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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

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.

I call these features "dead birds" because they remind me of gifts that an outdoor cat will leave on your doorstep. They took quite the effort to do and were made with good intention, but ultimately I don't want them.

  were made with good intention

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

Proliferation of middle management as a separate track killed software

I agree. Any thoughts on how to stop and maybe reverse the proliferation?

Fire the managers. More realistically, just let the big bulky companies fumble around until eventually they're outcompeted by the next generation of startups.

I don't hate the sentiment, but realistically, big bulky companies would go down in flames with much collateral damage from lobbying the government, regulatory capture, anticompetitive practices, squashing creative destruction that might threaten their dominance, etc.

cats _are_ evil indeed

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

Good thing they're fucking blind I guess.

lol'd, thank you

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

Nothing like a "dev process" where the developers do not actually participate.

Is this an admission that you accept to implement complete garbage?

Oh dear God in heaven and Ada Lovelace forgive me for the horrors I have wrought.

If I don’t, there are 100 other people who would do it

Tell your product owners that they should actually use the product they’re owning. And not just use it, but be a power user of that tool. Not a professional user, not a casual user; use the tool at least six hours a day.

I use YouTube 6+ hours a day and I have for probably 10 years, and I don’t even work there. (I have a few annoying personality limitations which make it so that I usually work better with YouTube on in the background, and NOT on autoplay, autoplay always chooses something I don’t want to see/hear; I know that because I use the tool a lot.)

I can tell you that it has steadily and continually gotten worse in that 10 year time. “I have to come up with stories or I won’t have a job” no you don’t, but even if you did, there are so many things YouTube needs more that enlarged thumbnails with visible compression artifacts.

>Tell your product owners that they should actually use the product they’re owning

I did. Not that anyone listened tho.

What shocked me in the aughts was how bad Lotus Notes was. I was pretty sure that the average IBM executive wasn't using the average version of it.

Using the most commonly version of the product, on the commonly used hardware, at least 2 days a week should be a prerequisite for every product owner.

>Using the most commonly version of the product, on the commonly used hardware, at least 2 days a week should be a prerequisite for every product owner.

I am a firm believer that the software should also be developed on commonly used hardware.

Your average user isn't going to have the top-of-the-line MacBook pro, and your program isn't going to be the only thing running on it.

It may run fine on your beefed up monstrosity, and you'll not feel the need to care about performance (worse: you may justify laggy performance with "it runs fine on my machine"). And your users will pay the price for the bloat, which becomes an externality.

Same for websites. Yes, you are going to have a hundred tabs open while working on your web app, but guess what - so will your users.

Performance isn't really product's domain, as in — they would always be happier with things being more snappy; they have to rely on the developer's word as to what's reasonable to expect.

And the expectation becomes that the software should and can only run fine on whatever hardware the developer has, taking all the resources available, and any optimization beyond that is costly and unnecessary.

Giving the devs more modest hardware to develop with (limited traffic/cloud compute/CPU time/...) solves this problem preemptively by making the developers feel the discomfort resulting from the product being slow, and thus having the motivation to improve performance without the product demanding it.

The product, of course, should also have the same modest hardware — otherwise, they'll deprioritize performance improvements.

----

TL;DR: overpowered dev machines turn bloat into an externality.

Make devs use 5+-year-old commodity hardware again.

"The Microsoft Store" app is such a strong example of what happens when nobody cares about performance. It misses UI events most of the time, regardless of what hardware it's running on. Although, in this case, I don't think a Pentium 166MHz would help. The UI event processing is just fundamentally flawed.

<flame=ON>

Usually, but not always, it ignores scroll events while an animation is playing…and hovering over a tile in the list cause a pointless zoom-in animation (the result of which occludes parts of adjacent tiles). Sometimes, the animation won't start immediately, but will still play. To prevent the cannot-scroll-while-animating problem, the only safe place for the mouse pointer is over the scrollbar.

Clicking the (completely invisible) track of the scrollbar has random multi-second delays.

Most of the search filters are hidden by default…and can't be shown without waiting for a slow animation. You can click the show-filters widget over 30 times if you're in a hurry, and still the animation hasn't even drawn the first frame. That delay before it starts means that even if you try to wait, you might click one extra time, and then see both the show-filters animation and then the hide-filters animation…all while none of the rest of UI responds. …And then you might realise you want to refine your search terms…which will reset all filters and re-hide the filter options.

Once you find a tile you want to click, be prepared for another two animation delay: one, if the tile isn't already zoomed in, and another while the app mysteriously animates a slew of placeholders instead of just dumping the items information directly into view. It's slow like a 33.6 moder on a noisy phoneline, but now you finely have details about the item you clicked on maybe 7 to 40 seconds ago.

Now maybe you click a screenshot to enlarge, and decide it wasn't the app for you. You hit your mouse's 'back' button or click the app's strangely tiny (given how freaking huge most of the UI is) back button. Nothing happens. You try again, potentially numerous times…because the app ignores those inputs while a screenshot is enlarged. The app's so unresponsive, it at first doesn't occur to you that no amount of waiting or retrying will help. No, you have to click the little close widget on the opposite side of the window, or 'back' will never mean 'back' again.

You try to go back to your search results. The app eventually responds, but decided to discard that data for some reason and has to play more placeholder animations while reloading it and rediscovering your scroll position.

Then you go into another search result and decide the sidebar of other apps people viewed has some interesting items. These don't have animations on the tiles or any details, so you have to click each one of interest, waiting for more placeholders while imagining modems noises and being outpaced by a Colorado glacier that's crossing the road. And when you page back, the item you just came from does /more/ animations while reloading everything via IP Over Avian Carrier With Quality Of Service.

But when burrowing through the people-also-viewed sidebars, don't go too many layers deep, or when you return to your search results, it will have forgotten your scroll position and turned of your search filters. Ah, time for more UI-blocking animations.

But that's okay, right? Nobody ever made an app that responds in milliseconds to every user input, right? And we all know that doing long, blocking operations on the UI thread is right and holy, right? Even routines single-threaded apps never need to yield to other code blocks or process interrupts, …right?

<flame=OFF>

<meta-flame>

Yes, I have reported this to MS via Feedback Assistant. A few times. No, I don't know why they haven't appeared to do anything about this unshippable pile random bits that somehow slopped out of the Bit Bucket.

"Rectify?" No, the only answer is “Games."

</>

I have never experienced any of this. It’s not a great app, but I’ve never had any problems like you’re describing. Or .. somehow I don’t remember them, but that seems unlikely; I’m always willing to dogpile on a shitty application, but I have to experience the things.

Thank you for your service o7

May your screams into the void be heard by the stakeholders, and not just people.

Those we literally words of Japanese Kamikazes in WW2. If not me, then someone else will die anyway.

It would be funny to compare suicide bombing to a dev implementing features their team is working on even if they don't sound good to that particular dev if it wasn't so sad and offensive.

Also those of German nazis doing their thing. Terrible excuse.

I'm sorry, but this cop-out really pisses me off. It is far too common and frankly, unacceptable. It really is insulting that you'd expect others to accept this as a justification. It's a lazy dismissal and not even a proper excuse.

You're excuse for doing something shitty is... that someone else will? What does another person even have to do with it?! Seriously, let them have the blood on their hands. You can't even assume that someone else will! If you do it, you guarantee that it happens. Even if it is likely that someone else will, there's a big difference between a certainty. This is literally what creates enshitification.

Plus, the logic is pretty slippery. Certainly you're not going to commit crimes or acts of genocide! You were "just following orders"[0], right? Or parents often say to their children "if everyone jumped off a cliff, would you?" Certainly the line is drawn somewhere, but frankly, it is the same "excuse" given when that extreme shit happened, so no, I won't accept it.

You have autonomy[1], that makes you accountable. You aren't just some mindless automata. You may not be the root cause, but at best you enable it. You can't ignore that you play a role.

And consider the dual: if you don't make it better, who will?

I believe you have the power to make change, do you? Maybe not big, but hey, every big thing is composed of many smaller things, right? So the question is which big thing you want to contribute to.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

[1] https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incent...

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

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

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

I get paid a lot of money for it, so yes.

Do user stories even come from users?

No, they come from the ads department

All the "The opinions stated here are my own, not necessarily those of my employer" googlers are silent.

  > Careful there are programmers here watching

And good! Fix your shit. Take some god damn pride in your work! Just because all code is shit doesn't mean it can be infinitely shitty.

> Why would you be on HN if you weren't a programmer?

This isn't (exclusively) a forum for programmers (in fact, since it belongs to YC, maybe you'd expect businesspeople etc.) For example, I'm not a programmer, and I've never worked anywhere near the IT sector, yet I visit HN often. Also, if you look at the frontpage there are usually many topics not related to programming, or even tech in general.

Hissssss!

Thank you for that.

My YT mobile pet peeve is that when you toggle the captions, an useless "Subtitles/CC Turned ON" is shown for 5 seconds.. OVER THE CAPTIONS!

Most useless message ever, placed exactly where you do not want it to be.

I can never tell if the toggle is CC on or off until I wait and see captions or realize nobody has talked yet.

YouTube is now full screen.

I highly recommend uninstalling the YouTube app and just using the browser. It has all the same features and it actually works reliability. And at least Firefox lets you keep paying a video without keeping the screen up

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.

Ah, that's why my feed seems like waves of themes. One opens the door a bit and then suddenly 30% of the videos on next page load have similar theme, (almost) completely forgetting tens of other videos of other themes I watches in past week.

Ie I hovered over one video of some Ronny Chieng commentary of RFK jr yesterday which somehow popped out of blue, and next time half of my feed was hardcore political with current admin (nothing what few Not interested clicks won't solve but then I am battling over-optimization of video platform).

I guess it suits certain audience well and keeps the feed fresh, but such behavior would cater to some maybe other type person better than me.

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.

It would probably hurt more than help, by way of retention metrics.

I found this "feature" triggers on videos I didn't even hover the mouse over.

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.

Also you can preview the video without taking an ad hit. Clearly the stable genius behind previews has left some revenue on the table.

Shh

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

> 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'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.

So they decided it's better to show lower-quality content (or not update the screen) than a loading screen, and it's the same school of thought that led to a loading screen being implemented? I agree both examples could be seen as intended to make things "feel" faster, but it seems like two different philosophies towards that.

(Also, I remember when quality changes didn't take effect immediately, but I've been seeing them take effect immediately and discard the buffer for at least the past few years-- at least when going from "Auto" that it always selects for me to the highest-available quality.)

> The idea is that [...] a few seconds later the new buffer hits and you jump up to the new quality level.

Except "a few seconds later" can become minutes. Sometimes it just keeps going at the lower quality while the UI claims to play a noticeably higher resolution than the one actually playing. To be clear, I don't care that the "automatic" quality is actually automatic, I care that the label blatantly lies about which resolution is playing. "Automatic (1080p60)" shouldn't look like a video from 2005.

YouTube Auto-HD browser extension: https://github.com/avi12/youtube-auto-hd?tab=readme-ov-file#...

I get "premium 1080p" most of the time, but yeah not being able to set it directly is annoying.

I can't remember which carrier initially compelled Google to do this, but it was done to save their networks rather than save cost for Google. It may have been Verizon when the HTC Thunderbolt launched. Now all the carriers are on-board.

e.g., https://www.t-mobile.com/offer/binge-on-streaming-video.html

> All detectable video streaming is optimized for your mobile device so you can watch up to three times more video using the same amount of high-speed data.

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.

I'm using Revanced - it removes a lot of shit like this.

I thought this behavior was just their way of punishing me for using adblock.

I have Premium and I always get a high resolution, if my connection allows for it.

My problem is I get high resolution (1080p) even if I want 240p!

I might be traveling and be on very expensive 3g data, and want to listen to a video and not care about the display but low quality setting means little when you are a premium user.

You have to explicitly change video resolution every time the next video starts playing.

You cannot choose explicit resolution preferences like you used to.

And I get no difference in what happens to resolutions chosen for me between these two quality settings. Seems random/non-deterministic.

Hmm, I don’t have this use-case so maybe it really doesn’t work, but are you sure you went to Settings > Video quality preferences and set it correctly there?

If that doesn’t work – reach out to YouTube support – as a Premium subscriber, you get to speak with a human.

Autoplay has been broken since major browsers have silently added autoplay permissions. The fundamental problem with autoplay is that the getAutoplayPolicy() query is still a draft and only experimentally implemented in Firefox.

There is no way to handle autoplay correctly. It's simply been broken for the past few years. There is also no way to detect autoplay using workarounds. I.e. autoplaying a silent audio, because you can only prove the existence of autoplay, but never its absence, since autoplay could be delayed for whatever reason and happen outside of your timeout based hack.

> 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.

As a counterpoint I love that feature on desktop and use it all the time.

Often I don't even click videos but just watch them with the preview autoplay (with sound enabled). I also zoom in on my mousepad so that it covers the whole screen and I only need to click through to like the video or for the comments. Much more seemless experience for me.

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.

All of social media is carefully tuned Skinner boxes. Even hacker news (maybe not as carefully)

Also if you do watch shorts, they are ALL added to your liked Videos.

Uh no they're not

It's easy to like them by accident though

Triggering autoplay by accidentally hovering does add videos to your history though, which is annoying.

[flagged]

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.

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.

> 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!

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).

Serious question as I use an Android device, but do people not purchase cases for iphones? I use an Otterbox case for my phone and it gives it a bezel (though the phone might have had one to begin with—I don't remember).

People do, but they shouldn't have to purchase a case to have their phone correctly. I have never purchased a case for a phone and have no intention to start, myself.

That is a really stupid design decision. I am so sorry for users who have to deal with that.

Ignore my other reply as it was meant for another comment. Regarding your comment:

I mean, I suppose you're right. However, that being said, a case is a good idea nonetheless, just as is a screen protector. A good case protects the phone against damage from dropping, just as a good screen protector does the same for the screen.

I have a case for my iphone and the problem I have described is happening even with that on.

That is unfortunate friend. I guess I was wrong. Not all cases provide that solution...

I agree, this obsession with filling the entire surface area with touch-sensitive display, and the quest for zero edge bevel width, is the bane of usability, often the soft fleshy part of your hand holding on the edge folds over and marginally makes contact with the screen, and then the screen ignores all your tops from your other hand that you explicitly makes.

> and there is no way to hold your phone without touching the screen

Sure there is. iPhone or otherwise, I don’t touch the screen when holding my phone.

Might be an issue for people with small hands perhaps. I’m trying to figure out in what circumstances I would be forced to touch my display whilst merely holding my phone but can’t of one, so it must be a size/grip thing, or I’m just holding my phone like a weirdo.

You can just... turn it off: https://www.youtube.com/account_playback

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.

It's not sticky. On iOS Chrome at least, I go pick that, within a few days it's set back to autoplay. And yes, I'm paying for premium

It just turns itself back on in a couple of weeks. Dark patterns ahoy.

Put your mouse up in the header on or near the scrollbar, scrolling will flow below to the video list.

It's even worse on mobile. You don't even need to hover for an autoplay video to show in your history.

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?

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?

Because of excessive things like this, I often point at my screen with a pen now and leave the mouse alone. Or take notes on a different laptop to avoid this stuff.

This drives me absolutely nuts on Netflix too, perhaps more so.

> 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.

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?

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?

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.

On the bright side, you could probably write something to just always reset that cookie before loading the site.

YouTube is a small and scrapy startup. Sometimes they have to move fast and break things

> It resets itself every 15 days or so

Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?

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.

First it was "hide shorts".

Then it was "hide shorts for X days" (I think 30?).

Now it is "show fewer shorts".

Those who disable watch history probably know this, but others probably don't -- when you disable watch history your "subscriptions" page effectively becomes your home page. And on your subscriptions page, shorts cannot be removed like on the actual home page. So if you disable watch history, you implicitly must enable shorts.

Like a relative commentor said -- a product manager on the "Shorts" team is doing a helluva job boosting their team's stats.

There is an 'unhook' add-on for Firefox that blocks all shorts forever. Highly recommended.

I wish there was something like this for safari on macos.

Lately the option to disable ambient lighting around video has been reseting to ON for me on every video I open.

I cant even formulate how I feel about that without breaking some rules somewhere

Using Unhook for 4 years, I save recommendation using my phone and watch it later on PC.

I resorted to a custom ublock origin rule

It seems to do that all the time. Try hiding YouTube shorts and they just come back.

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

The no recommendations at all sure feels like malicious compliance with California privacy law.

Even while pretending they've not recorded your viewing history they could still make recommendations from your subscriptions or give you the same glurg that they give viewers they know nothing about... but instead they break the site.

It's still better than having shorts on the screen.

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

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).

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…

Gambling has been around forever. Hyper aggressive slot machines do nothing to dissuade addicts, and dark patterns on the web are the same. They are trying to build addiction, and addiction doesn't care that something hurts to do, you need it.

The few of us who go "ew" and recoil are vastly outnumbered by the billions who just watch.

Every complaint about ads on youtube is someone who can't even be bothered to download an adblocker before Chrome killed it. It was one click, but that didn't dissuade the vast majority of eyeballs.

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

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

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

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

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.

This is what I’ve done - YouTube is a much better place now.

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).

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.

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

> 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.

not op, but have seen the same.

this is quite bad behaviour.

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

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

they excuse it under the protect of company policy.

Google the ant letter as an example.

>they excuse it under the protect of company policy.

sorry, pretext, not protect. an autocorrect error.

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.

> 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.

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.

In addition to what others said, they gaslight users by regularly resetting blocked accounts from recommendations. They also lose your play history after a while and start showing old videos you've watched as never been viewed.

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.

> 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.

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.

Chrome: command line switch:

--force-prefers-reduced-motion --force-prefers-no-reduced-motion

Ohh!! Thanks so much for this, I greatly appreciate it.

> It resets itself every 15 days or so

This is unacceptable to me. I've turned this setting off more times than I care to count. I've submitted feedback a couple times as well. I don't remember doing it lately, which is good. But I should have only ever had to do it once. I have a Google account, there is no reason this setting shouldn't be saved with my accounts, synced to all my devices, and only set once. I pay for YouTube Premium; I shouldn't be subjected to all these tactics which I assume are there to increase engagement and watch time. The price I pay is fixed and they don't earn ad revenue off me... why the games?

> I pay for YouTube Premium

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

> 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.

I set that a long time ago and it never disabled. Maybe something with your browser?

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

A sea of perfectly crafted misleading YouTuber pog faces isn’t necessarily better than autoplaying previews.

The automatically generated thumbnails were often the best at conveying what the video actual is in combination with a title and description that is currently overlooked in place of thumbnails.

These went away when people started gaming the system with a thumbnail frame right in the middle to intentionally misrepresent the content of the video. Same problem with the current YouTuber pog faces. The next step is to automatically generate multiple random frames to preview.

The garbage stock footage doesn’t work well here because it’s not great content to begin with. It’s lazy filler often used to hit the bare minimum arbitrary adsense time limit which wastes countless amounts of user hours.

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.

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).

> you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over

This might be intentional. Depending on how they calculate a view, this means they can pump up their stats they use to sell ads by making you "view" more videos than you actually click on.

I like the previews TBH. If you turn on sound in the preview, you can watch part of a video without seeing an ad. It only shows me an ad when I actually click the video to watch it, so I can spend the first minute or two watching the thumbnail to decide if the video is going to get into meaningful content and be worth watching the ad. Without previews, you click on a video, watch an ad, then watch the video for a minute or two before deciding you don't want to finish.

100% what I was going to say. Some team's dashboard somewhere has "number of auto plays" and it's an important metric for them.

Or your theory and its view fraud for ad or metric purposes.

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)

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.

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

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:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43848061

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.

Hehe, you need to be a big enough nerd to know to do this when you see it's misaligned:

https://github.com/insin/control-panel-for-youtube/blob/cf18...

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!

Do you have an ad blocker? I've always seen blank boxes in the spots where ads would have gone.

It's worse, I pay for Premium so there should be no place set aside for ads.

> I find the autoplay so annoying

Me too! So I turned them all off:

    Youtube Settings -> Playback and performance -> Browsing -> video previews (off)

In the browsers I use it switches itself back on about every four to five days on each of the four or so devices I use YouTube on. Not sure if this is a limitation of the browser local storage policies or if YouTube are 'helpfully' trying to convince me to like this 'feature' that I absolutely hate.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who gets annoyed by these details.

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.

>I find the autoplay so annoying

Fortunately, there's an actual setting to get rid of that. Found out yesterday, when trying to fix the OP problem (which youtube sadly forced on me).

That's extremely depressing on 27" 4k screen. Give me a density setting! I want compact thumbnails and to glance at a pack of vids at once.

> 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.

I have to admit I like autoplay… because the entire video will play, and it will never show ads. I often watch YouTube videos from the homepage entirely in autoplay and just zoom the browser in.

Irritating, but the quality is fine for most things and I save a few minutes not watching ads.

I personally love the autoplay (on hovering), as often I just want to see some part of the video without having to click on it and see a bunch of ads before any playback.

I thought i was the only one! I did realize at some point that you can avoid it if you hover on the left or right of the main grid. Still very annoying though

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)

"Why do you even need _different teams_ for the homepage ?"

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.

> and a list of videos

Are we just going to gloss over this like the list of videos is random? haha

Of course no, the search is handled by a different team, but does that team also work on the frontend ? I would expect them to have a quite different set of skills from those that do frontend work, at least at Google's size.

And if not the case, I would expect at least one team to be responsible for the final result

Generating a list of video IDs is different from rendering them on the page.

Well at least now I've got you up to 2 teams being acceptable :)

Being deliberately obtuse, or ignoring the context?

Because everyone always runs A/B tests to decide whether to add a feature, but never runs them to decide whether to remove one.

To be fair you've started to answer it yourself: I'd bet 'search' is at least one team.

The homepage has many similarities to a landing page / marketing funnel.

You can disable autoplay. Both on desktop and on mobile (not sure about TVs)

It's buried in the settings but it's there.

It's stored in a cookie or the browser local storage and "conveniently" forgotten every few days for me.

it had never reset for me even once, so I'm not sure what's that about

If you didn’t look away fast enough then they want to count it as a view so they can profit.

I always open videos in new tabs and they start from the beginning.

> 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.

NewPipe is the better app by far in terms of usability, despite having no budget in comparison. It's impressive how far you can get by just not adding bs

> 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.

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!

> 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.

> 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.

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

I think we need to be careful with the language like “this is what the users want” when something along the lines of “this is what triggers of pattern of compulsive behavior in users” is closer to the truth

Outside of legislation, there isn't a way to make a distinction. Corporations and most individuals are going to do whatever is legally permissible in order to maximize revenue.

And I would say its mostly not YouTube actually producing the content. They are responsible for the "reward mechanism" of clickbaity/shock content driving views, and in return, more views meaning more money for the creators. But I would really like to hear of another model. If YouTube didn't do it, someone else assuredly will. And traditional media is/was barely any better.

As for a business model, I think that we should pay creators, either directly e.g. via Patreon, or slightly indirectly via smaller creator-led platforms like Nebula.

In the same way that compulsive gamblers "want" to feed their retirement savings into slot machines.

I think it's more fair to say that this is a behavior that is profitable to exploit if you care more about making money than what you do to your customers' or society's wellbeing.

> 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.

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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.

The homepage of YT has become a disaster area, it has almost zero customizability or exploration value. Can't remove vertical video shorts, can't control the topics displayed at the top. It maximizes engagement and time waste, not what I need.

But you can use Gemini for better search, recommendations and you can play videos right in the chat window. At the very least replace search and recommendations with the model. You can explain what you want to explore and guide the recommender much better than on YT. There are no ads in Gemini itself.

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!

> You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations

Worst part about this is you search for food recipes and after the first 5 results there are gross out videos, "popping" videos, kids dying in an elevator video.

I'm about to eat dinner here... I know Neal Mohan REAAAALLLLY wants people to watch the video about the kids dying in the elevator because he keeps putting it in the trio of videos that show up when you search unrelated to your search but can he not wait till I'm doing a search that isn't food related to try and make me watch gross out content if he's so desperate to make me watch it.

Report it every time, makes no difference it all has millions of views so they'll keep doing it.

The dummy "loading" grey boxes it shows are still this size. Such a great "user experience."

Yes, this search thing is absolutely infuriating.

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.

No, they promote algorithmic "results" because they care about money from ads.

You can insert (and tweak) this into uBlock Origin filters:

    ! YouTube Fix & Customization by Arch v1.8.4 ! (1/11) YouTube 4 Videos Per Row Fix (Home and Channel Pages) / YouTube Fix & Customization

    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: 5 !important;)

    youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-posts-per-row: 5 !important;)

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

See here for the other forks: https://devnoname120.github.io/useful-forks/?repo=gijsdev/ub...

Didn't the new Chrome update break uBlock, or is that just for my test cell? I've been in mourning...

Vote with your clicks. Switch to Firefox

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!

It's annoying to have to constantly check for updates manually this way tho.

Switching over to firefox is the ultimate best option, regardless of any faults that firefox has.

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;
    }

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...

Yes, but it still works fine with Firefox.

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

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.

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.

Mozilla drags its feet on browser improvements to appease the overlord.

Mozilla config makes the old Windows registry look logically organized and named.

(try to disable cache, for example...)

i am unclear if Google merely counts on Mozilla acting like a reincarnation of the living-fossil that is the Apache foundation, or if their money steers this.

Use Brave if you want to stick with a Chromium browser. Their ad blocker still works great.

re-enable it or if not there is ublock origin lite which I believe is legit

> ublock origin lite which I believe is legit

It is, just not as capable as before due to the Manifest v3 changes.

Chrome should still support CSS style managers such as Stylus.

You can put the relevant CSS into a custom YouTube stylesheet if you like.

(I re-skin many sites, including HN, see my profile page for links to recent-ish CSS.)

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.

Magic, thank you. Works, at least for now, until they mess up with the layout again. So much better...

Another source from there: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1fkkcn1/youtube_de...

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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.

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.

I think this change came from the UX team.

Relevant articles:

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/simplicity-vs-choice/

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/short-term-memory-and-web-u...

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/working-memory-external-mem...

Their design/UX team 100% had a hand in it. Just look at Google's design blog, it's complete dogshit.

"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.

the question then becomes why do these bad UX/UI design makes higher revenue (and what makes them game the metrics too)?

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".

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.

>It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this.

this is the story of the big company web sites

- huge budget

- best programmers

- terrible design

- terrible usability

- doesnt make sense

- gets worse over time

it's unreal. seen on many major sites.

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

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

Yes, this my experience all the time. it's insane.

It's not enough to have hindustantimes.com articles for local American news on google-- even YouTube must be sacrificed. The rivers of enshittification must flow.

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.

This is inevitable when a company has a revenue model where they claim to serve both users and advertisers. The wants of each will always be diametrically opposed. The customer with the deepest pockets always wins, which are the advertisers.

I'm also starting to think that no large company will ever act in the best interest of their customers unless required to do so by regulation. As long as those customers are individuals.

Maybe the regulation we need is that companies like Google can't have "ad supported" products that are simultaneously sold as products to users. Either you're selling a product to users, or really running an advertising platform. It can't be both.

[flagged]

Could I implore you to please stop breaking the site guidelines? I don't have the energy to even list all the times we've asked you already.

I don't want to ban you, but you're making it increasingly difficult not to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Ah yes, but front-paging a headline that implies colleagues at YouTube are blind, that establishes a tone of reasoned civil discourse?

Pointing the finger at others isn't helpful.

You have a history of abusing HN and we need you to stop doing that. You also have a history of posting good things, which is why I'd prefer not to ban you.

Perhaps the incentives of said UX team don't align with those of the user. They might be optimizing for maximal time spent on the site, for instance.

Yup, and that's what I meant by them turning the pain dial all the way towards money. Presumably they can run A/B tests and will no doubt be able to prove that this change makes them $X more money (since it's 1/6 a full screen ad after all). At the cost of being a miserable tasteless change.

The YouTube team has been blindly chasing monetization at the expense of their website being useful and pleasant for a while now. Unfortunately it seems they can get away with it. I wrote this post to just shake my fist at the cloud

I’m going to take up smoking because Philip Morris says I should.

Microsoft's adware and spyware was designed by one of the wealthiest companies in the world, so it's good for you. Google's ad business is the most sophisticated on the planet, so their spying and tracking and reporting your location to the government is good for you, you're just too dumb to understand. The USA, one of the most powerful and advanced countries in the world has suspended FDA testing of dairy. Since you can't possibly know better, this must be a good thing.

This is called "appeal to authority" and it's a pretty unintelligent logical fallacy. Do better next time. Maybe read a book or two?

>This is called "appeal to authority" and it's a pretty unintelligent logical fallacy. Do better next time. Maybe read a book or two?

This is called ad hominem, and has no place here.

It's only ad hominem when the argument is an insult.

In this case there's an insult inside the argument, but importantly the insult is not the argument being made. Therefore it is not ad hominem.

The overall point, as you obviously understand, is that one should avoid personal insults when making a comment here.

FYI: YouTube provides RSS feed for every channel. The URL is as follows:

    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID

    https://cinemaphile.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID

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.

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.

You can change the first 4 characters of the channel ID to UULF to only get "Videos" (no shorts)

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71192605/how-do-i-get-yo...

This is very useful, thank you for sharing.

Doesn't seem to work for any of the ~50 URLs I tried with. Eg:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCS0N5ba...

... works but:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UULFS0N5...

... is 404.

I'm guessing it's only a feature of playlist URLs which that SO answer is about, not RSS feed URLs.

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

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

> DF Tube extension

This extension is no longer available because it doesn't follow best practices for Chrome extensions.

:(

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!

⁽¹⁾ https://marcosatanaka.com/

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.

There’s open source Unwatched[1] if you want something for free.

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unwatched-for-youtube/id647728...

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.

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.

You can use the wonderful mpv player to view videos directly from a yt-url (yt-dlp backend).

i made a tool to extract the rss feed from a channel too!

https://shorts.aviparshan.com/rss-feed

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

They clearly need to conserve bandwidth for the most important assets - the 12 whole megabytes of Javascript.

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.

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.

>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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

> Assuming 60 characters per line, that’s 200k lines of code?

The code is minified so there's relatively few characters for each source line, if you run it through a pretty-printer to restore sensible formatting then it turns into well over half a million lines of code.

That's the full YouTube player - you were assuming it just has the code for the homepage, but actually it gets the entire player right at the start.

Meanwhile, loading up a channel page with Invidious pulls in about 700k and half of that is the banner. JavaScript was not mandatory (on public instances) but it is now due to AI scrapers.

I've recently noticed that the thumbnails on the homepage are higher resolution than the thumbnails on the subscriptions page

Same for me. How strange.

they want more money, less videos more ads, probably the UX/UI team was against it but you know how those big techs are

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.

The worst thing about YouTube in 2025 is auto-translation. Whoever is behind this doesn’t seem to understand that many people outside the US actually understand two languages rather well.

In my case: German and English. I don’t want either to be translated to the other, but no chance. If you switch languages in the UI, you will get the garbage translated titles.

Google is institutionally incapable of accepting that people can speak more than one idiom.

I need to open a private window to have proper Portuguese search results. No matter what language preferences I set, I cannot get what seems to be most reasonable: show results matching the language of your query.

And the auto-dubbing introduced these last weeks makes it so much worse.

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.

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.

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?

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.

This is the correct model.

If you want your own home you can use something like Urbit.

Generally in the web as it is, we are all serfs on other people’s computers.

In my analogy, YouTube was the grocery store, not my home. I don't think of it as a place that I own, but a place that I go shopping for vegetables (educational long-form content). I already made the decision not to enter the candy store on the same block (TikTok), and while I accept that the grocery store sells candy too, I would find it intolerable for them to be following me around waving Oreos in my face as I browse the vegetable aisle, when I keep telling them I don't want Oreos because I'm on a diet. In fact they're the ones asking me if I want to see candy in the vegetable aisle and I keep telling them no.

I don't think it makes sense to say that they are forced by the market to do this to compete with the candy store, when they already know I don't want candy in the first place. Instead, this sort of annoying practice pushes me to leave and visit the organic market instead (Nebula).

I don't think "revealed preference" is the right explanation here either, because these kinds of settings preferences are tailored to an individual account, and I never click on Shorts and always select the "hide" dropdown, so the preference that I have revealed is one that is strongly disinterested in Shorts.

I think the correct explanation is that someone's KPI is attached to increasing Shorts viewership, and they're trying to earn their bonus, even if it's at a cost to the success of the organization as a whole.

They’re all fighting for the finite amount of attention - literally hours you are awake.

That’s a very competitive arena and while you and I may be health conscious - they’re fighting a trench war, you and I don’t matter.

>find an Oreo waiting for you by the sink in case you'd like to indulge.

this is a hilarious image. "ooh, don't mind if i do".

"Thanks, but I asked for heroin..."

> why can't I keep YouTube Shorts disabled?

> why would I go to a grocery store that insists on slipping a pack of Oreos into every third bag of carrots?

You can see how these are not analogous. The store _is_ slipping Oreos in your vegetables. So yeah… don’t install TikTok _or_ YouTube. I get that you’d rather YouTube to be YouTube-without-shorts, but it’s not a thing anymore, vegetables-without-Oreos is not an option at this grocery store

I think the thing they got wrong is it’s not a grocery store. It’s a casino - you can have a good time there, but the house isn’t interested in what’s best for you, but what’s best for them.

Even that’s imperfect because Zuck really was interested in the interactions he thought were best despite them not being highest engagement, but you can’t only do that and stay alive in a competitive market.

The Oreo analogy is perfect. I don't buy Oreos because I can't help myself from eating the whole container in a few sittings.

I don't even touch short form video because I'll get sucked in and suddenly hours go by. Short form video on YouTube makes me want to never open YouTube because I know how easily I can get sucked in.

IDK a lot of how-to and the like videos I watch can probably be distilled into 30seconds or less.

Long form content (i.e. Veritasium) are nice for sure, but some of it suffers from fluff too.

There's a difference between useful 30 second tutorials/how-tos and 99.99% of short form content which is brain rot designed to hook into you and keep you mindlessly scrolling - whether it's out of rage or joy. All they care about is eyeballs on screen no matter how it happens.

When I say I don't like short-form video content, I typically mean the tiktok-influenced infinite scrolling algorithm-driven video wall of videos. Where you might click on one thing that looks useful or interesting on your home page and without even thinking about it you start swiping through the videos and suddenly you emerge an hour later form a brain rot video fueled fever dream, with no idea how you just lost an hour of your life to useless shit online.

At least losing an hour to video games or reading online might leave you with a sense of accomplishment or satisfaction. I have never felt anything positive after binging on social media videos.

That’s nothing: YouTube has recently added shorts to YouTube Kids and it can’t be disabled.

They previously had a whitelist feature where parents could curate channels and videos for their kids.

That has been silently broken and all related features are disabled or non-functional.

Whoever is pushing Shorts is the equivalent of a drug dealer waiting outside a junior school to sell heroin to kids.

Sociopaths do this kind of thing.

Summary of the proposed solutions to block YouTube Shorts:

-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

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).

None of these workarounds are available on Chromecast, which is where I do almost all of my Youtube watching.

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.

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.

Thank you so much for this. I hate YT Shorts but never thought to look for extensions to block them.

Or just view all videos via DuckDuckGo

[dead]

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.

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.

Google is the Microsoft of today.

My fave is where something clearly has been cropped from a 16:9 source to fit the portrait mode.

As a recommendations engineer I've never been that impressed with YouTube, I think they cribbed the YouTube interface from

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.

> half the results are irrelevant

Better than the results on google these days, so YT is at least doing better.

On the other hand to find something in youtube I'll write the phase "$my_query youtube" and works ways better than youtube's own search.

>I HATE youtube shorts.

This guys posts only shorts: https://www.youtube.com/@hydronyc and he's got the best/funniest plumbing video you YouTube.

The bad shorts are when you scroll to the next short after watching one - never do that, only watch shorts from subscriptions.

Did I really just see him charge someone $1800 for shower mixer install?

Possibly. It's NY it's way more expensive than anywhere else.

That's a delta mixer valve which is $100, plus $100 for the trim. A plumber would charge double for that, so $400 for parts. Usually labor is about the same as parts so I would expect that job to cost $800.

Maybe there was a lot of labor involved, or maybe he's embellishing the story a bit (or leaving out some of the work involved).

All the comments in the video have the same question as you.

create a new folder, put two files there:

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

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)

https://gist.github.com/insin/ef93c7d87b1f97f1c9411e6128d520...

> 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 :/

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.

I go to Old Navy, shorts.

And not to forget god damned linkedin of all place which for me now puts shorts-like content in the feed. Convergent tiktok-ification.

I go to HN, text.

Hallelujah.

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

4.99 in the app store

Can I get some royalty-free slop-pop on a loop?

I don't see shorts on Bluesky, but I remember seeing something about video feeds a while back. Do you use video feeds?

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.

its a shame that shorts have taken so much of the market share. Our children will never know about jorts

This works: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-shorts-bloc...

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

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.

On Firefox, you can get rid of Shorts with Enhancer for Youtube extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-...

Right here folks we see the consequences of not having open source alternatives.

Not your software, not your control.

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.

The button to hide shorts now says something like "Show less" instead of the 30 days it had previously, and clicking it does absolutely nothing. It disappears from the current page but comes straight back after a reload.

there are games on youtube now? isn't that a bit of a security risk?

I cancelled YouTube premium and stopped using YouTube entirely because of this

I'm with you, but unfortunately Youtube is trading you(s) for many more zombies in the subway. Stats rule.

Me too, and honestly my life is better for it. I'm reading more, living a more active lifestyle, and using my phone less.

Ublock origin allows you to block any part of a page. Solved!

If it still works for you, it's because you've temporarily workarounded its automatic disablement, and that won't last much longer...

Alternatively they may be using a proper non-Blink browser, like everyone who cares about tech should.

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".

Would you share those extensions so that other people can join you in this good situation?

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.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-shorts-bloc...

Using uBlock, DeArrow and Sponsorblock.

And, Android also has some really nice clients.

Use the unhook extension, and on mobile revanced

Yes, and I also want to permanently disable hover to autoplay on desktop / 'video previews' on mobile browser. It's stored locally in the browser and is forgotten about every four days for me.

I hate that 'feature' so much.

Does this not work for you? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43854588

It switches itself back on about every four to five days.

It's been permanent for me the last couple of years or so.

Is it because I'm signed in to youtube, maybe?

The setting propagates to other browsers signed in to the same account, I think.

No, it's not propagated to other browsers signed into the same account, it explicitly says that in the settings page.

Maybe part of the issue is that I am logged into the same account across three different devices, or that I have other Google accounts too logged in (but I don't use YouTube in them, only the account with Premium).

Anyway, it should be trivial for Google to make it actually permanent (I would love it it was stored in my account, which I pay for Premium on, instead of local or cookie storage), but lots of people have this problem.

> it's not propagated to other browsers signed into the same account, it explicitly says that in the settings page

Yeah, you are absolutely right & I misremembered - forgot I copied over my browser profile.

It is definitely a permanent setting for me though, on both laptop & desktop profiles, haven't had to re-set it since I discovered it. (Firefox/linux).

Maybe the difference is in handling multiple google accounts differently. My approach: I tend to create browser profiles for specifiec tasks; the youtube viewing profile (used daily) is permanently signed in to my (non-Premium) youtube account, but when I check my actual gmail mail (for example) which is a different google account, I do it on a different browser profile.

Apologies for confusion over propagation, anyhow & thanks for the correction!

The unhook extension can get rid of them.

It also gets rid of that nonsense they did to the search page.

Works for the website but not the mobile app (where shorts are pushed even harder).

It's funny/sad how even firefox is making it worse now. I tend to browse youtube in firefox because the youtube app is such a pain, and doesn't have tabs and other niceties. And then only view individual videos in the app because the player works better and it's nicer to interact with comments.

But for a while now firefox has been asking every single goddamn time whether I want to open this page in the app instead. With the only extra option to always in open in app. What about no? What about never?

shakes fist at sky

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.

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

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.

But how else are they going to compete with TikTok?

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.

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!"

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.

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.

Shorts creators can link back to the full video, assuming both are posted on the same channel. You can't link to someone else's video though.

Also, a channel that posts shorts exclusively needs like 30 million views to be monetized, you're infinitely more likely to reach that threshold creating compilation of cute cat videos than with your own original content (regardless of the niche). I'd be shocked if even 2% of channels earning money from shorts create any original content what so ever.

I did watch a few shorts out of curiosity and it seems they're just "stream clips" most of the time

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.

I agree. YouTube Shorts should be a separate product line. The short form content is polluting the long form ones.

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.

My experience is that if you have a population doing some activity online it is self-perpetuating

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

I was thinking that Shorts is popular, and it seems like it is. What I estimates I find put it from half as many users as TikTok to on par with TikTok. With regards the flywheel, I think that it works better than your example, and I think that the existence of the myriad product bundles that we see are why. That strategy works so well against competitors that sometimes antitrust comes into the picture, to break something up that's too encompassing.

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.

I don't think so. I think users who don't want to see shorts, and aren't using TikTok are a minority. Short form video is hugely popular. And even if they are not in a minority, it doesn't really matter (to YouTube), because they are not going anywhere - there is nowhere to go.

The analogy fails as well. It would be more like Starbucks asking every customer whether they want tea as well. And I imagine that whichever tea company is partnered with Starbucks at that point is going to be very happy. Product bundling works very well, especially in cases like this, when an established giant decides that they are going now offer the thing as well. YouTube Music worked the same.

What's really funny is that I reckon if Youtube's persistence finally managed to get me to like short content, the first thing I'd probably do is... ditch them for TikTok.

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.

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.

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.

Please give this https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube a try

Use the NewPipe Android app.

I'm afraid the pressure from tiktok is just too high.

Or at least let me turn off endless repeat. It is an absolutely ridiculous way to watch video to have it auto-repeat endlessly.

I used ublock origin remove it from the page.

I just use freetube most of the time and don't experience shorts at all, and if I do I don't notice

Unhook extension, works on Firefox (computer and android), safari (computer and iPhone).

Youtube Unhook extension does that and it does a lot more to improve Youtube's UI.

Just block the html elements which show YouTube shorts? Use ublock, select, and block.

I've been using an Unhook, the extension, and couldn't have been happier.

>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.

More guidelines available at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you're on android you can use screenzen. Not sure if they have an ios app.

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".

Have you looked at the "YouTube-shorts block" add-on?

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.

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.

There's also lots of userscripts available on https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts?q=youtube+shorts

Greasyfork restricts what 3rd party libraries can be pulled in + you have the option of disabling automatic updates in your userscript manager.

The whole point is that I don't want to run other people's code on my machine so I use an LLM to generate code (that I verify) which does the job I need it to. For small, well contained requirements, it works quite well.

300k users is low-audience to you?

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.

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...

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!

I had to switch to freetube which is a much better experience

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...

>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 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.

(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:

https://github.com/Harren06/ublock-yt-shorts

So much this. They haven't even paywalled it behind Premium. They know they're dealing crack. Such a disgusting company.

Huge +1. Please.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

I am so done "capturing attention" it's ruined the internet.

I miss the internet of 1991. It really all went downhill fast once ads started getting involved.

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.

all they show you is a thumbnail, so the shortness is not capturing your attention, the provocative picture is

> but I pay for youtube premium

I found your error.

You can disable watch history on your account, which completely disables it. No need to install any extension (which may not work on all your devices)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795204

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

If you click on one though and go to swipe (unless it's in your subscriptions) it doesn't allow you to "scroll". You can watch them when necessary but it's impossible to get sucked into an infinite feed.

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.

It’s not complete but it does limit them quite a bit

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.

I can't speak for the desktop experience lately, but just last weekend I opened the YouTube app on iOS to this peak user experience:

https://files.catbox.moe/vzo65c.JPG

Apple will need to make the modal backgrounds animated and customised with each user's background image to make these fake popups more obvious.

Wow, that's just a blatant scam. Wakes up bad memories of the old Windows XP days, when this type of trick was used everywhere. And people wonder why we use adblock. Google (the most wealthy company on earth) will of course claim they don't have the resources to review them, when the truth is they are happy to reap their profits from scamming old people. Same with Facebook, happy to serve ads that lure old people into logging in to fake banks and get all their savings stolen.

There's probably a rule against apps impersonating the OS on the App Store, one could only wish for Apple using a more heavy hand against this type of "experience".

well at least was funny

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:

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

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.

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.

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.

I had the same revelation when doing the opposite, using Windows for two days after using Linux for years. It's a constant stream of attention grabbing distractions, questions and notifications. I don't even know what they are all doing. Like why does the graphics driver has it's own update mechanism and its own tray icon, why am i being asked to put the application as a desktop shortcut, why is the start menu rotating ads and news next to my applications. Some of them are not even metric pumping, it's just bad design. And that's just the start, the things getting in the way of you actually doing your job just don't end.

Never again.

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

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.

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

The only explanation I can imagine is that the risk of turning someone off YouTube by showing them the "wrong" vidoes is worse than the views or attention capture lost this way.

I can imagine my mom opening YouTube (hypothetically) for the first time and seeing an anime video, or my younger cousin being shown a Top Gear video, and them deciding that YouTube is "that app with the weird videos" that's not for them. It'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!

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

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

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

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?

"Feed Me Seymour"

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?

This freakin page:

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10588440?nohelpkit...

100%. YouTube is a chapter in a textbook about how to destroy UX.

I actually cancelled my YT Premium sub after this latest change with the thumbnails. I realised it doesn't really offer me that much value, and often using the platform just annoys me.

It's better now, the support page opens in a new tab, so you can close the tab and go back and click on the (right place of the) video thumbnail.

It used to open that page in the same tab you were in. So you press the browser's back button, you get back to the YouTube home page, but now it's shown you different recommendations and the video you wanted to click on is gone, and you've no idea what it was called...

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.

The top tier engineers were struggling to make it so that auto-play would stay off. This is no surprise.

It turns itself back on for me so frequently that I'm sure they must be intentionally having the site reset that preference... I hate it with a passion.

Now when I go on mobile Safari and want to switch off 'video previews' (for the thousandth time), and I tap the switch, it stays switched on but the 'Settings saved' thing comes up on the bottom. You have to tap it again to actually switch it off. I wonder if that's a bug or intentional too now...

The "fix" I've seen them testing is changing the wording to "show less shorts."

Yeah, they changed it to “stop showing as often”. I love the gaslighting forced features, so much…

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.

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.

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.

Nothing about using a phone requires users to hold it vertically to take video.

Except it's a natural position, quicker and gives you better position. And since most of content will be consumed on mobile makes no sense to shoot horizontally.

I gave up this fight a decade ago, can't believe people still struggle with this concept.

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.

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 :)

> 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.

There's a good chunk of the world whose only device to interact with the internet is a smart phone or tablet

Asian people like watching vertical videos on a desktop?

Actually in Thailand I don't think many people own a desktop. But many people do own phones.

Gaming on mobile phones, even MOBA games and first person shooters, seems quite popular here. For me, it's unplayable.

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

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

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

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

Pausing for me on mobile downsizes and letterboxes the video, shifts it to the left, and shows an ad on the right. The forward/play or pause/back buttons also shift to the left, which means that you can't tap the same spot to resume.

uBlock Origin lite is V3. And blocks youtube ads

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.

Obviously the model at the end of the post is a joke, but it implies that after September 2026 there will be negative videos on the screen. What does it even mean to be a negative video? There will be videos, but mirrored? There will be videos but the colors will be reversed? Will they play backwards? Is a negative video where multiple ads overlap each other?

I think a negative video is a requirement that you upload one before you may continue

"Please turn on your webcam for 10 seconds and spin around to prove you're human (i.e. help train our models), to continue."

What makes more sense is that one thumbnail would be so zoomed in that the borders of it are off screen. Less than one full thumbnail.

Only ads.

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.

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).

Yet the app is so bad that after switching to the iOS home screen, it forgets the video you were watching and goes back to the home page. History at least allows you to find it again and continue watching. I don’t care about their “imposed” suggestions either , so it’s about choosing the less shitty experience.

I have learned to use newpipe on my phone. But I use android and fdroid. I don't know how to work on ios

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.

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.

Yeah I learned early on with "engagement" is that the only winning move is not to play. Just ignore the voting arrows, and definitely don't leave a comment on the video.

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.

> I unironically agree with the prediction that the endgame is just one video.

Tthe youtube shorts are already there, so yeah that is what they want you to do, just watch the first thing.

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.

complain as you might about reddit but only it and cnn (to my knowledge) allow the kind of "old." url-based opt-outs

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.

that's likely true, it's just a different branch, LTS, if you will

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.

YouTube overall quality has been in a slow decline for the last several years and I'm sure it has to do with $$.

The UI is slower in almost all aspects, the grid mentioned here isn't even aligned properly. Playback buttons are slow to respond to hovers and clicks and the 1080p quality is no longer a "true" 1080p quality.

Don't even get me started with shorts because while the baseline functionality of it works, its pretty buggy for what it is. Maybe they are just too busy with scaling the entire thing that UI is an afterthought because the basic functionality is there and now its profits over quality.

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.

Ublock Origin in Firefox:

``` ! 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) ```

Forgive my ignorance, but how do you actually apply this?

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.

Makes sense and yet it doesn't, because the more they degrade my experience, the more I turn away from youtube.

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.

People need to realise that all this AB testing is going to lead YouTube developers to one final version: An endless TikTok style scroll of (soon to be AI-generated) recommended videos.

No search. No desktop/friendly UX. It’s all going to go away.

You can see this happening already with the inability to permanently disable “shorts”. They can only be disabled for 30 days. You can see this happening when unrelated recommendations appear in search results. You can see this happening with the inability to block a channel, you can only stop it appearing in recommendations. It’s only going to keep getting worse.

Get off YouTube (and especially get your kids off the platform) and find alternatives. It’s not going to end well.

I concur. Aside from user hostility, these purely algorithmic feeds with no search, mid-video snap-cut ads, and blink-attention-span content is retarding reasoning skills and already having a negative gestalt effect on society.

For, perhaps only once in multiple generations, all the "old folks" raging against "the kids" with their new media are correct.

More and more, the movie "Idiocracy" is becoming a documentary.

On my roku youtube app, you can only see 2 videos in full. Yes that's right, 2 videos. You can technically see 6 but there's so much cutoff on the right and bottom that you can't see what those videos are.

It's insane. I don't use it on roku anymore.

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.

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.

> 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

This response captures it perfectly. I started at Google in 2006 and the "mini kitchens" (essentially a convenience mart) were just getting "re-organized" The new CFO was out to "cut unnecessary costs."[1] While Google was banking billions of dollars in "Free Cash Flow" every QUARTER than were cutting the 'unnecessary' costs that were something like $12,000 per employee per YEAR. So with 20,000 employees, that is about 1/4 billion dollars a year, or roughly 3% of the free cash flow. I called Eric on it at a TGIF[2]. The gist was "We're going to lose all these great employees because you want to keep more of the free cash than you currently do?"

And people quit, lots of people, and the flow moved out. And people who joined had no idea it had been "better" than what it was, this was just the standard which was admittedly still better than other companies. Eventually everyone for whom this affront was to high left leaving an employee base reasonably happy with the status quo.

They continued to "downgrade" the 'lifestyle benefits' the entire time I was there and it continued to piss people off who left.

As margin pressure grew the need to monetize grew and Marissa Meyer who had been the 'brick wall' between the user experience and monetization left the company. Others who felt as she did also left for a variety of reasons. Leaving only those for whom monetization was just the cost of doing business and hey, "We're Google!" right?

This opens up the opportunity for disruption. There is a hysteresis effect though, everyone has a different tolerance for crap. More and more people I know are not "Google" users anymore, they are 'search' users and if their OS pre-loads Bing they use that, sometimes they switch to DDG or Kagi. Once that takes hold in the bulk of the addressable market, Google will go the way of every other tech company before them. I used to point out to people that the "GooglePlex" was the dead hulk of SGI. Like wasps Google was living inside the corpse of a formerly big player. Everyone would tell me, "We're different, we're always going to be around." And like the Zen quotes from "Charlie's War" I would say, "We'll see." :-)

[1] I believe that this statement is perhaps the single most destructive thing any CFO can do. In part because they don't define 'necessary.'

[2] He was not amused :-)

>This opens up the opportunity for disruption. There is a hysteresis effect though, everyone has a different tolerance for crap. More and more people I know are not "Google" users anymore,

On my mobile device, I have totally de-googled them so that no G apps are on my device. I only use gmail reluctantly from a laptop for accounts that are necessary for work. Haven't used G search in years. Me and the 12 other people on the planet that are the same don't make a fart in the wind of difference to G.

You're leading edge in this regard, the fall off is, in my experience, somewhat exponential. It never quite reaches zero though. Which is why we have people who still have AOL mail addresses.

we have people with AOL mail addresses still because it still works. if they pulled the plug on it, nobody would be using it any more. now i'm curious who actually is paying for those servers, and how they make money doing it. just not actually curious enough to look it up

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

Of course when I was a child my parents told me how much better my childhood was than theirs...cue uphill both ways stories.

But I find myself telling my child the opposite. I'll tell her how Walmart used to answer the phone, JC Penney used to have associates that helped you in each department, Home Depot used to employ skilled workers to answer questions, stores didn't lock up items, etc. Not to even mention about how the internet wasn't an ad laden crap hole.

And without saying as much to her, I feel like my child's life is markedly worse than mine growing up.

So, what gets better these days? I find myself just thinking everything will get continually worse until I expire. But it wasn't always this way. Where was the peak? My mind wants to say late 90s. I'm just hoping that's a local peak, and things will get better again in some fashion.

> And without saying as much to her, I feel like my child's life is markedly worse than mine growing up.

Growing up as a kid, we didn't even have the internet. Gaming consoles were well off into the future (NES wasn't until my teens), so we did crazy things like play outside. Being able to survive without internet/devices wasn't crazy, it's just how things were. I can't imagine going through life with anxiety level panic at the mere thought of not having a device within arm's reach at all times. The thought of wasting my childhood/teens doomscrolling and trying to think I was so important to call myself an influencer or even caring about what some rando on the internet does that I think I have to follow them is insane. I definitely feel like this is a markedly worse situation than my childhood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putting together a complete computer you can learn to program on can be done for < $100 if you're willing to use used keyboards/monitors/mice.

Making things out of plastic is accessible to everyone either by owning a 3D printer or borrowing one at the library or social club.

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

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.

My phone is 11 years old, from 2014, and I will probably have to buy a new one when they shutdown 3G since VoLTE is not “officially supported” with my device.

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.

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.

As for search results, I cannot help you.

As for recommendation, the algorithm works perfectly if you make the effort to "Like and subscribe™" to quality channels and videos. It's amazing how good YouTube can be if you curate the algorithm with this – and with dislikes if you have to.

Yeah I find generally YouTube to recommend me interesting stuff.

I've gotten recommended videos by creators with <1k subs that I really enjoyed, and many with <10k subs.

I've gotten recommended videos with topics I hadn't really thought about but which I ended up enjoying.

Sure there's about 10% or so that I'm not interested in, but I just mark those as "don't recommend channel" and move on. And the times I just need to check out some stupid clickbait, I make sure to remove it from my history afterwards.

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.

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.

The huge thumbnails are also in the subs tab.

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!

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.

That one's not on Youtube. It's a bug caused by ad blockers.

And it might add the auto-played videos to your history, impacting future recommendations.

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.

Let's not forget 'shorts' Yes, you can hide them, but they will be back there the next session.

>YouTube homepage will just be one video

On Smart TV devices, there is One large ad on the first row, then 2.5 video thumbnails on the second row, no other thumbnails.

Looks like this...

https://www.google.com/imgres?q=youtube%20app%20on%20smart%2...

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.

Everybody needs glasses, not just YouTube. Excessive padding and large flat UI widgets, where only 4 points of actual content are shown at a time, is a bad trend that's taken over the whole web in recent years.

I’ve also noticed YouTubes lack of attention to finding me new videos that aren’t maybe in a category I’ve watched before. I find my homepage filled with videos I’ve seen before or just the same categories churning similar videos. Similar to Spotify, the app struggles to push new music and instead just regurgitates old music I’ve previously listened. I don’t get the same refreshing/random feeling YouTube created before.

As a user, I'm under the impression YouTube uses click follow-through for algorithm feedback. For the past two years, I've consistently gotten more random content with ~100 views suggested to me in the side bar. I often click and check it out. Maybe prime the pump by diving for some random vids?

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

I use a combination of add-ons to fix YouTube that let me:

* 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.

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?

This https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-remove-youtu... and yt-dlp to download things from only subscriptions that interest me (and watch later offline) changed my life.

They trying to turn all video platform UX into reels/shorts/tiktoks. Hell theyre even shooting movies on verticle IMAX cameras now for better translation to phones.

They would rather focus your attention on a single short video you can lock into and then transfer that focus to an ad suddenly. Its perfect for their business model.

If you have a FireTV stick or something Android based for your TV, I can recommend SmartTubenext for browsing/watching YouTube.

I still use AppleTV for pretty much everything else, but got a firetv stick just to use that. https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube

> 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.

I'm surprised nobody mentioned the volume slider being moved from the left to the right side on the player... They also removed the ability the use mouse wheel to control the slider too.

How does something as big as a player redesign go through so little QA on one of the largest websites in the world?

It's also sometimes buggy and I can't adjust the volume at all. I can't comprehend what in the world would prompt such a "redesign"

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.

This is most likely to do with changing viewing habits. Very little YouTube is watched on a monitor anymore. In fact for most channels it is 40% mobile, 40% on a TV and 20% other. I’m guessing the new format is to optimize for the TV viewer as this is also the fastest growing segment.

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.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/news-feed-era...

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/df-youtube/

Unhook is also good. https://unhook.app/

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

> 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?

It already exists on YouTube under the Shorts tab, which is just "we have TikTok at home".

Here are more screenshots/data points https://x.com/nikitonsky/status/1916085438915150006

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.

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 :)

[0] https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions

[1] https://i.imgur.com/zst96wo.png

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.

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.

[1]: https://marcosatanaka.com/#play

People have always complained whenever YouTube changed its layout but I think the Polymer skin crossed a threshold of awfulness that caused people to start actively fighting against it by creating their own interfaces or finding workarounds on a scale we never saw with prior changes. I would take ANY of the pre-Polymer designs over Polymer which is truly in a league of its own, exemplifying everything wrong with corporate Web-design.

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 :(

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.

It's possible at that size (32") you're triggering 'leanback' UI mode, which is optimized for longer distance (TV like) viewing.

> It's possible at that size (32") you're triggering 'leanback' UI mode...

Right now, on my 32" 2160p screen, when I either maximize my browser window or put it into "fullscreen" mode, YouTube shows me a centered section with useful information (wide enough to display four videos when visiting the "/videos" endpoint), and empty space to either side of that section that's wide enough to convert this single centered-column layout into a three-column layout... tripling the amount of data on screen.

Both this and whatever "leanback" thing YouTube is testing are both pretty godawful. I do prefer the wasted space, so I know I can rearrange my windows to make use of the space. You never know whether or not a thumb-centric UI will shrink itself down when the viewport's size is reduced.

Even if true, it's indicative of the UX disease of trying to guess what the user persona needs instead of fucking asking us

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 :).

I wonder if this reduction in videos on screen is a result of an experiment due to "The Paradox of Choice" / "Choice Overload"?

https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/economics/the-par...

The extra time required to scroll through the giant thumbnails turned into "we saw a XX% increase in engagement time when we A/B tested larger thumbnails!"

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.

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

If you have a new account or use it less frequently, there are no videos .... It just says start watching so we could recommend you something like this . What are they trying? All they want to show users are targeted ads , won't even show any video recommendations until you give the algo something to target you with ads.

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.)

Has anyone else run into the issue of having a horizontal scrollbar while viewing videos in full-screen (on desktop)?

There are some hits when I search online for this issue but in my case, it's been happening intermittently for the past few weeks. Reloading the page fixes it. Not sure if I'm part of some A/B test.

The reason I use old.reddit.com with RES instead of sh.reddit.com is very simple. The more posts that are displayed on the screen at once, the more I can subvert the algorithm by cherry picking just the high quality posts. If the UI is inflated, the more time I'll waste on crap posts.

Use invidious. Youtube has gotten so bloated it takes seconds just to navigate between pages and load videos

Invidious and many other third party players are currently completely broken due to YouTube rolling out a new proprietary streaming protocol.

There are working fixes - and the new protocol, although not implemented in invidious - has a few open source implementations. I cobbled together one to integrate with invidious yesterday before swapping back to DASH after they fixed it. If they ever disable DASH for all the other clients, there are fallbacks in place

The bottom graphic is the best thing I've seen this week. That alone made me happy today. Thanks, stranger.

I stopped using YouTube a few years ago. It's just so many ads that I no longer enjoy using the platform.

I just use an adblocker.

>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.

What bugs me is that often several of the videos will be things that I've already watched and it somehow forgets that. Or it shows videos that it's shown me again and again and again and I'm not clicking on because I'm not interested.

Based on the projected rate of change, it sounds like the homepage will, after falling to 0 videos, eventually start removing videos from the site, so I consider it a win. There are only so many reaction channels that should be allowed to exist.

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 :)

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!

[dead]

Google must not only sell Chrome, but also Youtube. Tiktok might be interested to buy it.

Mobile-first design. Get used to it, we haven't even started to see the worst of it

One of the 5 videos on his home page is on mine. I always wondered how prevalent that was, because sometimes I get videos recommended from sources with a small number of views and channels with not that many subs.

>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!

There's nothing new under the sun, I thought I was being clever.

I'll have to watch it!

For the past decade or so my bookmark has been set to /feed/subscriptions and I can only recommend that. The one or two times a year I end up on the front page act as proof it should remain that way.

Has anyone commented already about the absurdity of watching Youtube Shorts? A wide empty white space, with a narrow vertical strip of content that is often stretched and split into two smaller videos.

It's not the count if thumbnails, it's the algo that either does not work at all or works only for them. Average engagement and zero control. Paid or free, they do not care.

An unmissable browser plugin is “clickbait remover for youtube” (or whatever it is called), it replaces the video preview image by a still taken from somewhere else in the video.

The iphone and its consequences have been a catastrophe for web design.

If you use Youtube without an account, and disable watch and search history in the left menu the homepage stays completely empty of videos/recommendations. It's great.

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

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.

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

Those of us "of a certain age" are grateful not to look at a screen of 30 videos, all of them illegible because our eyes are old :)

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.

Anyone else's YouTube home page just a white screen telling you to type in the search box? Because after reading this blog I might ask the author for some stock tips.

Glad I'm not the only one who noticed and hates this change!

I ranted about this a couple of weeks ago: two ⌘- taps has become my default just to make most sites readable.

When did 32-pixel headlines and 18-pixel body copy become “desktop friendly”?

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.

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!

Their TV app changed grid layout of playlists to list that scrolls down so slowly, this makes my 100+ video playlist useless! Argh.

Mobile web? On the Android app you can definitely put the comments side-by-side with a landscape video.

Haha so it’s not just me with that issue

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.

Youtube has always been an abomination. I pause a video to see a detail and the UI covers the video in suggestions and nonsense when in full screen mode.

I quite like the 2x3 grid of videos. No complaints, actually.

It's 1.5x3 if you have a 21:9 screen. It's so bad.

Yeah, the Steam HW survey shows that 16:9 resolutions form a majority (60%+) of their users with 1080p + 4K, so it makes sense as a default design choice for a company that only wants to target one ratio.

As a former user of 16:10, I feel your pain, though.

I found YouTube completely insufferable until installing ublock origin, sponsorblock, and youtube redux to return to a more old school interface. How a single website single-handedly justifies 3 extensions in my browser I will never know but those geniuses at google have managed it.

Can't recommend youtube redux alongside disabling watch and search history highly enough.

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

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

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.

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.

For your (and any other readers') benefit:

Dred's HN CSS Madhackery: https://pastebin.com/gLXiqKyd

Dred's HN CSS Madhackery -- Dark Mode: https://pastebin.com/6PF3dCXH

(Both in my HN profile page.)

I'm reading via the first now.

I've recently re-skinned Algolia's search to match this. What the heck, posted:

<https://pastebin.com/HMp8Er30>

This is so annoying, plus them injecting shorts basically every other row. Almost like they don't want you wanting something that's not trending.

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?!?!?

Oh, I got this and thought it was a bug - I reported it assuming that somehow I must have been served the mobile interface on my 4k monitor :P

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

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.

100% this. Please listen to what seems like overwhelming user feedback. Thanks, A disgruntled YT Premium subscriber.

YouTube without the PocketTube extension (where you can customize stuff like that) is basically unusable on desktop. Give it a try!

The problem is simply that managers at Google think that designs have to change all the time.

The idea that a design is perfect does not exist at Google.

It's because they want you to get hooked when the videos auto-play on hover, and that's less likely with small thumbnails.

if you use tampermonkey, there's a semi-decent script to change youtube back to what it was like in 2016 : https://7kt.se/

it does jank up a bit sometimes (i can't change the youtube region, and some other defects), but it's sufficiently good that i keep it.

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.

> I’ve projected that around May 2026 the YouTube homepage will just be one video

Well, of course. It’s all gonna be Shorts by then.

On recommendation from someone here -on another Youtube-related thread- I started using the browser extension Unhook.

Can recommend!!

It's painful, but every single person in this comment thread is no longer part of youtube's target demographic.

Pretty sure I am one of their target demographics as long as I keep paying for their subscription.

that's not what a demographic is

youtube is facing an existential threat from tiktok and nearly every product decision is driven by getting more gen z and alpha kids back to youtube

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

I noticed this exact same thing! I looked in every menu for the setting to change it back. Nothing.

So who is building their competitor? Any shot in hell at this because of their huge library?

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)

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.

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.

[0] https://mastodon.social/

[1] https://lemmy.world/

There is no competitor. Video hosting is too expensive.

of course there are competitors, but they're either pay-to-play (Vimeo?), or overrun with fash or fash-adjacent content (Rumble, etc.)

This happened to me last week, used uBlock origin to set it back to 8 video's per row.

Could you share how you did that?

Yes this change is super annoying

Fun thing to open first thing in the morning as I wait for my coffee to brew at YouTube

Funnily, when loading the page, it still display 5 of the placeholder boxes per row

Let's also not forget about automatic title and audio translations...

> 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

Ah, the same advanced analytics package used by most consultancies and all politicians, which consists in prolonging a trend as a straight line until it reaches then end of times, and beyond.

The same very powerful analytics package that was recently used by AI fanboys to predict AI will consume 100% of the world electricity in a few years.

Jokes aside, I just keep my watch history off so the homepage is blank

That advanced analytics package for projection gave me a good chuckle

Vote with your attention.

Blame all the children on their iPads who can't read.

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.

> Your use case may be desirable, but they've determined it's not profitable.

This right here is the crux of the problem - profitability rules over any and all functionality.

Even in a scenario where a given design/layout was universally desirable, it will lose out to a design that is more optimal for revenue generation.

Ok, yes, Google is a company that needs to make money, but changes that optimize for revenue over usability have a strong chance of a domino effect down the line of a dwindling user base paying an increasing cost to use a service that is no longer worth it.

> I assume they have the resources to measure _everything_.

I don't disagree with this assessment, but I believe it just means that they know where the inflection point is between functionality (driving engagement and retention) and revenue (increased at the expense of retention and engagement) and try and ride that intersection to maximize both.

> I believe YouTube is crushing it as a content provider.

There's an argument to be made here that YouTube just doesn't have any real competition due to the infrastructural requirements being so heavy and the network effect of having so many people using the platform, and that's different than doing well enough to be able to compete in an environment that had more competition.

Put another way, the way YouTube is run works great up until you have an actual competitor operating at the same scale, at which point it falls over, as opposed to one that could effectively compete against another service.

This feeds back into the point about riding that curve of revenue vs. functionality. If you're right at the intersection of that curve you have very little flexibility with which to adjust in competition with another entity. This just points YouTube believing (not unreasonably so) that they're an effective monopoly and don't need to worry about competition, so it doesn't enter into their calculations. They may never need to worry about it.

None of that is the same thing as being a "good" or "optimal" service for users, and you can't really "crush it" when there's no one of a similar size within the space to compare against.

Never visit the home page of any social media site.

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…

They should isolate shorts from real YouTube.

You’d think they’d all be using google glass

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.

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.

Pretty sure this is intentional to encourage doom scroll and to make the giant video titles and shocked-face-tiles easier to see and thus click on. Whatever gets you to click faster and make those ad dollars.

I'm more than a little disgusted by how moronic we are made to look now that every video tile caters to the dumbest person with the most base instincts. If YOU aren't SHOCKED by this TITLE how will we get you to CLICK IT? :O :O :O MUST SEE this video BEFORE YOU CONTINUE READING HN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvFZjo5PgG0

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.

What I'm using currently for news: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/114356066459105122>

(Own tool, local-only, inquire if you're interested, email in profile.)

Source currently is CNN, which really isn't a particularly good news source or article selection. I'm working on a version based on The Guardian's RSS feeds.

I find the result far more readable and calming than any current online news presentation.

Starting point was CNN's "lite" page, which turns out to be unordered headlines. First cut organised those heads by section, the link above adds lede lines to those stories, with more prominence and significance to earlier stories and selected sections, less to the fluff bits (sport, entertainment, food, style, etc.).

> This is on a 32” 1440p display

What in the world.

Doesnt doing this make youtube impressions go up, since they are showing you the video with less immediate competition around it.

Fewer thumbnails mean impressions go down

> 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