modern web is so hostile in general that aggregating any kind of data about my own usage is so onerous that it might as well be impossible. The friction they have purposefully created worked exactly as they intended.
seafoamteal · 3h ago
Zooming out actually makes the thumbnails bigger, because they grow to fill the space ceded by the rest of the UI. Just incredible design all the way through.
zippergz · 4h ago
Yes, this search thing is absolutely infuriating.
codedokode · 4h ago
They think that people are idiots and unable to deal with more that 3 search results. Or maybe they think their search is so good that the wanted video is always within those 3.
subscribed · 4h ago
No, they promote algorithmic "results" because they care about money from ads.
slater · 3h ago
I just wish they'd fix the "sort by date" bug in search. I search for something, it gives me endless results. If I then choose to sort by upload date, whoopsie, no results found!
InMice · 4h ago
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 Youtube" chrome plugin and Im able to fix it back to 6 videos per row. I also found I could make shorts play in the traditional youtube player by default - which is an added relief.
gorbachev · 43m ago
You assume the UX team has any say in any of this.
Some of the revelations from the various lawsuits against Google by the US and other governments over the years have been about this.
The company replaced leaders who cared about users with leaders who cared about revenue optimization and those leaders changed the direction of the company to what we all see in all of their products these days.
pwg · 2h ago
Most likely what happened is some MBA ran a short A/B test of smaller vs. bigger video thumbnails, and the A/B results showed more "engagement" with the larger size thumbs, and so, of course, to meet his/her performance goals, the MBA had the page altered to the version that showed "more engagement".
cowsup · 26m ago
I think it also helps them figure out which videos keep people on YouTube longer. If I scroll to a section of the page that has 6 videos, and I stare at them for 10 seconds, then scroll down, they'll know that one or two of those videos must have been somewhat interesting. But if I stare at 6 videos, then scroll away 2 seconds later, it knows that nothing in that batch was worthwhile.
The fewer videos they have in focus at a time, the more accurate their algorithms can be.
drewbeck · 2h ago
"It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this."
Unfortunately UX teams aren't actually paid to make great UX, especially at large corps and any place ad-driven. They're paid to move the metrics and move the revenue line.
htx80nerd · 1h ago
>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.
No comments yet
Root_Denied · 32m ago
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.
n00bs · 4m ago
It sure would be nice if they fixed the YouTube Apple TV app so you didn’t have to select which YouTube account you want to use every single time you launch the app on Apple TV. I guess someone thought it was better than the blank screen that used to greet greet folks when they loaded the Apple TV app after 24 hours. But this is just comically lame for folks who don’t ever switch accounts nor want to.
voytec · 4h ago
FYI: YouTube provides RSS feed for every channel. The URL is as follows:
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
EvanAnderson · 3h ago
Pssst! Keep this on the down-low or they'll take all of this away from us. >smile<
Seriously, though, w/o RSS feeds Youtube would be completely useless to me. I keep waiting for Google to kill them.
eddyg · 4h ago
The excellent “Play”⁽¹⁾ app (available for iOS, macOS, Apple TV and Vision Pro) can also use these feeds, plus give you the ability to conveniently save other videos to “watch later”. Highly recommended!
In addition to the main purchase price, this app charges 3.99/month for:
-following channels
-following playlists
-removing shorts
and many more features on top of those.
microflash · 1h ago
There’s open source Unwatched[1] if you want something for free.
Can also use google sheet + app scripts + youtube api to add new videos from channels in playlists. Sheet can trigger every few hours to keep things up to date.
It does get more complicated if monitoring too many channels since execution will timeout due to sheets limit. But can make it to pickup where previously timedout.
Bonus using API gets you video info so you can filter by length (shorts), keywords etc. Limitation is ~150 videos added per day due to API limits.
Fiely · 4h ago
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 to avoid in a reader than YT's UI.
crtasm · 2h ago
You can change the first 4 characters of the channel ID to UULF to only get "Videos" (no shorts)
I used this to make a Youtube viewer "application" that lists my subscriptions most recent videos, and i can watch them when i get a chance. Just a list. no thumbnails, no click bait, no random algorithm recommendations, just stuff i want to watch.
entropie · 4h ago
You can use the wonderful mpv player to view videos directly from a yt-url (yt-dlp backend).
avipars · 4h ago
i made a tool to extract the rss feed from a channel too!
I've said it before. The secret to sanity when consuming YoutTube content is to never consume it on YouTube. The interface has been actively user-hostile for over 15 years.
iMerNibor · 4h ago
What gets me the thumbnails are now so big, they're blurry since the images need to be stretched to fit now!
The preview is 530x300px on a 1920x1080 screen vs the image shown being 336x188px
How this passed any sort of QA is beyond me
jsheard · 4h ago
They clearly need to conserve bandwidth for the most important assets - the 12 whole megabytes of Javascript.
jmb99 · 3h ago
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.
jsheard · 9m ago
> Assuming 60 characters per line, that’s 200k lines of code?
The biggest JS file is about 9.1MB alone, and after running it through Firefoxes pretty-printer to undo the minificiation it comes to 447,873 lines of code. The other files would easily push it over half a million in total.
dylan604 · 3h ago
>What on the YouTube home page could possibly require 12MB of JS alone?
all of the code that hoovers up your analytics on what's been looked at, what's been scrolled past, etc. maybe I'm just jaded, but I'd suspect so much of it is nothing but tracking and does little for making the site function
titzer · 3h ago
Webpages are dumptrucks for every bad feature anyone ever thought up and are in a constant state of trying to re-framework their way out of the complete mess of utils that get shipped by default. Need a gadget that implements eye tracking via sidechannels? Yeah, they got that. And then justify that with "analytics" or anti-fraud and abuse, and no "click jacking" or whatever crap, and roll it times 1000.
jsheard · 3h ago
Fun fact: Googles own web performance team recommends avoiding YouTube embeds because they're so obscenely bloated. Placing their <iframe> on a page will pull in about 4MB of assets, most of which is Javascript, even if the user never plays the video.
YouTubes frontend people just don't care about bloat, even when other Googlers are yelling at them to cut it out.
leptons · 3h ago
We lazy-load Youtube iframes, fixes the problem pretty easily.
jsheard · 3h ago
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.
charlesabarnes · 1h ago
I've recently noticed that the thumbnails on the homepage are higher resolution than the thumbnails on the subscriptions page
cucubeleza · 2h ago
they want more money, less videos more ads, probably the UX/UI team was against it but you know how those big techs are
bryanhogan · 4h ago
The perfect oppurtunity for more AI, image upscaling! /s
Or maybe the next step will be automated AI-generated thumbnails based on the video and the user itself, so each user will be grouped into a different category and gets served a different thumbnail accordingly.
dcchambers · 4h ago
I am BEGGING someone, anyone at Google/YouTube to let me permanently disable YouTube Shorts.
I HATE Short form video content and no matter how many times I select "show me less of this" I still get them front and center when I open the app or website.
fossuser · 3h ago
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 YouTube. You can’t only have vegetables when your competitors are dealing heroin and your revenue is engagement based.
It seems the revealed preference of addicting consumption for engagement is tv with with a novelty button. TikTok and short form videos are that distilled to its purest form.
These companies can’t turn them off - they’re trapped by market incentives, it’s moloch. A few years back when Facebook had a more dominant market position Zuck said they were intentionally going to focus on human connections and friends despite the revenue cost that would cause because it was the ideal he wanted. In battle against TikTok you can’t hold those kinds of ideals unfortunately.
mitthrowaway2 · 2h ago
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?
therein · 1h ago
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.
jackcooper · 3h ago
Summary of the proposed solutions to block YouTube Shorts:
-Shorts filter list in Brave browser (works on mobile) — my personal favorite
Arisaka1 · 3h ago
Unhook made YouTube actually useful for my friend who has ADHD, since it lets you hide all recommendations in front page + side bar.
Luckily Google hasn't "manifest away" this type of extensions (yet).
s3p · 3h ago
Thank you so much for this. I hate YT Shorts but never thought to look for extensions to block them.
FuriouslyAdrift · 3h ago
Or just view all videos via DuckDuckGo
leptons · 3h ago
None of these workarounds are available on Chromecast, which is where I do almost all of my Youtube watching.
mrandish · 2h ago
I've been running the SmartTube app on my Chromecast (and on a Fire TV) for over a year and it's fantastic. Of course, you'll need to side load it but once installed it'll update itself directly. There are lots of tutorials online covering how to side load it on various Android-based streaming sticks.
nickthegreek · 1h ago
I have never seen a better youtube client than SmartTube. I recently switched from a Shield to an AppleTV 4k and the lack of SmartTube is close to a deal breaker. If android had a better jellyfin client, I would be back on the shield.
pier25 · 4h ago
Same.
I HATE youtube shorts. Not their content (I've never watched one) but how they've infected the whole youtube experience.
You search for something and half the results are irrelevant... which includes a ton of shorts.
kryptiskt · 3h ago
They are fucking up the product that they are dominating a market with in order to be an also-ran in another market that's hot. It's Windows 8 all over again.
FirmwareBurner · 3h ago
Google is the Microsoft of today.
dylan604 · 3h ago
My fave is where something clearly has been cropped from a 16:9 source to fit the portrait mode.
PaulHoule · 3h ago
As a recommendations engineer I've never been that impressed with YouTube, I think they cribbed the YouTube interface from
and no wonder they write papers about "negative sampling" because they don't collect clean data. I made the mistake once of clicking on a video where a Chinese lady transforms into a fox on America's Got Talent and oh my god I am suddenly scheduled for thousands of AI slop videos where some Chinese girl transforms into something on that show with the same music and with the same reaction shots.
There is an answer to the coldest cold start problem and that is have a hand curated collection of about 100 or so content pieces that are of broad interest and stupendously high quality. Instagram will show you videos that are amazing (like somebody cooking a fine meal under rustic conditions) if you're cold and Stumbleupon did the same back in the day. Now Instagram 2025 and Stumbleupon 2012 are not "cold" from the viewpoint of content the way YT Shorts is, but Google has the money to pay professionals to make something -- but their ideology is against it.
AwaAwa · 3h ago
> half the results are irrelevant
Better than the results on google these days, so YT is at least doing better.
add the contents of this folder as a chrome extension
insin · 3h ago
Here's a more comprehensive BYO Shorts-hiding extension which uses CSS instead of running JavaScript every time an element is added or removed anywhere in the DOM, and also supports the mobile version (CSS selectors are extracted from the https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube Hide Shorts feature)
Are you still using YouTube despite this frustration?
If yes, then they don't care. Sorry. If you'll tolerate it and some other cohort of users will engage with the site for 0.1 seconds more than they would otherwise, it stays. YouTube is an optimization machine.
louthy · 4h ago
> I am BEGGING someone, anyone at Google/YouTube to let me permanently disable YouTube Shorts.
Absolutely this! I was looking to see if it was an option yesterday. Annoyingly not :/
ysavir · 4h ago
The games, too. Clicking to hide them hides them for at most 30 days, then you have to tell them once more that it's of no interest.
WorldPeas · 3h ago
there are games on youtube now? isn't that a bit of a security risk?
oceanhaiyang · 3h ago
Ublock origin allows you to block any part of a page. Solved!
sheepdestroyer · 3h ago
If it still works for you, it's because you've temporarily workarounded its automatic disablement, and that won't last much longer...
bryanhogan · 4h ago
I'm happy with the extensions that I've been using, makes using YouTube much better and protects me from the wonderful world of "Shorts".
scubbo · 3h ago
Would you share those extensions so that other people can join you in this good situation?
Jensson · 3h ago
I use youtube shorts block, it turns shorts videos into normal videos so you can still view them if you like, just using the normal players with comments etc.
They've increased shorts length to >60s so now it's blending in with 2-3 minute long videos which overlaps with the sweet spot of no nonsense videos. Some shorts are improving, but the shorts UI on desktop is trash.
-__---____-ZXyw · 3h ago
I use invidious, and if I can't because it's down or something, I use a FF extension called "unhook". I hadn't been on to youtube proper in a good few years, but with unhook, I can block everything (suggested videos of all kinds, comments, etc). I can re-enable comments by clicking on the extension in the toolbar and unchecking comments. Easy peasy.
You get almost a complete blank page and a search bar when you go to "youtube.com", and then when you search, you get the results. Just simple, really.
kelvinjps10 · 4h ago
Use the unhook extension, and on mobile revanced
jabroni_salad · 4h ago
The unhook extension can get rid of them.
It also gets rid of that nonsense they did to the search page.
dcchambers · 4h ago
Works for the website but not the mobile app (where shorts are pushed even harder).
conductr · 3h ago
Yes please!!! I too hate Shorts. I hate that I get sucked into them in a downward doom scroll even more. I'd love nothing more than to completely disable it. But, i think this is also why they will never let me.
I also hate that the first one or two short may be relevant to whatever I'm consuming, researching, then it quickly turns into me watching Kill Tony comedians, girls basically naked in the gym, etc. they know my brain basically just turns off and enters the void
RankingMember · 1h ago
Or at least let me turn off endless repeat. It is an absolutely ridiculous way to watch video to have it auto-repeat endlessly.
didip · 3h ago
I agree. YouTube Shorts should be a separate product line. The short form content is polluting the long form ones.
huslage · 3h ago
I want something that blocks them from the AppleTV App. Even if I did like them, it's so stupid to watch shorts on a TV.
Maken · 4h ago
But how else are they going to compete with TikTok?
codedokode · 4h ago
I notice that many short videos seem to be simply cuts from longer videos posted to promote them. So they were not made for short video section and just try to misuse short videos to increase long video visibility.
geerlingguy · 4h ago
There is now a _huge_ industry of solo editors who spam YouTubers advertising "increasing revenue by re-using the content you already made!"
And 98% of it is just grabbing popular snippets of long form videos, cropping them slightly, and overlaying some bubbly animated text (or worse, just closed captions but with a bright font).
It's almost as annoying as the deluge of people who email and say "we can auto-translate your content into 20 languages!"
edm0nd · 3h ago
Yeah there are even platforms that simply let you upload a long form video and it will use "AI" to churn out 5-10 short form videos from it.
aargh_aargh · 3h ago
But there's no way to click from the short to the long video. I'd like to do that. It's someone else doing the cuts, presumably for their own benefit, rather than to promote the original.
WorldPeas · 3h ago
I did watch a few shorts out of curiosity and it seems they're just "stream clips" most of the time
npteljes · 3h ago
Not a chance. YouTube needs shorts so that they can compete with TikTok. They HAVE to put it in front of everybody so that they can leverage their existing, vast userbase to quickly bootstrap such a product. It's a fight for market relevance for them. You will most likely not see them let that go.
PaulHoule · 3h ago
My experience is that if you have a population doing some activity online it is self-perpetuating
and you might think, "I have (say) N=250,000 people playing game A and I can get them playing game B" you are probably going to be disappointed and very lucky if you get somewhere between 250 and 2500 of them playing your new game.
The two-sided market that makes YouTube impossible to dethrone makes it just as hard to change direction. For one thing you have to change the behavior of the viewers, but you also have to change the behavior of the creators, who know how to make videos, who know how to monetize them, all of that.
Myself I find I don't have a big attention span for short videos. I mean, Chinese girls doing the robot turn on my mirror neurons as much as anything. I can watch a 30 second video and get 30 seconds of fun but I don't want to watch another and another and another. However I cannot get enough of Techmoan talking about tape decks and such
Someone may believe this, but it’s utter nonsense. The users who don’t want to see shorts aren’t using TikTok.
This would be like Starbucks randomly serving tea to 20% of customers who order coffee because they want to compete more effectively with Lipton. That’s not how competition works.
rsanek · 3h ago
>Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.
Not sure what you mean with "completely disables it". I have watch history disabled and still see shorts in search results or subscriptions results https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
ryandrake · 1h ago
Turning off Watch History only disables shorts on the main page, not in search results or the side-bar. It's a good start but incomplete solution.
teaearlgraycold · 3h ago
It’s not complete but it does limit them quite a bit
guiomie · 3h ago
Atleast let me disable shorts on the TV app. I can't scroll thru my subscribed channels feed without being spammed with all the shorts, this makes content discovery awful and im just not using the app as much.
bethekidyouwant · 3h ago
I cancelled YouTube premium and stopped using YouTube entirely because of this
whiplash451 · 3h ago
I'm with you, but unfortunately Youtube is trading you(s) for many more zombies in the subway. Stats rule.
xigoi · 3h ago
Use the NewPipe Android app.
duped · 4h ago
What I don't understand is why YouTube penalizes creators for creating short "traditional" videos yet also penalizes them if they aren't creating shorts.
I mean, I do know, it's ads and the attention economy, but still. Pick a lane. This is why I pay for Nebula.
AlienRobot · 3h ago
I go to TikTok, shorts.
I go to Youtube, shorts.
I go to Instagram, shorts.
I go to Facebook, shorts.
I go to Imgur, shorts.
I go to Pinterest, no shorts because it only plays 1 video per screen, but on mobile the screen is smaller so, shorts.
I go to Reddit, shorts.
I go to Bluesky, shorts.
I don't go to Twitter.
Tumblr is probably the only social media that isn't filled with vertical videos and that has an algorithmic feed. I go to Explore and I get dandelions. A static photo of them, not a video. I'm crossing my fingers it stays that way.
barbazoo · 3h ago
I go to Old Navy, shorts.
nanna · 3h ago
I go to HN, text.
Hallelujah.
dylan604 · 3h ago
Waiting for the Show HN browser extension that reformats all HN posts to fit into a shorts frame. Then rather than just displaying the text, it puts it in an annoying animated font. Maybe even adds an AI character to read it to you
withinboredom · 2h ago
4.99 in the app store
Zambyte · 3h ago
I don't see shorts on Bluesky, but I remember seeing something about video feeds a while back. Do you use video feeds?
isoprophlex · 3h ago
And not to forget god damned linkedin of all place which for me now puts shorts-like content in the feed. Convergent tiktok-ification.
kspacewalk2 · 3h ago
I guess the likes of Youtube and Facebook are trying unsuccessfully to replicate TikTok. This is effort #2 for Facebook, which is/was also trying unsuccessfully to replicate Youtube with their take on some-attention-span-needed videos.
(Seriously though... Facebook's video playback UI. What the fuck is that? Why is it so bad?)
I guess they don't get that there's going to be only one winner in each niche, unless TikTok goes down for political/national security reasons. Why do I need Youtube shorts if I have TikTok? Why do I need Google+ if I have Facebook? Why do I want Facebook videos if I have Youtube? Unsolved puzzle.
WorldPeas · 3h ago
its a shame that shorts have taken so much of the market share. Our children will never know about jorts
niels8472 · 4h ago
I used ublock origin remove it from the page.
WorldPeas · 3h ago
I just use freetube most of the time and don't experience shorts at all, and if I do I don't notice
unclad5968 · 3h ago
If you're on android you can use screenzen. Not sure if they have an ios app.
esolyt · 3h ago
Youtube Unhook extension does that and it does a lot more to improve Youtube's UI.
diabllicseagull · 3h ago
I've been using an Unhook, the extension, and couldn't have been happier.
veqz · 3h ago
Just block the html elements which show YouTube shorts? Use ublock, select, and block.
EGreg · 3h ago
Right here folks we see the consequences of not having open source alternatives.
Not your software, not your control.
htx80nerd · 1h ago
>no matter how many times I select "show me less of this"
facebook works the exact same way
billion dollar companies forcing you to look at stuff you dont want and gaslighting you into thinking you have a choice
I love short form video content, but I don't want it from YouTube. And if YouTube feels they need to have it to be competitive then don't put it on my desktop.
EDIT: I said "do put it on my desktop" -- I meant to write "DON"T put it on my desktop".
whiplash451 · 3h ago
I'm afraid the pressure from tiktok is just too high.
dvngnt_ · 3h ago
I had to switch to freetube which is a much better experience
timbit42 · 4h ago
Have you looked at the "YouTube-shorts block" add-on?
0cf8612b2e1e · 4h ago
Not the OP, but I have given up on trusting low-audience browser extensions. Too many stories of the author selling out and injecting analytics/malware into the product.
xmprt · 4h ago
What I've been doing is using high audience extensions (like Tampermonkey) and getting ChatGPT to write a script for it which does what I need it to. Much more effective and trustworthy than relying on another extension developer. If Tampermonkey can't do it then I'll just write the entire extension on my own and load it as a developer extension.
Greasyfork restricts what 3rd party libraries can be pulled in + you have the option of disabling automatic updates in your userscript manager.
skyyler · 3h ago
300k users is low-audience to you?
0cf8612b2e1e · 3h ago
Unless it is a top-10 app, it is a no go. The top applications have millions of users.
A browser is my everything app. It is the most security essential tool I use daily, which requires vigilance in how I extend it. More users is a crappy proxy for how likely a developer can sneak through an insidious change.
skyyler · 1h ago
I understand being cautious, but this extension is featured in the chrome store and has quite a few users and only requests access to youtube sites.
Not exactly fly-by-night...
louthy · 4h ago
Not the OP, but I want to turn off Shorts too. I do most of my youtube access via Apple TV -- where Shorts are particularly annoying when scrolling through Subscriptions -- so this wouldn't be an option.
It just needs to be a preference!
undersuit · 3h ago
I want Shorts to format properly on my 1440x2560 screen. All the interaction controls on hidden off the side of the screen. Still have black bars on the left and right of the video too.
And also yes, I want long form and short form videos to be separated, when I'm scrolling through results 6 at a time(minus 1-2 ads) to queue the shorts really mess up the flow.
ibejoeb · 2h ago
(sorry for the repost but it's long thread)
This filter list is the most up-to-date that I've found to hide shorts with uBlock Origin:
Sorry bro. They get paid to propagandize you. No amount of complaining will change that.
Remember, with normal videos you (primarily) decide what to watch, but in shorts, you decide what not to watch.
mschuster91 · 3h ago
Personally, I don't hate Shorts but god I wish that the order of Shorts on the homepage would be the same one that you get when swiping down.
And for fucks sake give me an option to disable the AI translation trash everywhere, and show the title of shorts on a creator's feed page...
gregorymichael · 3h ago
Huge +1. Please.
zppln · 4h ago
So much this. They haven't even paywalled it behind Premium. They know they're dealing crack. Such a disgusting company.
film42 · 3h ago
Same. Shorts are actually a great product in terms of capturing attention, but I don't want them on youtube. I hear someone from the back shouting, "you're not the customer, you're the product!" but I pay for youtube premium... that makes me the customer; and I pay for the long-form content without ads! But 50% of Youtube shorts are just ads or product marketing. I never feel good after going on a youtube shorts binge. Please, youtube, let me turn it off.
stuaxo · 3h ago
I am so done "capturing attention" it's ruined the internet.
leptons · 3h ago
I miss the internet of 1991. It really all went downhill fast once ads started getting involved.
GuB-42 · 3h ago
I have seen an article somewhere they are not even good for marketing.
The do grab your attention, but they have no lasting effect, it is so short and there is so much of it that you quickly forget everything you have watched, including the ads.
They are good for the platforms though, because effective or not, they get paid good money for these ads.
dfxm12 · 3h ago
You're still the product. Paying to remove ads doesn't change this. You're still being tracked. Unless something has changed recently, you're still being recommended videos.
sapiogram · 3h ago
No, I think Youtube really is the product. With Premium, you don't see any ads (at least the ones Youtube makes money from), and there's no way "tracking" makes them anywhere near as much money as a simple premium subscription.
Zambyte · 3h ago
> and there's no way "tracking" makes them anywhere near as much money as a simple premium subscription.
Who places ads everywhere else on the web?
fsckboy · 3h ago
all they show you is a thumbnail, so the shortness is not capturing your attention, the provocative picture is
nullc · 3h ago
> but I pay for youtube premium
I found your error.
insin · 4h ago
I make an extension which lets you fix this to your liking (choose the minimum number of videos you want per row, while also fixing the spacing issues overriding the underlying --ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row CSS variable causes), plus many, many more annoyances and what I felt were missing options and features for YouTube, like being able to completely hide Shorts:
Edit: for comparison with the screenshot in TFA, this is my Home feed on a 14" MacBook. No Shorts, no Mixes, videos which are 85% (configurable) watched or more are hidden, stream VODs from channels which also stream, Movies and TV, and any channels "Don't recommend channel" refuses to work on, can all be hidden for you:
For me they made it so large that I can only see 3 full thumbnails. The rest don't even fit the screen anymore. https://i.imgur.com/11iI4sI.jpeg
meltyness · 4h ago
Yeah this is late-stage 'growth.' Hamstring your other products to reconcentrate activity, 'rebalance' usage to Shorts content by making the original offering, long-form content less usable, lower quality, less interesting; and so shall it remain until some congress finally forces these players cut a dividend instead of this moronic buybacks situation, hysterical that <well-liked female northeast senator and presidential primary candidate whose policy positions had been featured here> abruptly stopped talking about this for no apparent reason.
It's kind of conceptually like a Shepard's tone, though, which is maybe interesting.
Havoc · 3h ago
Yes, for all their A/B testing they could really do with a bit more common sense.
Like why do thumbnails have an invisible overlay that appears on hover over, hijacks the click and takes you to a support page about paid product placement?
I'm clicking on the thumbnail to watch the video not for a jarring detour off the youtube page to a boring help article. Honestly WTF. Maybe the UI designers don't use youtube themselves?
On the extrapolation to zero videos by September 2026: it is already here.
Seriously. Clear your cookies or open a private window. All of the videos are replaced by the message "Try searching to get started". Granted, as someone who clears cookies regularly, I like the change.
jaydenmilne · 3h ago
Its oddly relaxing.
As an aside, this is something I've noticed recently switching to KDE from Windows/OSX No one is trying to get me to do anything with my computer to pump their metrics. You log in the first time, there's a little welcome popup, and that's it. You are now free to use your computer as you wish.
It's oddly stressful being a rat in a bunch of PM's maze.
3D39739091 · 57m ago
This is exactly the best part about the Linux experience right now. There is nothing that's there because a PM is trying to get a promotion.
kccqzy · 34m ago
I like that too. It reminds me of the classic Google home page: just a search bar so you have to search to get started.
jmkni · 3h ago
Except the results will be what the algorithm has determined that people accessing from your IP address at your location using your exact version of your browser on your exact version of your operating system on a screen with your exact width and height and pixel resolution are into lol
ashf023 · 3h ago
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
sundarurfriend · 3h ago
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's not a carefully thought out conclusion, but in the era of a hundred competitors, it's plausible that superficial decisions like that have a lot of impact on the app usage.
Or it could just be that someone with a forceful personality on the YouTube team decided this is how we're going to do it and nobody could oppose them, not every decision is scientifically planned and executed like it's often assumed from the outside!
WorldPeas · 3h ago
does anyone know why when I do this all my recommended videos are always
"10 hours star pattern" or the like? does youtube figure any cookie-less machine is usually just a stick pc in a restaurant serving screensavers?
jaydenmilne · 3h ago
"Feed Me Seymour"
SurgeArrest · 56m ago
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 a label clearly visible and I want to have preferences to hide those completely.
mrweasel · 45m ago
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 meagre profit.
My issue with Shorts are that you watch it, conclude that it was garbage and a waste of your time, so you hit "thumbs down". That apparently does NOTHING in YouTube land, because you watched, and hit a button, so you "engaged" with the content. There's so much good, well made, quality content on YouTube, but even if you pay for Premium, the algorithm, tweaked for engagement and ad impression just ruins it and the more YouTube push Shorts the worse it gets.
lukaslalinsky · 4h ago
The nastiest trick for me is that no matter how times I tell YouTube not to show me shorts on the home page, they always sneak back in.
kotaKat · 4h ago
Yeah, they changed it to “stop showing as often”. I love the gaslighting forced features, so much…
hansvm · 4h ago
The "fix" I've seen them testing is changing the wording to "show less shorts."
UnreachableCode · 25m ago
Highly recommend https://untrap.app/ if you want to remove some of the shit from YouTube like shorts, comments or the recommendation bar to the right of videos. It has a safari extension on iOS too (this costs about 3 bucks). Disclaimer: not my software
puttycat · 4h ago
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.
wsc981 · 4h ago
I think in (South-East) Asia the people like vertical videos for some reason. Seems how many people record videos on their phones - at least in Thailand.
GuB-42 · 3h ago
For most developing and recently developed countries, the gateway to modern technology is the smartphone.
The first world had a lot of computers, video cameras and horizontal screens in general before they had smartphones.
I think it plays a part.
ryandrake · 1h ago
Nothing about using a phone requires users to hold it vertically to take video.
cardanome · 4h ago
The most infuriating thing is that there is no technical reason for vertical filming sucking so much.
The phone camera sensors often have a aspect ration of 4:3 but the sides are cropped in software. So the videos just get mutilated because convention.
Though at least 4:3 format is making a come-back because it is the prefect comprise format. Looks great on a tablet, is usable in both landscape and portrait mode. On Desktop it leave space to read comments. Perfect for youtube videos.
michaelteter · 4h ago
I don’t have the numbers, but I’m pretty sure that Asia (lots of people) use phones as their primary (sole, even) device.
Since a phone can show portrait or landscape videos in fullscreen (just hold the phone vertically or horizontally), it makes sense to shoot in whatever orientation fits the content or situation best.
The real problem is that computer monitors don’t easily offer orientation switching :)
soylentcola · 3h ago
> shoot in whatever orientation fits the content or situation best.
I'm with you there. It's the same for shooting still photos.
...but that doesn't stop people from shooting portrait video and then constantly panning back and forth because the whole (crowd, landscape, giant sea monster, whatever) doesn't fit in the frame.
duped · 4h ago
There's a good chunk of the world whose only device to interact with the internet is a smart phone or tablet
TiredOfLife · 4h ago
uBlock Origin lite is V3. And blocks youtube ads
constantcrying · 4h ago
Also disturbing is how absolutely awful it is at basic design. You can even see it on the screenshot that the Videos on the third row aren't properly aligned.
This is one of the largest corporations in the world and they make one of the most visited sites on the entire internet look like it was someone's hobby project and they just couldn't be bothered to align things correctly. This is insane.
The YouTube Startpage is incredibly bad in so many regards. Low in information density, full of things people do not want to see and fails at basic design. Even a basic, low effort redesign would be a major improvement.
schainks · 2h ago
I already have no videos on my homepage! Just turn off all the suggested video in your account settings. I only use youtube to watch channels I've subscribed to or videos people send me.
I don't care to waste time letting the machine guide me to "discover" something. There is the thing I need to learn/watch/enjoy _now_, and that's it.
_QrE · 2h ago
People see videos on the front page of YouTube? I've turned YouTube history off, and all I get is a warning that says that if I want "the latest videos tailored to me", I need to turn that on. This is without being signed in.
Honestly, I think I prefer this. It makes my use of YouTube a little more deliberate since there's no clickbait to click, initially.
bobsmooth · 2h ago
The huge thumbnails are also in the subs tab.
xanadu132 · 5m ago
never realized how annoying this was until now
segphault · 4h ago
The quality of the content on YouTube has declined so aggressively that the terrible UX almost doesn’t even matter anymore. They optimize to promote the most cancerous, low-effort, viral clickbait trash and the algorithm makes it incredibly difficult for anything else to survive or be discoverable. The culture of YouTube is absolutely vile.
bluGill · 4h ago
Turn off watch history. That disables the homepage. Which in turn means you only see things you directly link to, or things you have subscribed to (after going to the subscriptions page).
alpaca128 · 3h ago
On the topic of A/B testing, it would be really neat if there was a way to opt out of it.
I cannot remember a single time in the last 5+ years when the website wasn't broken in some way. Right now the UI has at least 5 separate bugs and a Premium feature of the iPad app has 5 distinct bugs which are also so obvious that it's clear YT doesn't even test their paid version at all.
YouTube is the best argument against opt-out (or forced) telemetry in apps.
WorldPeas · 3h ago
complain as you might about reddit but only it and cnn (to my knowledge) allow the kind of "old." url-based opt-outs
Narishma · 1h ago
They've recently started infecting old reddit with some of the new crap like notifications for every little thing. You can still disable them for now, tediously one by one.
barbazoo · 3h ago
If you're referring to old.reddit.com or whatever it is, sure, but I can't imagine that users of that site aren't part of a/b tests all the time anyway even though what you see is the old stylesheet.
WorldPeas · 2h ago
that's likely true, it's just a different branch, LTS, if you will
sprremix · 1h ago
This makes me appreciate my newly discovered "Remove YouTube Suggestions"[0]-extension a lot more. My homepage looks like this[1] and I absolutely do not get the feeling I'm "missing out" on any content. I just go to my subscriptions page, look at some videos and then close YT :)
* "AdashimaaTube" script running under Stylus add-on.
* "Enhancer for YouTube" add-on
* uBlock Origin (of course)
For Android phones: Revanced Extended
For Android-based streaming sticks: SmartTube
Note: The set of add-ons & scripts I use in desktop Firefox is just what I happened to end up with at the time I finally got fed up a few years ago, looked for solutions, tried out several and settled on this mix as working for my needs and preferences. YouTube is constantly changing (usually for the worse), so the landscape of community add-ons and scripts is constantly evolving in response. You'll probably need to update to latest version on whatever solution(s) you use at least every couple months.
efields · 36m ago
I believe YouTube is crushing it as a content provider.
I assume they have the resources to measure _everything_.
They know what they're doing. Your use case may be desirable, but they've determined it's not profitable.
esotericsean · 31m ago
I got this view the other day and was shocked. Went and found a browser plugin to fix it. But I wish our voices could be heard or we could give some feedback.
quantike · 3h ago
One other point of annoyance with the new UI is that the videos actually aren't aligned vertically.
I really dislike auto-play so I have always strategically rested my cursor in between the columns of video. Now, as I scroll, my cursor will end up within a column that is misaligned and start autoplay. The worst!
insin · 3h ago
If you're using an adblocker, it's because YouTube video grid items have an [is-in-first-column] attribute which gives them extra margin-left, throwing off alignment when videos flow to fill in gaps created by promoted videos which were hidden.
It's kind of silly that they add these attributes to each nth item based on what they expect the grid width to be, when you can get the same layout without them (my YouTube extension mentioned elsewhere in this thread performs this style fix so grid items line up properly when videos and entire cross-cutting shelves are hidden and the rest flow to fill in the gaps), but I suppose they have no incentive to make the layout work when videos are being hidden or the grid is otherwise being modified externally to work in a way they didn't want.
Narishma · 1h ago
That one's not on Youtube. It's a bug caused by ad blockers.
barbazoo · 3h ago
And it might add the auto-played videos to your history, impacting future recommendations.
lykahb · 3h ago
Displaying more videos gives more choice to the users. It may also be slightly better for collecting data about the user. But that's reducing the impact of the algorithmic feed and is opposite to what tiktok does. I unironically agree with the prediction that the endgame is just one video.
ryandrake · 1h ago
One thing I don't like about the "old" style (that I haven't seen anyone here mention yet) is that it has all that whitespace on either side of the list. So much monitor space wasted! The new site uses it all. I wish sites would stop limiting their content to a small vertical strip of the screen. I bought a gigantic monitor and I rather like being able to use all of its pixels.
I'm not a fan of this trend either. My suspicion is this change is to increase scrolling to pump more ad space; it makes sense from a business standpoint. But this combined with the Algo changes makes it hard to keep coming back looking for new content VS just consuming the people/content I know and enjoy.
adamc · 4h ago
Makes sense and yet it doesn't, because the more they degrade my experience, the more I turn away from youtube.
Twirrim · 4h ago
As a subscriber, I get 6 algorithm suggested videos (even split 50/50 on subscribed vs suggested).
Then of course the content is also routinely interrupted by rows that take up more space than a row of video suggestions:
* Premium movie suggestions, which also manages to take up half the width with just two sentences: "Discover your next favourite movie. Watch without ads, included with your Premium membership"
* Shorts, despite me continually pressing the triple dots and saying "Stop showing me this crap".
* Interactive Apps (same, I keep saying "not interested" or whatever variant message it shows me).
I think I'm more irritated that youtube gives me the choice to say "don't show me this" and ignores it, than I would be by not having a choice in the first place.
PeterStuer · 4h ago
Let's not forget 'shorts'
Yes, you can hide them, but they will be back there the next session.
almosthere · 19m ago
They should isolate shorts from real YouTube.
ChuckMcM · 3h ago
This feels symptomatic of Google getting more and more desperate to have Youtube generate net revenue. All of the changes pointed out (and all of the 'shorts' that litter the site) are explained as 'additional monetization.'
If the author scrolls down another 5 videos and an ad will appear, etc. Shorts are designed so that they can feed more ads/hour to viewers. Both are strategies to increase monetization on the site at the cost of customer experience.
silisili · 3h ago
Between shorts, search results, the ads, and the content...I treat youtube links like pinterest links these days. Basically, I'll only click it if I think I really, really need to see it.
By 'content' I mean the fact that every video has a moron talking for 10 minutes at the beginning. You can search up something as simple as how to tie a shoe, find a promising video with a lot of likes, then click it. Gotta start with 2 ads first, naturally.
Then the first 2 minutes will tell you they'll teach you to tie a shoe. The next 5 minutes will be a backstory on the history of the shoe and how it's impacted the creator's life and their own shoe stories. Then a 2 minute sponsored segment for some dropshipped wallet or sock nobody needs, then another youtube ad, then hurried 10 second clip of someone poorly tying a shoe.
Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't see how anyone can stand it anymore.
dylan604 · 3h ago
> Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't see how anyone can stand it anymore.
when you're not an old, and this is all you know, you just accept it without knowing that there was a better world back when the olds were young. not being able to accept this really shows how old man yells get off my lawn you are. YT is not trying to capture you, and probably doesn't care one bit about olds. it's the younger crowds that have been given YT as an absentee parent/babysitter that they have been able to set their hooks in from the beginning. that's the group that will be making them money for years to come
silisili · 2h ago
That tracks. It feels like as soon as you fall out of that 18-25, or 18-30 demo, the world leaves you behind. Now I understand why we always thought old people were so cranky!
ryandrake · 58m ago
I'm still using an 8 year old phone. Nobody has made a phone yet where the feature set would motivate me to but a new one. Stickers? Emojis? Camera filters and effects? Social media integration? None of this is even remotely interesting to elderly-me. The only reason I'm likely to get a new one any time soon is that the companies stopped supporting the old one with software updates, effectively forcing me to throw away a perfectly working phone to keep up with security patches.
Same with computers. My daily driver is from 2017. I'm just not interested in anything new they're coming out with.
dylan604 · 5m ago
I went from a 6S+ to a 15 because I was in the same boat where the end of support/updates made it impossible to use. Also, the battery is shot so it lives on a cable full time. Hoping I can get as many years out of the new one. I have very few apps because I don't trust any of you app builders to respect my privacy. If there was something in between a smart phone and a feature phone, I'd be interested.
carlosjobim · 1h ago
There's a million videos uploaded to YouTube each second. If you're only seeing low quality videos it's because you're only looking in the wrong places.
silisili · 28m ago
I don't doubt good videos exist - I'm blaming YouTube for boosting the awful ones so it's all I see in my first page of search results, and the 'creators' who make them.
SnorkelTan · 2h ago
I'm not a webdev, but I suspect an overwhelming majority of their traffic is on mobile devices. So that's where a majority of eng time is probably spent. Not that it shouldn't be fixed.
lajosbacs · 24m ago
Let's not forget defaulting the audio to an automatic translation. That is so dumb that I still a have hard time believing that there is not an option to disable this. They don't even get any ad revenue out of this, it is just idiotic.
Timpy · 3h ago
This is totally orthogonal to the issue but I think the best fix possible is to block the YouTube home page. I have gained value from algorithm-curated feeds in the past but it's no longer a net positive in my life. I recommend checking out News Feed Eradicator[0], Distraction Free YouTube[1], and set up some extremely aggressive uBlock Origin rules.
My guess would be that this is in support of the preview hover feature. For a while now, you can watch an entire video just by hovering over it, complete with captions, scrubbing and audio. This wouldn't be very useful if the thumbnails were still tiny like in the past. Personally, I like this feature and don't often need to look at tons of thumbnails at once, but to each their own.
cpersona · 2h ago
Well YouTube no longer shows videos on the landing page if you’re not logged in so the tongue-in-cheek conclusion is prescient in this case.
radicality · 4h ago
If you have a FireTV stick or something Android based for your TV, I can recommend SmartTubenext for browsing/watching YouTube.
This is painfully accurate. I just opened YouTube on my 4K monitor and counted four videos before the ads and algorithm sludge took over. It’s like they’re actively hostile to screen real estate now.
The 2019 layout actually respected your time — now it’s just dopamine bait on rails. Feels like they’re optimizing for engagement metrics only a machine would love.
That graph made me laugh way too hard. "Zero videos by September" might honestly be the most realistic roadmap Google’s shipped lately.
Also, I’d 100% use a lightweight frontend that just shows recent uploads from my subs in a clean grid. No shorts, no nonsense. If no one builds it, I might.
> I miss YouTube before they turned the pain dial all the way towards money.
The worst part is everyone who tries to compete quickly turns the pain dial up to 11 as well. I realize YouTube existed for many years as a Google subsidized product, but Rumble is the best competitor we have and they can get quite annoying as well.
markus_zhang · 4h ago
I actually didn't notice until recently. Guess I'm also in the test group.
I wonder what's the purpose of this A/B test? Definitely has nothing to do with revenue, right? So what could it be? More engagement? I doubt that few seconds added upon more scrolling won't be much. Retention? Hard to tell.
ssalazar · 2h ago
Some of this is probably driven by mobile usage and unifying the experience between mobile <> desktop.
But the truth is a team almost certainly tested this and measured an improvement of some topline performance metric.
(Hacker News articles comparing YT before and after screenshots is not one of their topline metrics.)
bunderbunder · 4h ago
And on the iOS app, I can now only see 1.5 at a time because the thumbnails are so huge.
Which is somehow still an upgrade over the last version of the UI, where the titles of the videos were getting clipped off after about 16 characters.
rfolstad · 2h ago
Why does the youtube miniplayer suck so much?! X has the best one i've seen on any platform. You can actually pop the player out of the browser and move it anywhere you want and it has 0 chrome just a window with the video in it amazing!
No comments yet
daemonologist · 1h ago
I've seen it display *two* videos at the top of the home screen (plus an ad and five "shorts"). Kind of comical when it happens.
nottorp · 3h ago
Hmm interesting. My laptop is about the only place where I occasionally open Youtube. I get 3 videos per row and it looks just fine(tm) because it's a 14 inch screen.
I just experimentally opened youtube in a maximized window on my desktop with the 24" monitor and ... it's 3 videos per row again but I never noticed.
Perhaps all youtube UI "experts" work from cafes on tiny laptop screens?
youtubeuser · 37m ago
> Unfortunately, using an advanced analytics package I’ve projected that around May 2026 the YouTube homepage will just be one video, and by September there will be no videos at all on the homepage.
Lmao
presbyterian · 4h ago
I've stopped using YouTube directly. This is only for Apple users, but I started using the app Play[1]. It manages my subscriptions, keeps a watch later list (with smart tags and filtering, if you'd like), and you can even play videos directly in the app (and it remembers your place, better than YouTube itself does sometimes), though I still open it in the browser so I can use SponsorBlock.
My homepage on 14" laptop has degraded from 12-16 previews (4 in row) to 9 (3 in row), lately since around late 2024 has a whopping 4 (four) previews. Amazing evolution. Such courage.
Also there are bugs there, and after some magic combinations of clicks I sometimes see 9 grid, or even rarely a 16 grid. Though it lasts only for one session and I can't ever reproduce the bug. So the support is there, they made it shitty on purpose. And I even pay for that crap :(
nvarsj · 3h ago
I still don't know how to "go back" after viewing a video on the mobile app. It's so confusing. I just keep swiping stuff and eventually it works.
The google maps app has similar bizareness.
I guess somehow this all makes G more money, but it sure is painful as a consumer.
I'd pay money for a good hand-crafted (non a/b tested) experience. Competition should be the true a/b test :).
nickvec · 3h ago
I stopped using YouTube a few years ago. It's just so many ads that I no longer enjoy using the platform.
bobsmooth · 2h ago
I just use an adblocker.
schnable · 3h ago
This inspired me to check out my YouTube.com home page, and I have zero videos. I just see a message telling me I should turn Watch History on.
No comments yet
wobfan · 3h ago
The bottom graphic is the best thing I've seen this week. That alone made me happy today. Thanks, stranger.
soegaard · 3h ago
FWIW - the YouTube app on Apple TV has a similar issue.
The video previews are so large, that one can't get a proper overview.
jessyco · 4h ago
I wish we could go back; A lot of googles UI/UX is based on the next billion users experiences. I'm unsure how much influence this has on a day to day design choices they make. My experience right now on a 1440p monitor is 5 visible videos, 2 video ads, a ton of tags that I can't turn off for finding videos.
There are a ton of great UI/UX choices they've done over the years too; I just wish we had more options as a users.
WorldPeas · 3h ago
>zero thumbnails on the homepage
I have this manually enabled, but also consider it could be true if they take the instagram/x approach where you just have no thumbnail and are just dropped down the video flume right out of the gate. Don't worry. We know what you want.
JasserInicide · 3h ago
Mobile-first design. Get used to it, we haven't even started to see the worst of it
cucubeleza · 2h ago
it's just a big company doing big company things, don't care about the user, only thing that matters is money and power, like dictators
fernvenue · 3h ago
Exactly, and maybe YouTube have a plan, have a god damn plan...By the way, I use https://github.com/KcodeGG/UserStyles this to make YouTube back to old style :)
iorekz · 3h ago
>Presumably by then we’ll have our mandatory NeuraLinks and the YouTube algorithm will be able to inject real-time ML generated content (and ads) straight into our brains
exactly what happens on a black mirror episode. Recommended!
jaydenmilne · 3h ago
There's nothing new under the sun, I thought I was being clever.
I'll have to watch it!
amai · 2h ago
Google must not only sell Chrome, but also Youtube. Tiktok might be interested to buy it.
jayshah5696 · 3h ago
Goal for them to not watch too much content. I changed my YouTube account and increased from 3 width to 4. So probably if you are watching too much to discourage they are doing this.
seydor · 3h ago
When you open any video on youtube.com the video players menus appear for a split second (some CSS is not hiding them). Keep getting this on chrome/windows
musesum · 3h ago
My chain of thought:
1) Aaron Marcus - who found optimal menu count to be 5 +/- 2
2) Magic number 7 +/- 2
3) Fitt's Law selectivity (bigger is easier)
4) Shared layout for mobile + desktop
5) I hate short form
6) Is 5) a non-sequitur?
7) No! I now have the attention span of a goldfish.
8) Maybe I should read a book
blahaj · 4h ago
> Unfortunately, using an advanced analytics package I’ve projected that around May 2026 the YouTube homepage will just be one video, and by September there will be no videos at all on the homepage.
Doesn't exactly that already exist with TikTok?
jsheard · 4h ago
It already exists on YouTube under the Shorts tab, which is just "we have TikTok at home".
chao- · 4h ago
My YouTube changed recently from 6-wide to 4-wide. I wonder why I get 4 across instead of everyone else's 3?
Still annoying, and I still much, much prefer 6 videos across.
mirrorlake · 4h ago
I quite like the 2x3 grid of videos. No complaints, actually.
CryZe · 8m ago
It's 1.5x3 if you have a 21:9 screen. It's so bad.
shanehoban · 4h ago
Glad I'm not the only one who noticed and hates this change!
stuaxo · 3h ago
Youtube on AndroidTV is even worse. Most of the pic is taken by the first video which is always a massive ad.
They've made it terrible.
Eavolution · 2h ago
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.
magackame · 2h ago
Let's also not forget about automatic title and audio translations...
pimlottc · 4h ago
It's because they want you to get hooked when the videos auto-play on hover, and that's less likely with small thumbnails.
kelvinjps10 · 4h ago
Idk but I prefer the modern one as the other one I feel there are too many videos and I'm unable to see them well
anigbrowl · 1h ago
It's the same with Google news on Mobile. I found an old Nexus one in a drawer the other day and tried charging it up, it still worked fine. When I opened Google News (from~12 years ago!) it was just a list of categories and 8-10 headlines within each category, a small picture for the top story in each category.
On my modern phone it's all pictures and you can see at most 2 headlines at once. It takes a bunch of scrolling (= 'engagement' = $) just to see what the top headlines are. Worse, the categories are all mixed together, so I keep being subject to sports 'news'. Absolute garbage.
brailsafe · 2h ago
Jokes aside, I just keep my watch history off so the homepage is blank
crawsome · 47m ago
Similar with Reddit. The redesign serves you less content and more ads, and zooms everything in. There's no profit in giving you everything you want all at once.
Razengan · 49m ago
Someone at HN needs glasses too, until then we're stuck with this borderline hostile text/UI size and colors trying to be as unreadable as possible.
hkchad · 3h ago
This happened to me last week, used uBlock origin to set it back to 8 video's per row.
rcfox · 3h ago
Could you share how you did that?
mitthrowaway2 · 4h ago
I noticed this exact same thing! I looked in every menu for the setting to change it back. Nothing.
asdfman123 · 4h ago
Fun thing to open first thing in the morning as I wait for my coffee to brew at YouTube
sailfast · 4h ago
So who is building their competitor? Any shot in hell at this because of their huge library?
SmartestUnknown · 4h ago
I think it is not just the library but the huge costs associated with storage, encoding and bandwidth. YouTube has innovated significantly to make it as cheap as possible to run such a service and it is likely that it would take an enormous amount of money for any competitor to replicate it.
(Disclaimer: I work at Google but no connection to YouTube)
bluGill · 3h ago
Peertube is trying. There are a bunch of different servers with some interesting content.
Some is the keyword here. As you say youtube's huge library is a hard thing to compete with. Still I've found some good content there and I make it a point to look at peertube first to reward those who are there with my eyes.
boramalper · 2h ago
I wish PeerTube had a "flagship" instance like mastodon.social [0] for Mastodon or lemmy.world [1] for Lemmy. The lack of a generalist instance with open sign-ups hinders the adoption.
There is no competitor. Video hosting is too expensive.
slater · 3h ago
of course there are competitors, but they're either pay-to-play (Vimeo?), or overrun with fash or fash-adjacent content (Rumble, etc.)
fHr · 1h ago
I mean I applied as SWE 2 but they don't even proceed with any app, at least I solved meanwhile around 1000 lcs. So I can't solve it for you sadly and people working there are probably to much in the ad business then doing actual core changes these days, to hard probably need for 1 small css change 7 higher manager approvals....
anentropic · 4h ago
Yes this change is super annoying
alex1138 · 3h ago
One thing that made Youtube work well in its early days was a robust and interesting recommendations system (for those who are old, like me). There was also a robust Trending section
They chipped away and chipped away at the usefulness of Youtube and the recommendations got worse and worse (and sometimes blatantly corporate), then they lied about what was trending, and now it's just a mess (some of the recommendations can still be good). And I'll forever maintain they absolutely do regularly remove videos (or demonetize channels) for reasons of 'misinformation' (which they aren't, at least some of the time); they've taken an ideological stance. And there's a reason why the default homepage isn't your subscriptions page
Companies do not listen to their users. I guess in part it's because if you did you'd have to take on board every asinine suggestion under the cover of "the customer is always right" but there's a middle ground, y'know? They just really don't seem to care, giving any sort of feedback is like screaming into the void
godelski · 3h ago
There's just so much low hanging fruit at YouTube (and other places) that it's wild. I can't believe this shit goes on. No, it isn't just OP I see 3 videos in the first row, and 2-3 in the second. First row contains a fundraiser video or membership video each time. And the info about ads takes up so much space a frequently click on it instead of the fucking video I'm trying to watch.
Also, I can't believe this is a problem. But if you watch with subtitles and the video has embedded subtitles, they just clash. A fucking intern can write you the program to turn them off (ADAPTIVELY!) as needed. But when they clash both become unreadable!! It's so fucking bad that everyone that makes shorts puts captions in the middle of the screen because YouTube puts theirs at the top. Like you got all this machine learning and you can't use it for something useful?!?!?
Alifatisk · 4h ago
That advanced analytics package for projection gave me a good chuckle
the_other · 4h ago
Vote with your attention.
gh0stcat · 4h ago
This reminds me of Pinterest, a platform I used to love for finding art and inspirational content as an artist myself. Without ad blockers, I would say 1/3 to 1/2 of all “pins” or images are actually ads, some of which are the nefarious “shopping” ads which look just like images and when clicked, take you directly to the sellers site. With the ad blocker, it is full of weird holes that just make the page look terrible. It feels honestly terrible as a consumer to have the experience degraded this much, its like having a storefront and half of the items on display are actually garbage you need to toss aside. And unfortunately there isn’t an obvious better choice or option. Also don’t even get me started on the scammy ads that are ai generated images or just all of the pins that are ai generated slop…
geuis · 4h ago
Their mobile site is also terrible. It's like the designers forgot that people watch videos in landscape mode. For example, comments won't load unless you rotate to portrait mode first. I mean, come on.
andypants · 1h ago
Also when clicking from a search result to a video, it replaces the url instead of pushing to navigation history. So when I click into a video and try to go back, it takes me to the homepage instead of the search results! It only happens on mobile!
meroes · 4h ago
Haha so it’s not just me with that issue
calf · 4h ago
Their TV app changed grid layout of playlists to list that scrolls down so slowly, this makes my 100+ video playlist useless! Argh.
jeffbee · 4h ago
Mobile web? On the Android app you can definitely put the comments side-by-side with a landscape video.
mmmlinux · 4h ago
Doesnt doing this make youtube impressions go up, since they are showing you the video with less immediate competition around it.
jonny_eh · 3h ago
Fewer thumbnails mean impressions go down
brendanfinan · 4h ago
YouTube is removing videos and moving to Shorts-only in a couple months, so this shouldn't be an issue for long
herpdyderp · 4h ago
What does this mean? Does this mean that there will be no more video UI (only the shorts UI)? Does this mean that only shorts will show up on the homepage? etc. (Also a source would be nice.)
luxurytent · 4h ago
I think OP is being sarcastic, throwing a hint to how popular TikTok (and thus short videos) are over long form content
akulkar4 · 4h ago
Parent comment needs a /s.
enlyth · 4h ago
Does it though? It's blatantly obvious sarcasm
jaydenmilne · 3h ago
YouTube should just show ads, that's what makes money anyway right?
Cable TV figured this out a long time ago.
enlyth · 4h ago
The most placebo button I've ever seen is that "Don't show Shorts" where it says something like "We'll show you less Shorts" and then they reappear 30 minutes later
I guess every content platform is moving to forcefully shoving slop into your face now
markus_zhang · 4h ago
OK finally something to cute my addiction.
pier25 · 4h ago
Absolutely. It's like they only test youtube on small laptop displays.
So many websites are not tested on large monitors ffs.
From the top of my head I remember the previous Gumroad marketing website. It looked terrible. Everything was huge. Even the new one doesn't work that well on a large monitor:
I thought it was just me experiencing this last week. I thought I accidentally changed some setting, even checked my browser's zoom mode, and then just lived with it.
Also the lack of 'gutters' to lay my mouse cursor to rest while scrolling is annoying.
But hey, I subscribed to your RSS feed. That's at least some good news.
The iphone and its consequences have been a catastrophe for web design.
bravetraveler · 4h ago
List view, gang
mystified5016 · 3h ago
I love how YouTube makes it impossible to resize your browser window to cover the title and description and all the flying animated like and view numbers. If you try to resize vertically, it pillarboxes the video to make the title box fit.
I have a vertical monitor and all I want is to put the video on one half of the screen without all this crap constantly cloying for my attention.
micromacrofoot · 3h ago
It's painful, but every single person in this comment thread is no longer part of youtube's target demographic.
leptons · 2h ago
Pretty sure I am one of their target demographics as long as I keep paying for their subscription.
ringeryless · 4h ago
almost like they think a desktop monitor is a portrait mode phone screen...
it's not like we dont have media query API, google, but hey, it fits with the general dumbing down and phonification of all interfaces that should have stopped by now.
it's not like they don't have 3 layout sizes already enshrined, it's that they are forcing the desktop layout to act like a portrait mode phone screen for no apparent reason other than trying to be on trend with enshittification or somesuch.
Another recommendation for the Unhook extension. Literally cannot use YT without it now.
npteljes · 3h ago
Honestly, this, and the other reasons in the thread (like the resetting preferences) is the reason why I don't invest emotionally into platforms anymore. Been burned too many times. In most cases, I won't fight the system at all - I'll use the defaults, and if I don't like it, I'll go elsewhere. This have freed up so much mental energy for me.
SO much stupid bullshit is going on that boggles the mind. But they are only bullshit from "our" consumer perspective - they make perfect sense from other perspectives, like the creators, the platform providers, and so on. Most just boils down to the participants having different priorities. And to the power dynamics between them. For example - yeah you might not like YouTube (addressed to the creator or the consumer), but where else will you go?
titzer · 3h ago
Well, I've been holding this one in for a while but now's the time, so it's flame on.
YouTube sucks so bad.
On the one hand, you have the amazing engineering prowess, enormous hardware resources, reliability and scaling of Google. The amount of sheer bandwidth of video that YouTube can pump is absolutely staggering. Having to deal with fraud, abuse, content moderation, copyright disputes, and to create an ecosystem that rewards creators and all...a lot of problems were solved. AFAIR from my days at Google, YouTube finally broke even in terms of revenue in the early 2010s. It turns a profit now--a massive one for any company except Google scale. Compared to search ads its still a pittance.
And yet, the product is getting worse and worse and worse. It's worse for users and worse for creators and worse for society.
The UI is atrocious and the ads are annoying. It regularly breaks for me on non-Chrome browsers (maybe partly attributable to adblockers I run, who knows). It's unusable with full blown ads. I just don't know who has the patience to spend any time at all on a site.
With ads, it's on again off again with interruptions in the middle of videos. Entire classes of use cases are utterly destroyed by ads in the middle. For example, I spent a significant amount of time collecting backing track and play along videos for guitar. Play along use cases are just ruined by ads. Full stop. YouTube is completely unusable without an ad blocker. So I do what I should have done, which is to rip the audio tracks out of videos and put them on my local computer. What an absolute fail of a computer system. The internet sucks.
But that's just the ads. The UI--even optimized for tablets--is so stupid as to be nearly unusable. The basic functionality I want to use--SEARCH FOR A VIDEO--is hidden somewhere in a corner somewhere, doesn't show up on most pages, tries to hide itself whenever possible, and in addition to that, the pages are clunky, slow, poorly organized, confusing, and reorganize themselves every six months. FFS I WANT TO SEARCH FOR A VIDEO. I don't know how to find it now. I don't know how to use any of the crap anymore. I counted and for some workflows it literally required me to use the back button three times to even get to a page where the search ICON was hidden in the corner somewhere using the quietest, unobtrusive labeling possible. They don't even want you to search anymore.
What is this new UI regime we are in where the five basic functions of the video browser (at least for me)--play/stop, advance, go back, search, and toggle full screen--are so badly labeled, hard to get to, and laggy, that it's basically unusable? Oh, that's right. All of those things are annoying for YouTube engagement that spends all of my screen on stuff that IT WANTS ME TO SEE--including ads. Like literally the entire point is to pull you away from whatever you are doing to watch something else...
Don't even get me started on how bad search has gotten and how the ecosystem of videos is totally borked by the attention economy now. I find myself wishing for an option where any video made in the last 5 years is just excluded. Otherwise I just get some 8K video of some fool sitting in a racecar chair talking so fast and loud that I feel frankly assaulted. And some people edit their videos to literally delete the spaces between words and sentences.
It's all so terrible and I kind of don't want it.
...except that YouTube just kind of became the world's repository of all video data? What does that mean for history when an ad company takes it over?
Agingcoder · 2h ago
First of all , I agree with all your points. I used to not use YouTube because it was unusable ( try to watch an educational video when you get interrupted every 5 minutes …). Most of my problems got fixed by paying for YouTube premium, and disabling search history, much to my surprise. It’s expensive though, and it won’t solve everything, but it makes YouTube significantly better.
titzer · 2h ago
I object to YouTube premium as it amounts to extortion. It's a reward for making a product worse. What a perverse incentive system, and we shouldn't let them get away with it.
quantadev · 3h ago
I don't even let Youtube suggest videos to me, nor do I use their jank Subscription system. I simply maintain a markdown file with a direct link to the '/videos' page of each channel I care about.
This way I'm always in control of what I see. Sure Youtube can still slather me with ADs injected into videos every 2 minutes, and much of the content I watch has ADs right in the video, but at least I feel more in control by never giving Youtube the chance to unleash their algos on me to entice me into as much fake AI-Generated garbage recommendations as they can jam onto a page. That's no longer a problem. I no longer dig thru their dumpster fire of a home page.
jaggs · 3h ago
I hate to be that guy, but how many of us are actually paying for this service? Yeah we pay with ads and attention, but is there another company that's prepared to store over 500 hours of new content every single minute? Yeah it sucks, but free is as free does.
loosescrews · 4h ago
A 32” monitor should be 4k. If anyone needs glasses, it might be the author of this blog post as that is the typical market for low pixel density displays.
kasabali · 2h ago
1440p@32" is very close to 96 ppi (ie. pixel density as the god intended).
If you want high density go full double at ~192 dpi so you get proper scaling. 4k@32" is a shitty in between resolution nobody has asked for.
jaydenmilne · 3h ago
I agree, but I didn't buy this one
pizzathyme · 4h ago
I always laugh at these shots from the hip criticizing YouTube and Google. As though Google doesn't have a entire team of data scientists and top tier engineers managing this experiment and driving it to optimal results. (Spoiler: they do)
If you don't like the service, you can stop using it. And if you do, they have already factored that into their metrics guardrail, and it was the right decision.
jaydenmilne · 3h ago
Yup! That's the point, I'm mourning what was and shaking my fist at a cloud.
They're probably right by their metrics, they can probably rigorously prove this makes them more money. But I think its subjectively worse, it feels claustrophobic and prescriptive to me.
pizzathyme · 2h ago
Don't disagree at all
skeaker · 3h ago
The flaw with this angle is that their success can be attributed to momentum rather than any good decision-making. They have no real competition for long-form video content. If they make a terrible decision, they can still be successful as their market has nowhere else to go to.
That is to say that "If you don't like the service, you can stop using it" isn't really true if you want to watch long-form videos on the internet. There isn't an alternative.
bluGill · 3h ago
I have a background in human machine interaction and I can tell you without even being there to tell you that a lot of changes didn't have proper UX design work done on them.
Now they did have AB testing and likely are better at the metrics Google cares about: making money. However they are worse for users in ways that real user testing would catch. Again though, real user testing would likely cost them money.
pizzathyme · 2h ago
This is certainly true. UX design and user feedback is only one piece of Google's decision making process
titzer · 3h ago
Yes, exactly, like the entire marketing team for buggies around 1910. They really figured out what people wanted.
pizzathyme · 2h ago
If Youtube is going the way of buggies in 1910, then there is a lot of money to be made by shorting their stock right away. If that's your position I would go big
Clearly people don't want what OP shared. My main point was that they are aware of that, yet they are still optimizing for their company's performance
leptons · 1h ago
I hate Youtube Shorts so much that I just installed "SmartTubeNext" app on my Chromecast (suggested in the comments here about Youtube hate). So that expert team is making decisions that drive away users from their apps. The great thing about SmartTubeNext is that even though I pay Youtube to not show ads, the content I watch is often littered with in-video ads, which SmartTubeNext will automatically skip. So, is me leaving the Youtube app part of their "optimal results"? They've optimized so much they created an app that I absolutely hate. I pay for youtube, and now I'm cancelling my subscription because this other app doesn't show ads and doesn't force me to see "shorts" and other things I don't want in my Youtube experience. It seems to me that they are optimizing for paying-user cancellations.
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 it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage. Often the video gets inexplicably added to my watch history, and if I do choose to click on it I have to go back to the beginning because I missed the start of the audio
Additionally there's a bug on the Android app that it sometimes doesn't show video titles (or the worlds worst A/B test?), so scrolling through I just see talking heads (since it autoplays instead of showing the video thumb) and have to force restart it to actually understand what's going on.
If you manually increase the quality on that video, it will only apply for that video, and whatever videos you play next, will still be limited to 480p.
All this is just to save costs..A truly fucking shady tactic to fuck over paying users. Fuck Google for what they do and how they cheat naive users.
Also the compression algorithm is very aggressive and it works reasonably well for general content but for edge cases (like starcraft streams), the 1080p loses enough details to make it hard to see important things like observers and outlines of individual units in crowded clusters. The compression algorithm just isn’t trained/tuned for these types of content, so even on a 1080p screen I need to stream at 4K just to see the details properly.
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 the buffer and have all the new video coming in be set to the new quality. The idea is that you would have the video playing, change the quality, and it keeps playing until a few seconds later the new buffer hits and you jump up to the new quality level. Combined with the fact that YouTube only buffers a few seconds of video (a change made a few years prior to this; back in the Flash era YouTube would just keep buffering until you had the entire video loaded, but that was seen as a waste of both YouTube's bandwidth and the user's since there was always the possibility of the user clicking off the video; the adoption of better connection speeds, more efficient video codecs, and widespread and expensive mobile data caps led to that being seen as the better behavior for most people) and for most people, changing quality is a "transparent" operation that doesn't "interrupt" the video.
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 can also be seen in Chrome sometimes on high-latency connections: in some cases, Chrome will just stop for a few moments while performing DNS resolution or opening the initial connections rather than displaying the usual "slow light gray" loading circle used on that step, seemingly because some mechanism within Chrome has decided that the requests will probably return quickly enough for it to not be an issue. YouTube Shorts on mobile also has similar behavior on slow connections: the whole video player will just freeze entirely until it can start playing the video with no loading indicator whatsoever. Another example is Gmail's old basic HTML interface versus the modern AJAX one: an article which I remember reading, but can't find now found that for pretty much every use case the basic HTML interface was statistically faster to load, but users subjectively felt that the AJAX interface was faster, seemingly just because it didn't trigger a full page load when something was clicked on.
And, I mean, they're kind of right. It's nerds like us that get annoyed when the video quality isn't updated immediately, the average consumer would much rather have the video "instantly load" rather than a guarantee that the video feed is the quality you actually selected. 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.
This is also why Google's Lighthouse page loading speed algorithm prioritizes "Largest Contentful Paint" (how long does it take to get the biggest element on the page rendered), "Cumulative Layout Shift" (how much do things move around on the page while loading), and "Time to Interactive" (how long until the user can start clicking buttons) rather than more accurate but "nerdy" indicators like Time to First Byte (how long until the server starts sending data) or Last Request Complete (how long until all of the HTTP requests on a page are finished; for most modern sites, this value is infinity thanks to tracking scripts).
People simply prefer for things to feel faster, rather than for things to actually be faster. And, luckily for Internet companies, the former is usually much easier to achieve than the latter.
These were unlisted videos, so I’m not a YouTuber or anything, but I’m pretty sure this is one thing some people do to make their videos appear better sometimes
They're making slot machines, effectively.
It's easy to like them by accident though
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.
As to the reason, at least with Youtube and Facebook, the answer is obvious: they want to increase their ad revenue by claiming additional “plays” or “interactions” or whatever they want to call it today. I remember realizing several times over the years that I had been conned when I paid for ads. The top-level numbers looked good, but when I dug in, I realized they were all faked.
Same stuff with the mobile youtube app. If you so much as graze the screen anywhere while watching a video the replay speed doubles. This is so sensitive that even a tiny unintentional finger touch, or a water droplet landing on the screen triggers it. Whoever thought that is a good idea as a feature, i can’t comprehend.
Plus they have no data to see how badly their feature annoys me. From a metrics perspective “the user wanted to fast forward for 5s” looks the same as “a careless finger cradling the phone triggered the fast forward and it took the user 5s to realise what is going on and adjust their hold, now they are annoyed at how fragile this app is”. Someone might have even used the statistics of all the inadvertent activations in their promo package to show what a popular feature they made!
I have it turned on, but leave my mouse to the right of the screen if I don't want autoplay. It's habit now.
EDIT: or did you mean on autoplay as in part of a playlist playing in the small player in the corner while you are on the home page?
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.
Surely you don't expect YouTube, a company that doesn't store any data at all actually, to be able to store a single boolean value somewhere in your account, do you? This would be impossible for a company as broke and small as YouTube.
Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?
I suspect that the managers in charge of some of these features are lobbying for it as a way to artificially increase the engagement stats for their features, but spinning it as actually being good UX instead of a user-hostile move because it's important for "discoverability" or something like that.
Then it was "hide shorts for X days" (I think 30?).
Now it is "show fewer shorts".
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.
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 rabbit holes in YouTube so bad that they decided to physically destroy their computers…
My preferences change all the time, regardless of Youtube. For example, when I was a kid, I hated mustard.
On the other hand, my Youtube configuration may change independent of my actions.
I'm fearing the day they'll just remove that toggle for good.
Don't. Nowadays we can just re-introduce it, at least all who read this. iOS, macOS, Windows, Android... All have browser extensions, all can be modified.
Absolutely no sites, including YouTube, honour the parameter. But you can at least tell the site that you'd prefer it another way.
Unfortunately there's no way to set this per-site, at least in Chrome. Similarly, if you disable animations in Windows, you also disable all animations and transitions in websites that support prefers-reduced-motion, causing some sites to feel janky as a result.
They really need to add a per-site toggle for that, and a browser-level option to ignore the OS' setting. Turning off animations in Word shouldn't turn them off in Google Calendar.
Chrome: command line switch:
--force-prefers-reduced-motion --force-prefers-no-reduced-motion
It's also just stored in a cookie/session, so you have to do it in each client and every time you wipe your cookies. Very frustrating.
By all UI logic this should not scroll as this element is not scrollable (it's the top bar above the scrollable content), but YouTube and Google in their infinite UX wisdom kept the scroll mouse events go behind the hovered element. I won't complain about this one too.
Is it maybe caused by an adblocker? (I have YouTube premium, so no ads.)
Edit: Actually, the picture in the article shows a misalignment in the "Breaking News" section. It's odd, because the sections align perfectly for me on various screen sizes
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43848061
Bunch of hackers using adblockers that modify the client-side UI to cheat Google out of money and then complaining loudly about a minor UI convenience. How dare Google not optimize for them!
I say this as someone who uses an adblocker myself. But come on.
https://github.com/insin/control-panel-for-youtube/blob/cf18...
They added fuchsia to the timeline bar so that it now clashes in an ugly way with everything else on the page.
Don't like Shorts? TOO BAD!
If anything, I feel like that this is by design to hyperstimulate their core audience seeking instant gratification.
It's buried in the settings but it's there.
The home page is made up of: a search bar with some extra buttons that link to different pages, a sidebar with some more buttons and a list of videos. What are the multiple teams for ? And even assuming it is necessary, there is really no single person responsible for the page so that issues like this can be seen and fixed ?
And since we are talking about pet peeves, on my laptop when you open the homepage you get a placeholder with 4 videos per row, and then you get 3 videos per row (or 5 shorts per row)
Conway's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
Conway's law is expressed as "communication structure -> program structure" but it's actually even stronger than that; the arrow is bidirectional. If either the organization wants to break up the homepage into different teams, or if the organization has to have multiple teams work on their homepage for whatever reason, the homepage will reflect the organizational structure. YouTube falls into the second branch, which is that their home page is so complicated it has to be broken up between teams due to sheer organizational size. At YouTube's size you'll even have organizational distinctions you can't even see on the homepage like dedicated reliability engineering teams. At their scale I see at least six teams most likely, the "normal" video team, the shorts team, the sidebar menu, the hamburger menu, the search team, and the team responsible for the top-level all-Google interaction, plus multiple invisible ones like recommendation algorithm, reliability, possibly a dedicated performance team, etc.
You can, organizationally, try to put these all under one manager, but even when you do that it is a surprisingly uphill battle to maintain coherence, even when it is a goal, which it often isn't particularly. There's a lot of reasons few companies have the visual and design coherence of a ~2010 Apple, including arguably even 2025 Apple.
Are we just going to gloss over this like the list of videos is random? haha
Wait what? Thumbnails are useless. DeArrow has been god sent.
Nobody cares about coherent UI/UX anymore. They certainly don‘t care about your fringe usages. Do new stuff. Do good enough. Expensive designers with a clear vision and attention to detail? Sounds slow. And expensive.
The move towards forced autoplay and infinite scroll will continue in any media app. AB tests show it is what humans crave.
I tend to select some text in long textblocks to keep a point of reference while reading. Medium and other new generation slop loves to open an obtrusive menu above my selection.
https://github.com/Harren06/ublock-yt-shorts
If someone can recommend a better alternative for custom CSS, I'd be interested to hear it. I guess Tampermonkey could work, if you have that.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/custom-css-by-denis...
* download a release zip: https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/releases (expand Assets). * go to chrome://extensions, toggle developer mode on * click load unpacked and select the file you unzipped the release
then you also have to watch out because chrome will, still time later, disable ublock origin. You have to go to your extensions page and find the option for 'Keep it for now' or something. Then you can continue to browse the internet like a real gee! Thanks ublock origin!
So I don't consider that to create a conflict of interest.
It is, just not as capable as before due to the Manifest v3 changes.
youtube.com##ytm-paid-content-overlay-renderer
The `this video includes sponsored content` that covers and takes over the click into a video.
Whoever designed that, implemented that, approved that, needs to be fired and blacklisted from doing user-facing code changes.
The worst casualty of the current design is the search. You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations. No? Fuck off? Do what I tell you to do!
Maybe a good opportunity to remember that you watching the videos you want to watch is actually just a workaround Google suffers through in the YouTube product.
They have to do it so that you come to the site, but it costs them money and makes it harder for them to optimize the revenue they get from your eyeballs.
Strycturally, their goal is to push the line as far as they can, and they spend a lot of product design and engineering effort to do so. They're only going to get better at it as time goes by.
And of course this principle doesn't just apply to YouTube, but at pretty much all media sites once they get large enough to pivot from growing their audience to optimizing its profitability.
It used to be a Google mantra that "focus on the user and all else will follow." They are so far beyond that they've wrapped around. They actively hate users now.
All Google really cares about is making advertisers happy. Literally nothing else registers as a priority.
Unfortunately this seems to be what people want.
There's plenty of YouTube competitors (Substack, Patreon, Vimeo, Twitch etc.) Unfortunately, they just don't have the traction of YouTube
This has become increasingly annoying for me. Sometimes I want to find a reference I saw a few years ago on some topic. Even if I know the speaker, the topic, sometimes even the title, I can't find the video. I get a handful of results vaguely related to the search terms and then a never ending list of garbage not even slightly related to my search terms.
I really want my own memory augmentation. A personal tracker for all of the content I have ever consumed in any form, indexed and searchable (like in a personal Elastic Search cluster). The trouble is, I only want it for like 1% of the content I have consumed. The modern web is so hostile in general that aggregating any kind of data about my own usage is so onerous that it might as well be impossible. The friction they have purposefully created worked exactly as they intended.
As a result I installed the "Control Panel for Youtube" chrome plugin and Im able to fix it back to 6 videos per row. I also found I could make shorts play in the traditional youtube player by default - which is an added relief.
Some of the revelations from the various lawsuits against Google by the US and other governments over the years have been about this.
The company replaced leaders who cared about users with leaders who cared about revenue optimization and those leaders changed the direction of the company to what we all see in all of their products these days.
The fewer videos they have in focus at a time, the more accurate their algorithms can be.
Unfortunately UX teams aren't actually paid to make great UX, especially at large corps and any place ad-driven. They're paid to move the metrics and move the revenue line.
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.
No comments yet
Seriously, though, w/o RSS feeds Youtube would be completely useless to me. I keep waiting for Google to kill them.
⁽¹⁾ https://marcosatanaka.com/
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unwatched-for-youtube/id647728...
It does get more complicated if monitoring too many channels since execution will timeout due to sheets limit. But can make it to pickup where previously timedout.
Bonus using API gets you video info so you can filter by length (shorts), keywords etc. Limitation is ~150 videos added per day due to API limits.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71192605/how-do-i-get-yo...
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCS0N5ba...
... works but:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UULFS0N5...
... is 404.
https://shorts.aviparshan.com/rss-feed
The preview is 530x300px on a 1920x1080 screen vs the image shown being 336x188px
How this passed any sort of QA is beyond me
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.
The biggest JS file is about 9.1MB alone, and after running it through Firefoxes pretty-printer to undo the minificiation it comes to 447,873 lines of code. The other files would easily push it over half a million in total.
all of the code that hoovers up your analytics on what's been looked at, what's been scrolled past, etc. maybe I'm just jaded, but I'd suspect so much of it is nothing but tracking and does little for making the site function
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/performance/thi...
YouTubes frontend people just don't care about bloat, even when other Googlers are yelling at them to cut it out.
Or maybe the next step will be automated AI-generated thumbnails based on the video and the user itself, so each user will be grouped into a different category and gets served a different thumbnail accordingly.
I HATE Short form video content and no matter how many times I select "show me less of this" I still get them front and center when I open the app or website.
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 YouTube. You can’t only have vegetables when your competitors are dealing heroin and your revenue is engagement based.
It seems the revealed preference of addicting consumption for engagement is tv with with a novelty button. TikTok and short form videos are that distilled to its purest form.
These companies can’t turn them off - they’re trapped by market incentives, it’s moloch. A few years back when Facebook had a more dominant market position Zuck said they were intentionally going to focus on human connections and friends despite the revenue cost that would cause because it was the ideal he wanted. In battle against TikTok you can’t hold those kinds of ideals unfortunately.
-Enhancer for YouTube extension (Firefox) — mopsi
-Unhook extension (Chrome/Firefox) — jabroni_salad, kelvinjps10
-YouTube-shorts block add-on — timbit42
-ReVanced for mobile — kelvinjps10
-Shorts filter list in Brave browser (works on mobile) — my personal favorite
Luckily Google hasn't "manifest away" this type of extensions (yet).
I HATE youtube shorts. Not their content (I've never watched one) but how they've infected the whole youtube experience.
You search for something and half the results are irrelevant... which includes a ton of shorts.
http://www.sebastianmihai.com/idiocracy.html
and no wonder they write papers about "negative sampling" because they don't collect clean data. I made the mistake once of clicking on a video where a Chinese lady transforms into a fox on America's Got Talent and oh my god I am suddenly scheduled for thousands of AI slop videos where some Chinese girl transforms into something on that show with the same music and with the same reaction shots.
There is an answer to the coldest cold start problem and that is have a hand curated collection of about 100 or so content pieces that are of broad interest and stupendously high quality. Instagram will show you videos that are amazing (like somebody cooking a fine meal under rustic conditions) if you're cold and Stumbleupon did the same back in the day. Now Instagram 2025 and Stumbleupon 2012 are not "cold" from the viewpoint of content the way YT Shorts is, but Google has the money to pay professionals to make something -- but their ideology is against it.
Better than the results on google these days, so YT is at least doing better.
manifest.json
containing: { "manifest_version": 3, "name": "Hide YouTube Shorts", "version": "1.0", "description": "Hides YouTube Shorts", "content_scripts": [ { "matches": ["://www.youtube.com/"], "js": ["content.js"] } ] }
and a file named content.js
containing:
function hideShorts() { const shorts = document.querySelectorAll('ytd-rich-shelf-renderer[is-shorts]'); shorts.forEach(short => { short.style.display = 'none'; }); } hideShorts(); const observer = new MutationObserver(hideShorts); observer.observe(document.body, { childList: true, subtree: true });
add the contents of this folder as a chrome extension
https://gist.github.com/insin/ef93c7d87b1f97f1c9411e6128d520...
I also hate shorts, however, if this is to believed, we're for sure stuck with it: https://www.zebracat.ai/post/youtube-shorts-statistics
If yes, then they don't care. Sorry. If you'll tolerate it and some other cohort of users will engage with the site for 0.1 seconds more than they would otherwise, it stays. YouTube is an optimization machine.
Absolutely this! I was looking to see if it was an option yesterday. Annoyingly not :/
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-shorts-bloc...
You get almost a complete blank page and a search bar when you go to "youtube.com", and then when you search, you get the results. Just simple, really.
It also gets rid of that nonsense they did to the search page.
I also hate that the first one or two short may be relevant to whatever I'm consuming, researching, then it quickly turns into me watching Kill Tony comedians, girls basically naked in the gym, etc. they know my brain basically just turns off and enters the void
And 98% of it is just grabbing popular snippets of long form videos, cropping them slightly, and overlaying some bubbly animated text (or worse, just closed captions but with a bright font).
It's almost as annoying as the deluge of people who email and say "we can auto-translate your content into 20 languages!"
https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/the-flywheel.html
and you might think, "I have (say) N=250,000 people playing game A and I can get them playing game B" you are probably going to be disappointed and very lucky if you get somewhere between 250 and 2500 of them playing your new game.
The two-sided market that makes YouTube impossible to dethrone makes it just as hard to change direction. For one thing you have to change the behavior of the viewers, but you also have to change the behavior of the creators, who know how to make videos, who know how to monetize them, all of that.
Myself I find I don't have a big attention span for short videos. I mean, Chinese girls doing the robot turn on my mirror neurons as much as anything. I can watch a 30 second video and get 30 seconds of fun but I don't want to watch another and another and another. However I cannot get enough of Techmoan talking about tape decks and such
https://www.youtube.com/user/techmoan
This would be like Starbucks randomly serving tea to 20% of customers who order coffee because they want to compete more effectively with Lipton. That’s not how competition works.
More guidelines available at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795204
I mean, I do know, it's ads and the attention economy, but still. Pick a lane. This is why I pay for Nebula.
I go to Youtube, shorts.
I go to Instagram, shorts.
I go to Facebook, shorts.
I go to Imgur, shorts.
I go to Pinterest, no shorts because it only plays 1 video per screen, but on mobile the screen is smaller so, shorts.
I go to Reddit, shorts.
I go to Bluesky, shorts.
I don't go to Twitter.
Tumblr is probably the only social media that isn't filled with vertical videos and that has an algorithmic feed. I go to Explore and I get dandelions. A static photo of them, not a video. I'm crossing my fingers it stays that way.
Hallelujah.
(Seriously though... Facebook's video playback UI. What the fuck is that? Why is it so bad?)
I guess they don't get that there's going to be only one winner in each niche, unless TikTok goes down for political/national security reasons. Why do I need Youtube shorts if I have TikTok? Why do I need Google+ if I have Facebook? Why do I want Facebook videos if I have Youtube? Unsolved puzzle.
Not your software, not your control.
facebook works the exact same way
billion dollar companies forcing you to look at stuff you dont want and gaslighting you into thinking you have a choice
EDIT: I said "do put it on my desktop" -- I meant to write "DON"T put it on my desktop".
Greasyfork restricts what 3rd party libraries can be pulled in + you have the option of disabling automatic updates in your userscript manager.
A browser is my everything app. It is the most security essential tool I use daily, which requires vigilance in how I extend it. More users is a crappy proxy for how likely a developer can sneak through an insidious change.
Not exactly fly-by-night...
It just needs to be a preference!
And also yes, I want long form and short form videos to be separated, when I'm scrolling through results 6 at a time(minus 1-2 ads) to queue the shorts really mess up the flow.
This filter list is the most up-to-date that I've found to hide shorts with uBlock Origin:
https://github.com/Harren06/ublock-yt-shorts
Remember, with normal videos you (primarily) decide what to watch, but in shorts, you decide what not to watch.
And for fucks sake give me an option to disable the AI translation trash everywhere, and show the title of shorts on a creator's feed page...
The do grab your attention, but they have no lasting effect, it is so short and there is so much of it that you quickly forget everything you have watched, including the ads.
They are good for the platforms though, because effective or not, they get paid good money for these ads.
Who places ads everywhere else on the web?
I found your error.
https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
Edit: for comparison with the screenshot in TFA, this is my Home feed on a 14" MacBook. No Shorts, no Mixes, videos which are 85% (configurable) watched or more are hidden, stream VODs from channels which also stream, Movies and TV, and any channels "Don't recommend channel" refuses to work on, can all be hidden for you:
https://imgur.com/LUnpz9e
It's kind of conceptually like a Shepard's tone, though, which is maybe interesting.
Like why do thumbnails have an invisible overlay that appears on hover over, hijacks the click and takes you to a support page about paid product placement?
I'm clicking on the thumbnail to watch the video not for a jarring detour off the youtube page to a boring help article. Honestly WTF. Maybe the UI designers don't use youtube themselves?
This freakin page:
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10588440?nohelpkit...
https://files.catbox.moe/vzo65c.JPG
Seriously. Clear your cookies or open a private window. All of the videos are replaced by the message "Try searching to get started". Granted, as someone who clears cookies regularly, I like the change.
As an aside, this is something I've noticed recently switching to KDE from Windows/OSX No one is trying to get me to do anything with my computer to pump their metrics. You log in the first time, there's a little welcome popup, and that's it. You are now free to use your computer as you wish.
It's oddly stressful being a rat in a bunch of PM's maze.
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's not a carefully thought out conclusion, but in the era of a hundred competitors, it's plausible that superficial decisions like that have a lot of impact on the app usage.
Or it could just be that someone with a forceful personality on the YouTube team decided this is how we're going to do it and nobody could oppose them, not every decision is scientifically planned and executed like it's often assumed from the outside!
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 a label clearly visible and I want to have preferences to hide those completely.
Short form content, especially combined with AI is an abomination foisted upon this world in search of a meagre profit.
My issue with Shorts are that you watch it, conclude that it was garbage and a waste of your time, so you hit "thumbs down". That apparently does NOTHING in YouTube land, because you watched, and hit a button, so you "engaged" with the content. There's so much good, well made, quality content on YouTube, but even if you pay for Premium, the algorithm, tweaked for engagement and ad impression just ruins it and the more YouTube push Shorts the worse it gets.
I highly recommend installing an extension that hides the home feed and sidebar recommendations, which at least makes YT non-distracting again.
The first world had a lot of computers, video cameras and horizontal screens in general before they had smartphones.
I think it plays a part.
The phone camera sensors often have a aspect ration of 4:3 but the sides are cropped in software. So the videos just get mutilated because convention.
Though at least 4:3 format is making a come-back because it is the prefect comprise format. Looks great on a tablet, is usable in both landscape and portrait mode. On Desktop it leave space to read comments. Perfect for youtube videos.
Since a phone can show portrait or landscape videos in fullscreen (just hold the phone vertically or horizontally), it makes sense to shoot in whatever orientation fits the content or situation best.
The real problem is that computer monitors don’t easily offer orientation switching :)
I'm with you there. It's the same for shooting still photos.
...but that doesn't stop people from shooting portrait video and then constantly panning back and forth because the whole (crowd, landscape, giant sea monster, whatever) doesn't fit in the frame.
This is one of the largest corporations in the world and they make one of the most visited sites on the entire internet look like it was someone's hobby project and they just couldn't be bothered to align things correctly. This is insane.
The YouTube Startpage is incredibly bad in so many regards. Low in information density, full of things people do not want to see and fails at basic design. Even a basic, low effort redesign would be a major improvement.
I don't care to waste time letting the machine guide me to "discover" something. There is the thing I need to learn/watch/enjoy _now_, and that's it.
Honestly, I think I prefer this. It makes my use of YouTube a little more deliberate since there's no clickbait to click, initially.
I cannot remember a single time in the last 5+ years when the website wasn't broken in some way. Right now the UI has at least 5 separate bugs and a Premium feature of the iPad app has 5 distinct bugs which are also so obvious that it's clear YT doesn't even test their paid version at all.
YouTube is the best argument against opt-out (or forced) telemetry in apps.
[0] https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions
[1] https://i.imgur.com/zst96wo.png
* Block shorts
* Adjust the number of thumbnails per line, thumbnail shape, border, etc
* Limit the length of titles/descriptions
* Force titles/descriptions into normal upper/lowercase
* Change the default player window size
* Show thumbnails actually in the video (from start, middle or end)
* Fix literally dozens of other annoyances
For Windows desktop under Firefox:
* "Nova YouTube" https://github.com/raingart/Nova-YouTube-extension script running under ViolentMonkey add-on. Nova YouTube is framework that puts modular YouTube fix scripts under one UI.
* "AdashimaaTube" script running under Stylus add-on.
* "Enhancer for YouTube" add-on
* uBlock Origin (of course)
For Android phones: Revanced Extended
For Android-based streaming sticks: SmartTube
Note: The set of add-ons & scripts I use in desktop Firefox is just what I happened to end up with at the time I finally got fed up a few years ago, looked for solutions, tried out several and settled on this mix as working for my needs and preferences. YouTube is constantly changing (usually for the worse), so the landscape of community add-ons and scripts is constantly evolving in response. You'll probably need to update to latest version on whatever solution(s) you use at least every couple months.
I assume they have the resources to measure _everything_.
They know what they're doing. Your use case may be desirable, but they've determined it's not profitable.
I really dislike auto-play so I have always strategically rested my cursor in between the columns of video. Now, as I scroll, my cursor will end up within a column that is misaligned and start autoplay. The worst!
It's kind of silly that they add these attributes to each nth item based on what they expect the grid width to be, when you can get the same layout without them (my YouTube extension mentioned elsewhere in this thread performs this style fix so grid items line up properly when videos and entire cross-cutting shelves are hidden and the rest flow to fill in the gaps), but I suppose they have no incentive to make the layout work when videos are being hidden or the grid is otherwise being modified externally to work in a way they didn't want.
``` ! Display 6 per row youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row, #contents.ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;) youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 6 !important;) youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-posts-per-row: 6 !important;)
! Block on profiles "/videos" youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row:matches-path(/.\/videos/):style(display: none !important) youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer:matches-path(/.\/videos/):style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 4 !important) ```
Then of course the content is also routinely interrupted by rows that take up more space than a row of video suggestions: * Premium movie suggestions, which also manages to take up half the width with just two sentences: "Discover your next favourite movie. Watch without ads, included with your Premium membership" * Shorts, despite me continually pressing the triple dots and saying "Stop showing me this crap". * Interactive Apps (same, I keep saying "not interested" or whatever variant message it shows me).
I think I'm more irritated that youtube gives me the choice to say "don't show me this" and ignores it, than I would be by not having a choice in the first place.
If the author scrolls down another 5 videos and an ad will appear, etc. Shorts are designed so that they can feed more ads/hour to viewers. Both are strategies to increase monetization on the site at the cost of customer experience.
By 'content' I mean the fact that every video has a moron talking for 10 minutes at the beginning. You can search up something as simple as how to tie a shoe, find a promising video with a lot of likes, then click it. Gotta start with 2 ads first, naturally. Then the first 2 minutes will tell you they'll teach you to tie a shoe. The next 5 minutes will be a backstory on the history of the shoe and how it's impacted the creator's life and their own shoe stories. Then a 2 minute sponsored segment for some dropshipped wallet or sock nobody needs, then another youtube ad, then hurried 10 second clip of someone poorly tying a shoe.
Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't see how anyone can stand it anymore.
when you're not an old, and this is all you know, you just accept it without knowing that there was a better world back when the olds were young. not being able to accept this really shows how old man yells get off my lawn you are. YT is not trying to capture you, and probably doesn't care one bit about olds. it's the younger crowds that have been given YT as an absentee parent/babysitter that they have been able to set their hooks in from the beginning. that's the group that will be making them money for years to come
Same with computers. My daily driver is from 2017. I'm just not interested in anything new they're coming out with.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/news-feed-era...
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/df-youtube/
I still use AppleTV for pretty much everything else, but got a firetv stick just to use that. https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube
The 2019 layout actually respected your time — now it’s just dopamine bait on rails. Feels like they’re optimizing for engagement metrics only a machine would love.
That graph made me laugh way too hard. "Zero videos by September" might honestly be the most realistic roadmap Google’s shipped lately.
Also, I’d 100% use a lightweight frontend that just shows recent uploads from my subs in a clean grid. No shorts, no nonsense. If no one builds it, I might.
No comments yet
The worst part is everyone who tries to compete quickly turns the pain dial up to 11 as well. I realize YouTube existed for many years as a Google subsidized product, but Rumble is the best competitor we have and they can get quite annoying as well.
I wonder what's the purpose of this A/B test? Definitely has nothing to do with revenue, right? So what could it be? More engagement? I doubt that few seconds added upon more scrolling won't be much. Retention? Hard to tell.
Which is somehow still an upgrade over the last version of the UI, where the titles of the videos were getting clipped off after about 16 characters.
No comments yet
I just experimentally opened youtube in a maximized window on my desktop with the 24" monitor and ... it's 3 videos per row again but I never noticed.
Perhaps all youtube UI "experts" work from cafes on tiny laptop screens?
Lmao
[1]: https://marcosatanaka.com/#play
Also there are bugs there, and after some magic combinations of clicks I sometimes see 9 grid, or even rarely a 16 grid. Though it lasts only for one session and I can't ever reproduce the bug. So the support is there, they made it shitty on purpose. And I even pay for that crap :(
The google maps app has similar bizareness.
I guess somehow this all makes G more money, but it sure is painful as a consumer.
I'd pay money for a good hand-crafted (non a/b tested) experience. Competition should be the true a/b test :).
No comments yet
There are a ton of great UI/UX choices they've done over the years too; I just wish we had more options as a users.
exactly what happens on a black mirror episode. Recommended!
I'll have to watch it!
1) Aaron Marcus - who found optimal menu count to be 5 +/- 2
2) Magic number 7 +/- 2
3) Fitt's Law selectivity (bigger is easier)
4) Shared layout for mobile + desktop
5) I hate short form
6) Is 5) a non-sequitur?
7) No! I now have the attention span of a goldfish.
8) Maybe I should read a book
Doesn't exactly that already exist with TikTok?
They've made it terrible.
Can't recommend youtube redux alongside disabling watch and search history highly enough.
On my modern phone it's all pictures and you can see at most 2 headlines at once. It takes a bunch of scrolling (= 'engagement' = $) just to see what the top headlines are. Worse, the categories are all mixed together, so I keep being subject to sports 'news'. Absolute garbage.
(Disclaimer: I work at Google but no connection to YouTube)
Some is the keyword here. As you say youtube's huge library is a hard thing to compete with. Still I've found some good content there and I make it a point to look at peertube first to reward those who are there with my eyes.
[0] https://mastodon.social/
[1] https://lemmy.world/
They chipped away and chipped away at the usefulness of Youtube and the recommendations got worse and worse (and sometimes blatantly corporate), then they lied about what was trending, and now it's just a mess (some of the recommendations can still be good). And I'll forever maintain they absolutely do regularly remove videos (or demonetize channels) for reasons of 'misinformation' (which they aren't, at least some of the time); they've taken an ideological stance. And there's a reason why the default homepage isn't your subscriptions page
Companies do not listen to their users. I guess in part it's because if you did you'd have to take on board every asinine suggestion under the cover of "the customer is always right" but there's a middle ground, y'know? They just really don't seem to care, giving any sort of feedback is like screaming into the void
Also, I can't believe this is a problem. But if you watch with subtitles and the video has embedded subtitles, they just clash. A fucking intern can write you the program to turn them off (ADAPTIVELY!) as needed. But when they clash both become unreadable!! It's so fucking bad that everyone that makes shorts puts captions in the middle of the screen because YouTube puts theirs at the top. Like you got all this machine learning and you can't use it for something useful?!?!?
Cable TV figured this out a long time ago.
I guess every content platform is moving to forcefully shoving slop into your face now
So many websites are not tested on large monitors ffs.
From the top of my head I remember the previous Gumroad marketing website. It looked terrible. Everything was huge. Even the new one doesn't work that well on a large monitor:
https://gumroad.com/
Also the lack of 'gutters' to lay my mouse cursor to rest while scrolling is annoying.
But hey, I subscribed to your RSS feed. That's at least some good news.
https://freetubeapp.io/
I have a vertical monitor and all I want is to put the video on one half of the screen without all this crap constantly cloying for my attention.
it's not like they don't have 3 layout sizes already enshrined, it's that they are forcing the desktop layout to act like a portrait mode phone screen for no apparent reason other than trying to be on trend with enshittification or somesuch.
SO much stupid bullshit is going on that boggles the mind. But they are only bullshit from "our" consumer perspective - they make perfect sense from other perspectives, like the creators, the platform providers, and so on. Most just boils down to the participants having different priorities. And to the power dynamics between them. For example - yeah you might not like YouTube (addressed to the creator or the consumer), but where else will you go?
YouTube sucks so bad.
On the one hand, you have the amazing engineering prowess, enormous hardware resources, reliability and scaling of Google. The amount of sheer bandwidth of video that YouTube can pump is absolutely staggering. Having to deal with fraud, abuse, content moderation, copyright disputes, and to create an ecosystem that rewards creators and all...a lot of problems were solved. AFAIR from my days at Google, YouTube finally broke even in terms of revenue in the early 2010s. It turns a profit now--a massive one for any company except Google scale. Compared to search ads its still a pittance.
And yet, the product is getting worse and worse and worse. It's worse for users and worse for creators and worse for society.
The UI is atrocious and the ads are annoying. It regularly breaks for me on non-Chrome browsers (maybe partly attributable to adblockers I run, who knows). It's unusable with full blown ads. I just don't know who has the patience to spend any time at all on a site.
With ads, it's on again off again with interruptions in the middle of videos. Entire classes of use cases are utterly destroyed by ads in the middle. For example, I spent a significant amount of time collecting backing track and play along videos for guitar. Play along use cases are just ruined by ads. Full stop. YouTube is completely unusable without an ad blocker. So I do what I should have done, which is to rip the audio tracks out of videos and put them on my local computer. What an absolute fail of a computer system. The internet sucks.
But that's just the ads. The UI--even optimized for tablets--is so stupid as to be nearly unusable. The basic functionality I want to use--SEARCH FOR A VIDEO--is hidden somewhere in a corner somewhere, doesn't show up on most pages, tries to hide itself whenever possible, and in addition to that, the pages are clunky, slow, poorly organized, confusing, and reorganize themselves every six months. FFS I WANT TO SEARCH FOR A VIDEO. I don't know how to find it now. I don't know how to use any of the crap anymore. I counted and for some workflows it literally required me to use the back button three times to even get to a page where the search ICON was hidden in the corner somewhere using the quietest, unobtrusive labeling possible. They don't even want you to search anymore.
What is this new UI regime we are in where the five basic functions of the video browser (at least for me)--play/stop, advance, go back, search, and toggle full screen--are so badly labeled, hard to get to, and laggy, that it's basically unusable? Oh, that's right. All of those things are annoying for YouTube engagement that spends all of my screen on stuff that IT WANTS ME TO SEE--including ads. Like literally the entire point is to pull you away from whatever you are doing to watch something else...
Don't even get me started on how bad search has gotten and how the ecosystem of videos is totally borked by the attention economy now. I find myself wishing for an option where any video made in the last 5 years is just excluded. Otherwise I just get some 8K video of some fool sitting in a racecar chair talking so fast and loud that I feel frankly assaulted. And some people edit their videos to literally delete the spaces between words and sentences.
It's all so terrible and I kind of don't want it.
...except that YouTube just kind of became the world's repository of all video data? What does that mean for history when an ad company takes it over?
This way I'm always in control of what I see. Sure Youtube can still slather me with ADs injected into videos every 2 minutes, and much of the content I watch has ADs right in the video, but at least I feel more in control by never giving Youtube the chance to unleash their algos on me to entice me into as much fake AI-Generated garbage recommendations as they can jam onto a page. That's no longer a problem. I no longer dig thru their dumpster fire of a home page.
If you want high density go full double at ~192 dpi so you get proper scaling. 4k@32" is a shitty in between resolution nobody has asked for.
If you don't like the service, you can stop using it. And if you do, they have already factored that into their metrics guardrail, and it was the right decision.
They're probably right by their metrics, they can probably rigorously prove this makes them more money. But I think its subjectively worse, it feels claustrophobic and prescriptive to me.
That is to say that "If you don't like the service, you can stop using it" isn't really true if you want to watch long-form videos on the internet. There isn't an alternative.
Now they did have AB testing and likely are better at the metrics Google cares about: making money. However they are worse for users in ways that real user testing would catch. Again though, real user testing would likely cost them money.
Clearly people don't want what OP shared. My main point was that they are aware of that, yet they are still optimizing for their company's performance