Show HN: Search YouTube without stopping the video, and make your own playlists

Generally, when one (or a couple) experienced designers get their hands on a UI, it turns out alright. Its the 'mish-mash' effect where multiple people try to control the look and feel, where things go south.

This can be because of a literal committee, but it can also be due to poorly designed software trying to take away design decisions from the designer.

Just take a look at the mess CSS made of things in the browser. For years, it was easier to design something that looked good by just hard-coding an interface in a native language...

It looks like all your comments since your very first one have been pretty reasonable. Not sure if this is something that can be fixed, so you may want to consider creating a new account?

One option I'm missing is as simple as reversing playlists (often they are in counter-chronological order when they shouldn't be) or that I can't order the subscribed channels on the left panel manually (I have so many subscriptions, that I have to get to the subscriptions manager, scroll all the way down and go to the second page to find some of my favorite channels) or infinite scroll which makes the viewport jump around when using the back button jump around and generally feels slow and clunky (although YT's implementation is not the worst out there at least.)

The player itself is quite nice here on Chromium (not HW-accelerated but that's a longstanding Chromium/Intel bug), I agree. Otherwise the site is relatively fast and reliable; I like especially the video streaming smoothness and automatic quality detection, which is lightyears ahead of anything I have seen elsewhere.

They ought to have a clear indicator of thumbs up/down ratio on each video thumbnail (a couple pixel bar at the bottom colored green/red would easily do the trick). That would save plenty of time that would otherwise be spent watching some troll video or annoying commentary/reaction edit of some other person's work.

One of the least subjectively dumb decisions that they pushed through, was to change the "+"-operator from making a word obligatory to searching for this word on Google+. This one, I suppose, would go under just straight-up arrogance.

In general, though, I would ascribe it to bigger companies having a higher percentage of graphics designers, as opposed to regular programmers working on the UI. And well, programmers will generally put more options and things into a UI than your average UI person. And if you like options and things, then the UI person's UI is subjectively worse.

Why? The ads aren't that bad.

> There are wrong defaults like showing annotations or autoplay.

From a business perspective, autoplay is good as it leads to more videos being watched.

Yup, it's amazingly bad. 'Related' videos are mostly OK, but reccomendations seem to be just a 'related' video based on something you watched ages ago. I guess most youtube viewers are browsing omnivores and don't really care how bad the stuff is as long as it makes the time pass.

At least Amazon let you fix their reccomendations.

- Keyboard shortcuts to increase/decrease the speed (shortcuts for all controls, really)

A lot of people seem to enjoy it though, I don't think you can generalize this. Different features for different types of users.

1. The interface is complex and defined because of the sheer amount of features present. 2. Recommendations work really well after for me after I started using the "not interested" feature and curating channels. 3. You can add playlist and get notified when new videos are added easily - thus eliminating the need to subscribe to whole channels if you don't like all their content. (I know there are a few I like to see all the content from). 4. They disappear when you mouse away. 5. The volume control slider works... 6. Annotations are not default on for me. Autoplay on by default got me to start using it and is great for Chromecast and music. 7. Annotations can be updated by uploaders and some are good - but the default engine is only sufficient and sometimes difficult to translate. (But still the best I've seen anywhere else on the web for non-intentionally edited ones) 7. I don't see playlists as a bad workaround for this- particularly given you can update them in real time. Also the queue for streaming has this feature. (It would be cool to have the ability to navigate search while playing videos). 8. You just became a cost center for Youtube rather than a cost and revenue center - and your needs won't be catered to. YouTube Red is great and comes with a music subscription service and solves the ad problem. 9. This is a good idea. The workaround currently is Patreon links in the description which add minimal total clicks to donating.

I don't know how the Youtube Team operates but I'm very thankful for their product. They serve up incredible amounts of video on dozens of devices and network types for many use cases and manage to do so in a way that perseveres some discoverability and personalization. Red allows ad free access to insane amounts of content for a reasonable cost.

Thanks for being the man in the arena YouTube team.

if you're not logged in (personally I only log into gmail in a private tab), you just get the related videos, which are (imho) fine.

if you're logged in, yeah. useless.

> - I can only use YouTube on my Desktops because that's where the ad blocker works.

Firefox for Android has extensions, among which uBlock Origin, which blocks the youtube ads.

I also have some thingy to block the ads in the Youtube app but that's an Xposed-mod, which requires a rooted device (if yours is rooted, Xposed is highly recommended, many useful mods for many apps)

Knowing nothing about the situation, it looks like

1. You work for ProductHunt.

2. This is a veiled promotion of "your" site.

3. In any case, the comment adds nothing to the conversation for HN readers. It's merely a personal message to the OP.

As someone who has also been on Hacker News for years, that's my take.

Edit: You'll notice that other, similar "low-value" top-level comments have also been downvoted: "Love it! Thanks!" and "good job".

Although such comments are polite to OP, they add nothing but noise for all the other readers of the thread.