I know it's a small thing but somehow this hits me really hard.
Also, there's less videos on a single row now. Because we can't read more than that without our attention span going poof.
This bothers me because I like to know how long a video is before I commit the time to sitting down and watching it. This feels like an attempt at a dark pattern with the intent to improve metrics - surely watch time is a metric youtube cares about.
Edit: looks like the dots are 40x40px on desktop
Though it probably is some bug or... rapid A/B testing thing Google has going on.
Between the ads and the poor content, I feel like Youtube is pushing hard to become the new public TV.
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/research/library/user-cont...
When you're watching a video and you go back, the url updates but the page doesn't refresh/redirect, the video just ends up restarting. Very annoying.
Edit: this happens on Firefox on Windows. I haven't tried Chrome.
Overall YouTube makes for a nice example of how modern design often makes the experience worse
But yeah the new design is pretty awful. No idea what they were thinking.
And for design, I'm actually harsh over stuff like the new "top comment" box that, when clicked on, /completely removes the normal comment interface/, shrinks the video, and moves the comments to a new and otherwise-completely-unseen comment interface to the right side of the video. Which is bizarre, inexplicable user experience and a fair amount worse than simply being a weird color.
Oh well even HN will always mess up your scroll position when hitting back so it goes
But, taking it as true (for some arcane reason), then perhaps they should change the design of their site so that popping away from the timeline isn't a part of the normal usage flow!
Specifically, if you want to expand the conversation under a tweet, you tap it, which takes you to a new page; when you're done, you want to continue reading your timeline. If making the back button can't be made reliable, then it seems a design that simply expands the thread off to the right or inline below or in a popup, without leaving the timeline page, would work much better.
I think I found the problem.
But press Cmd+K to reach the address bar, or Cmd+W to close the tab: Nothing happens because Jira hijacks the keyboard.
It’s the big site challenge: Wreck the user experience and watch people who keep using it because they have to.
Just a reminder, at that time you couldn’t do console.log(), because it worked with the devtools open, but “console” would be null with the devtools closed, which is treacherous because it only bugged for non-dev users. As a bonus, IE would ask the user whether they wanted to debug.
One of the things we discovered is that Youtube actually runs from three content delivery networks who all have to agree on what data is to be displayed. The user data, such as your profile, watch history, and subscriptions, are in the first CDN. The video description, title, and comments attached to the video are in the second. The video itself and related data such as ad placement, categorization, and closed captions, are on a third CDN.
If the CDNs don't agree or one doesn't get updated in time before the page draws itself, you get mismatched descriptions/titles, mismatched comments, or some of the strangeness people have noticed where the timeline "watched" preview in the thumbnail is wrong by showing the user stopped watching earlier in the video than they actually did.
Isn't that all there's ever been? Just chronological and popularity? This post isn't very helpful unless you say what you think has been removed. (I, for one, have always wished for most popular over the last 30 days, but oh well.)
> Also, there's less videos on a single row now.
You're going to have to tell us how many there were before and how many there are now. I'm not seeing any difference. It also depends -- are you talking about the home page? Channel home page? Channel videos tab? Because they all act differently.
Are you sure you just haven't changed your zoom settings or something? Or your window width?
Most Popular Date added (oldest) Date added (newest)
That's what I see too, but worth remembering that other people might see totally different UI options, given the number of A/B tests that Google run
const urls = {
popular: `?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid`,
oldest: `?view=0&sort=da&flow=grid`,
newest: `?view=0&sort=dd&flow=grid`,
}
[1] from https://github.com/sw-yx/youtube-browser-extension/blob/e76f...
https://github.com/n0x5/scripts/blob/master/youtube_api_uplo...
Need an API key and also the Uploads playlist ID from the channel which can use this script to get: https://github.com/n0x5/scripts/blob/master/youtube_get_uplo...
It's a little convoluted I might implement get uploads id right into the script but the issue is it doesn't always return the correct channel when searching by name, in which case one has to manually go through the results and find the right channel id which would take longer to code to actually work all the time.
the thing on the veritasium looks to be a new layout. trying to see if i can modify for it.
update: looks like a very opaque api request so i cant figure it out in the time i have for this. extremely sad.
Much more intuitive to learn?
in 3 commands
Youtube old UI "SORT BY" option had "Date added (oldest)" : https://imgur.com/a/9czAAiv
Youtube new UI removed "oldest" option and only has "Recently uploaded" : https://imgur.com/a/aSAhxLC
(Apparently, the new javascript for Youtube hasn't propagated to all worldwide servers yet which is why I was able to get screenshots of both the old & new UI by using different computers.)
This redesign is being A/B tested (with high percentages of users it's rolled out to). It comes in different parts, so if you clear your cookies and reload you can be reassigned a bucket and therefore see slightly different interfaces.
Bonus: I think the redesign is called called Amsterdam, don't quote me on that though...
* Only go on the Subscriptions page; I've never once visited the "Home" page
* Blocked the Recommended Videos sidebar using uBlock
* Use SponsorBlock
* Use uBO filters to remove Shorts from Subscriptions page
I come to watch what I want, not get all the clickbait on the side.
For me, it basically takes a guess what topics and themes I find interesting and pulls content around them. Automatic notifications are also pretty good.
YouTube figured out that I like interviews on a certain channel and nothing else, or Ukraine war updates from another channel but not their regular content. Probably through simple similar audience trick but solid selection nevertheless.
For whatever reason, it cannot apply this knowledge to shorts which are dreadfully bad.
Speaking of search and YouTube UI… are you talking about that veteran guy who occasionally does coverage on Ukraine but keeps a level head. He will often point out why it is important to think about why your enemy is doing what it is doing. And he uses some open source map to show what is going on?
…and the rest of his content seems to be reviews of military related things, or something else that has nothing to do with Ukraine?
Cause yeah I’m subscribed to that guy, I think… but I totally forget what his channel is and don’t seem to be getting any recommendations for his videos anymore.
I mostly watch channels like Aswath Damodaran, mCoding, etc., which are not related to the contents of the mentioned channels at all, yet their recommendation engine still shows me all this stuff.
I wish there were a way to see how it places you in various demographics, with a corresponding 'slider' to move yourself in/out of topics.
It just doesn't bloody care.
I added another reminder on my todo list to get rid of Premium and go rogue. My biggest issue is watching it on Android TV and the iPad, I will need a good adblocking setup, no way in hell I will watch ads.
- search duckduckgo, go to the "videos" tab, then I end up on youtube if that's where the video is.
- go to youtube.com, use the search, pick the video.
- I don't ever like/subscribe/comment on anything.
The easiest way for me not to get consumed by trash is to proactively hide it. I leaned that I have low self control when it comes to data consumption, so I block everything I identify as dangerous.
site:youtube.com <your_searchterm>
Youtube power is in its recommendation engine. I discovered amazing content through this engine. You say you come to watch what you want, but how do you initially fill the "subscription" page without exploring first?
There can be various levels of exploring. Maybe visiting the home page only once a month. But the distribution capabilities are what makes Youtube what it is.
If I'm looking for potentially interesting content outside my core subscription views, I'm better served by turning on FM radio.
all those videos in your watch history? others have watched those videos, too. youtube will recommend videos that those others have watched and that you have not.
the narrower the focus of your viewed videos, the narrower the focus of the recommendations will be.
For example I watched and subscribed to PBS ST to kick start. It instantly flooded my feed with low-quality sci-pop with “pro voice actors” voices and stupid sensational topics like “shocking alien planet” or “will our sun explode tomorrow? Emoji emoji emoji”. No astrophysics was recommended yet. Yesterday I searched for and binge-watched about hyena clan relationships, today it recommended me two quran surahs for good sleep, few colorful open-mouth-sensation morons (not sure which topic they were trying to “wow”) and a very badly compiled drama about different snow leopards chasing goats. And that’s while I’m holding my finger on “not interested” trigger for weeks.
What am I doing wrong?
if there is anything you started to watch, but didn't like, clean that stuff from your watch history.
click the "Like" button on any videos you like a lot, and favorite the very best.
sometimes YouTube's skull is very thick, but it will get a bead on you fairly soon if you do what you can to tell it what you like and don't like. that's been my experience, anyway.
I tried to turn it on for a while and it didn’t make any difference. Same for likes/dislikes. The only effective methods are channel-wise, i.e. “subscribe” and “don’t recommend channel”, but then the feed becomes 90% of videos I have watched or new videos (from these channels) in which I mostly have no interest in. Other 10% are irrelevant to me.
Anyway, I’ll try to follow your advice (thanks!) with more active liking etc for a while, but my hopes are weak atm.
I don't think it's necessarily bad to use the automated recommendations but there are certainly other ways to discover new content.
Every once in a while after scrolling for a while it gives me a "Want something new?" link and then the recommendations are fanatic but that feed has no bookmarkable URL or reliable way to get to it.
I say that because, as someone who does not sign into YouTube, I have no idea if it gets more complex.
Did you actually discover it through youtube's algorithms and discovery engine or was it linked to you by friends and you simply watched it on Youtube?
These are completely different things in this context.
> But the distribution capabilities are what makes Youtube what it is.
Hold on, I thought it was the recommendation engine? Which is it? Distribution is about economies of scale and good engineering, recommendation is about putting the user first, rather than monetization.
My typical usage is:
* Go to Home page * Add highly relevant videos to my Watch Later playlist * View the videos from Watch Later, like/dislike as appropriate * Rinse and repeat
I'm trying to give Shorts a shot. I particularly like them for viewing podcast shorts, but I've noticed the suggestions are taking a longer time to give me 'relevant' videos. Some of the Shorts are totally random, while others are from my Subscribed channels. I make sure to like/dislike as appropriate, and I've noticed a slight improvement in a week's time.
Pages are amazingly clean now.
When I mouseover a video with an interesting title, the preview appears.
The thumbnails are very distracting, and I found it hard to pay attention to the video playing on screen.
I don't miss the thumbnails at all, not one bit.
I use YouTube like this! Definitely going to implement some of your suggestions.
[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distractio...
YouTube is so much better when you remove all the little overlays and dark-patterns meant to get you to watch something else at all times.
Linus' channel is particularly horrible without this.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...
I'd like to figure out how to filter Shorts from my RSS feeds, but my preferred channels almost never use them so it hasn't been a big deal. The only other annoyance is live streams, which seem to debut on my RSS feed several hours before they're actually live (with no clear information about the "live-iness" of the video).
But getting the clean google-videos layout which was just a video player and a search bar can be done entirely with ublock :D
definitely not. there are very few bots in YouTube comments these days, though there certainly are some.
there is a LOT of brown-nosing, though.
I don't watch ultra-popular stuff, so what I see is different from what you will see, necessarily.
In gameplay and game streaming videos you'll find useful tidbits and hints on how to play a game.
etc.
...all of which serve to remind me what a pit of suck the service is, and ensure I never subscribe.
And the cycle of life is complete.
This works OK, although it tends to promote the same things over and over, seemingly at random.
This popup always shows up in my account no matter how many times I dismiss it. Very annoying.
Any way to remove this with uBO? I tried a few ways but it ended up not working well
For this I just use the web feeds. Creators are free to hop platforms and my workflow won’t need to change.
I don't think I could use YT without SponsorBlock and uBO. The SponsorBlock outage of the last few days really made me aware how much time is wasted on those sponsored segments, intro reels, and interaction reminders.
I love it when videos have a SB "skip to highlight" timestamp -that 10 minute video of the creator rambling on and on is now a 10 second video of the slow-motion moneyshot.
I recognize that people value YouTube for it's recommendation engine. That was never the draw for me; I just want a place to watch videos from creators I like. Overall, I found the recommendations to not work for me; they were overall noisy and distracting. Someone asked me once "well how do you find new content?", which I found hilarious.
* Never go to https://youtube.com to find anything. Only go to YouTube when it's a known link you found on another site. I don't need recommendations or ads
* Copy the URL, paste it into yt-dlp
* Wait a few seconds for the video to download and watch it in my viewer of choice with no crap attached.
Combine this with a window manager shortcut to open the clipboard contents in mpv and the experience is pretty slick.
You can also dump the URLs in a .m3u file and watch a bunch in a row with mpv that way.
I too only do subscriptions, watch everything my subscribed channels put out by placing them in my playlists (custom watch later lists for attention spans/activies), and only find other channels through my current channels. If you don't watch everything from specific channels (some big ones really pump them out), I recommend PocketTube's Subscription manger (and playlist manager).
Youtube hates us. It takes away tools for us to watch how you and I want, and refuses to add basic tools to playlists like "removed all watched" and "sort by length". I'm subscribed "watch later" still exists. They want you to just watch "recommended" videos one after the other like tik-tok-television.
It's a pattern of 'don't restrict, just make it less convenient to use'.
They carry such a small cognitive load and are of immense value to many, many use cases.
Who decides these things?
I can imagine a "Watch Later" product owner thinking that if he removes a certain control, he can game the stats and say the feature is seeing more use - securing his promotion.
We see this in public administration all the time, no reason to think private enterprise would be any different.
Having written that, I realize my YT usage is fairly low on search and I feel myself being forced towards it more and more in recent months/years.
Apple started the minimalist, option hiding, functionality axing, 1984-ish control freak movement. They even got away with selling phones without chargers, making $40 billion on lightning cables sales.
Just blame Apple.
I don’t know a single person in my bubble who needs more lightning cables. I have a dozen unused lightning cables already laying around.
I threw away every pair of headphones that came with an iPhone I have ever bought. Most of mini/micro usb cables that come with small electronics go into trash - I do not need more cables!
???? That's literally exactly what the point of every business decision is.
It’s not always a conspiracy to make more money.
If you need one there are plenty of options, including affordable 3rd party options.
Cynically it’s probably a way to adjust for inflation or whatever by keeping the same price but reducing the amount of stuff you get.
Someone commented this yesterday but the calculation was crap. What source do you have?
On that hand: Google never cares about feedback, you can't submit it, if you can it gets ignored.
Personally, I hardly use YouTube unless I follow a direct link. I have also disabled all feeds, comments, and suggestions using uBlock Origin.
If you expect that people are stupid you will get stupid interfaces.
There is just no way to endlessly improve a UI. At some point if you have 3K people work on it it will become a hot mess.
Yes. A sane person or organization must be able to make judgements that include values other than narrow metrics.
If your engagement numbers told you to jump off a bridge, would you?
So far I have not encountered a single big tech company that is able to factor in values into decision making at this level. I don’t know whether we even have the tools for that. The incentives (promos, bonuses), company size (internal competition, changing ownership, focus on growth), being public (relentless growth), etc, etc - all of that contributes to this outcome.
Personally I prefer a more thoughtful and caring approach to introducing changes, but knowing how the industry works I don’t see a lot of space for that.
From an engagement standpoint, the ideal Youtube is one where you can't actually view a list of videos from a specific channel at all. Or search for videos. Or anything really that isn't just watching whatever set of videos the algorithm thinks will maximize your engagement at that time.
The web in general is moving in this direction at a fast pace and the cause for all of this is one thing: phones. That's it. There's an increasingly massive number of people that spend hours a day staring at their phones mindlessly scrolling through tiktok, twitter, etc. to waste their time away when they have nothing better to do, simply consuming whatever content is fed to them, giving absolutely no thought to what they're seeing beyond how much it entertains them in that moment. They don't want to look for specific videos, they don't want to watch a specific channel, they just want to be kept busy by an algorithm. These people are insanely easy to please and will consume for hours at a time, watching plenty of ads. The more people start behaving like this, the more money these platforms make.
True, with an exception of Mastodon, PeerTube, Matrix and other distributed networks based on free software.
Are there books on how to play the game?
But I never had a hostile manager really. Some coworkers though. Most people were more than decent.
It's just... a hard environment to get used to if you're not inclined to think in a big-organizational way.
<funny videos> <cats> <harry styles new gf> <steroid cycle> <apple or pc>
At the same time, there is some pipe dream that the app can just give the user a 100% ideal experience with virtually no input on the user's part. What this really means is less optionality for users who want it.
Lastly, in any company there are going to be people fighting against complexity to keep things maintainable, scalable etc. The product gets sacrificed for the organization.
search has also become ... rather stupid? it shows a few results and then some irrelevant "recommendations"
Also would be nice if they stopped pushing shorts so hard. Why does youtube want to become tiktok, that is offensive to both users and creators, becayse YT has a distinct use case
But I'm not sure where Youtube is actually going with this. There's now "normal Youtube", "Shorts" and "Live" coexisting on the same platform, along with Premium exclusives and Youtube Music. All of them integrated somewhat awkwardly.
Also agree with the sibling comment that youtube was _full_ of fun short videos, but they are Not for some reasons counted as shorts, and now there is this situation of channels with yers-old catalogues of short videos, except the newest ones are “shorts” and the oldest ones in exactly the same style are “just videos”.
???
Some things are missing, like searching and queuing videos while watching one (I guess adding this feature could be a weekend project), but there's no ads, you can listen to video without downloading the video part, it does not stop after a while, and is quite lightweight. You can subscribe to channels and there's no magic happening in the videos you actually see, nor any need for a Google account. The information density is correct. You don't wait before a skeleton while the interface loads, because it's instant. SponsorBlock works with it too.
I can recommend. It might not be very sexy, but its interface design is not driven by commercial reasons and does not follow the oversimplification trend.
A bit OT, but I watch a lot of tutorials with many parts. Is there a good way to track which part I already watched?
Luckily you can get the regular video UI if you go direct to the video link in your browser, but no casting and if you ever get to the video another way you need to edit the URL to do simple things like seek.
I understand the desire to control how users are exposed to your content, but I think these options err too much on the side of removing user freedom.
I don't know if people experience the same but I feel like I'm just being fed whatever is trending now instead of things I actually want to watch.
I agree; which is astonishing, given how bad it was before. I wish there were some way I could actually tell it what I'm interested in watching; but no, I have to let it infer my preferences using it's "algorithms".
Even searching fails, even if I type in the full name of the documentary I want to watch. You really have to bend over backwards to make a literal search for the title of a show give you a completely different show, with a completely different title.
My suggestions are still totally fine, as they have always been.
Turns out there's very little of the "you" in YouTube anymore. I remember a day when you could type in any given search term and there would be videos from everyday people arguing for one thing or another, or showing you how to do a thing without totally shilling out for dinner kits or mattresses. I was surprised to find that even the least controversial topics yield very little. When it comes to YouTube, it seems very few everyday people just vlog or express themselves anymore. Everything has to be a podcast, everything has to be sponsored, everything needs graphics and studio lighting, everything has to not piss off the wrong group, everything has to constantly retread safe topics, and so on.
What a boring place YouTube became. The only reason I still use it is because NewPipe still works and TikTok just seems like a den of mental illness.
Also, I do find my extension useful. If I'm searching for videos on a topic involving science or technology, I really don't need a bunch of mainstream popsci bullshit. Unfortunately, it only works for Firefox.
Some things to note if you'd like to use it:
1. I deploy to Github Pages via Github Actions. See .github/workflows/build.yml for details. The only thing you might wanna change here is the `schedule` of how often to build your page
2. I define my subscriptions in src/feeds.json. It's just an array of tuples [name, rss_url].
3. I currently redirect to an Invidious instance. You can modify the `YOUTUBE_URL` const in scripts/render.js to `youtube.com` if you don't care for this
EDIT: By the way, I also wrote this scrappy user script to quickly download my youtube subscriptions as JSON: https://gist.github.com/kevinfiol/da63cd137327b8f8d6b7070601...
It'll just create a `get feeds` button at https://www.youtube.com/feed/channels
Twitter has become unusable and toxic for me in recent years. It seems like most of the tweets are recommendations - those liked by my follows or their friends. It's maddening to not have control. It seems like no matter how much I try I can't help but see vitriolic politics tweets, million-like jokes, etc.
Original author is the same as the equally excellent NewPiped mobile app.
I hate how youtube doesn't just show whats new from my subscribed content creators, it's insane to me that instead is a bunch of random crap and I miss content from the people I have already told the algorithm I want to see.
Hoping this has a way of just showing the content from the creators I want to watch, trying to have a more balance digital life and remove the crap these companies put on you, while keeping up to date with stuff that is interesting to me, it's always a difficult battle.
That's what drives me nuts about Youtube, is that I can't put "science" youtubers in to a particular, very narrow category separated from other elements. This seems like the feature that would make Youtube infinitely more useful. I can't count how many times I've had to bounce back and forth through the shitty subscription view trying to associate some infinitesimally small avatar with a tutorial video I watched two months ago. Somehow I inevitably miss it, too.
Of course there's no incentive for Google to do this, but these other guys..?
I am fully convinced the only reason RSS still works is that someone at YT forgot the feature exists and so it didn't get fucked with from when YT subscription panel was still working.
1. Youtube Vanced (deprecated but still works),
2. ReVanced (in development),
3. Brave mobile browser,
4. NewPipe (opensource, doesn't support most account-based features),
5. YouTube Premium and their regular app.
1. play video
2. turn off screen
3. video stops, turn on screen
4. pull down the menu from the top, showing a firefox notification with a play button
5. click play
6. turn off screen again
This is on Android 11, YMMV.
[0]: https://invidio.us/
Or maybe they just had a bug interfering with it and are still getting a solution in place (if they even noticed it)
I've almost started to become strategic about what I click on now instead of just going with whatever flow I'm enjoying right now. Not sure if I'll continue the subscription after the trial if they don't give us more options for managing our preferences. I guess I could get a family option for myself just to get more accounts, but I'll have to see.
I do wish there was something like "virtualenv" for youtube, where it's trivial to change your preferences without changing your account (which is still tied to things like subscribers and comments.
Not that I'm aware of, at least not for a single standard subscription. There's a family option with up to 5 accounts that might work, but it's probably not how that's meant to be used, so you might run into some problems. virtualenv is a good analogy, that's what I'd want as well, but I doubt that we're going to get that.
This is how I use it.
I used to procastinate a lot in YouTube, so I installed a plug-in in the browser that don't let me get into YouTube. At the beginning I was worried that it's not going to work for me, because if you use te incognito mode the plug-in doesn't work, so I thinked that every time I would want to procastinate I just open the incognito mode.
But surprise! I'm no longer procastinate in YouTube, because every time that I open YouTube in incognito, the recommendations are sooo bad, that I just scroll a few seconds and get out, and now I'm YouTube free for a long time.
DF Tube (Distraction Free) web extensions are available[0] for Chrome and Firefox which cut down intrusive UI (comments, recommended videos, the home page). It's easy to clone and extend the add-on if you want to block more.
When I'm on mobile, I limit the recommendations I can't block by disabling/clearing YouTube watch history. The new UI is aware of how much worse the suggestions are and hides them altogether—which is exactly what I want.
From there, I try only look at my subscriptions feed and occasionally the trending videos page. This makes YouTube less overwhelming—even if I watch just as much content—because I'm in control of what I want to see.
Curious if anyone else uses YouTube like this!
[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distractio...
Bonus points for putting your intake folder in a place your media server can see.
In my case I stuck my instance (not that exact software but similar) behind Caddy and added basic auth. Then I just setup Shortcuts or bookmarklets that just did:
curl -X POST --data-urlencode "url={{url}}" http://{{address}}:8080/yt/q
Who knows how many videos in my specific sub-interest (ASMR videos, for the curious) are already lost forever. I try not to think about that. I've got a representative sample archived and am working to keep up with the new stuff that gets posted. Anything added to the archive is picked up by Jellyfin for later perusal. From here I can create playlists, tweak metadata, etc...
A video or two being taken down for creative reasons by the author is one thing. YouTube making executive decisions to delist videos or channels is entirely different.
Google has had it too good for too long with YouTube being the de-facto video host of the Internet. Society at large is at fault for buying in so completely.
I just want important examples of an interesting art form to stand the test of time. And if you want something done right...
I remember being a 10-year old and reading these kinds of threads on the Neopets forums everytime a UI change happened. Back then, everyone would promise to switch to a competitor. Then everyone would forget, get attached to the new UI, and then if they ever changed it again (even changing it back to be more similar to the old one!) we'd hear the say peans about how they are ruining it.
See also: livejournal users threatening to go to dreamwidth, and /b/day (the 4chan exodus to 7chan).
Such a shame they’ve made that so difficult for…nothing?
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_jKrZ130j5QcXycYK_HePw/vid...
Google search has been severely gimped. And it's not alone. Bing too will only ever return under 900 results. The days of surfing the web are over. The tools to do so no longer exist. Now the searchable web it's just whatever has been posted on a corporate walled garden in the last year.
Severely gimped? Are you sure your use case doesn't just represent an extremely extremely small percentage of users?
And this is a terrible situation. There's an entire generation of people that can never learn how to search, even if they wanted to, since it is no longer available.
Anyway, I was watching a logged in friend using YouTube, and realized their suggestions were equally irrelevant.
I wish people would mirror their videos somewhere that's more archival focused and less of a spam shovel.
From what I gather they're mostly music-related ones (perhaps in favour of YouTube's "most popular songs" playlists). Here's a random example: https://youtube.com/c/DomDolla/videos
Notice there's no option to even select any type of sort.
It makes a tiny bit of sense to use that YouTube playlist instead (for example artists may upload songs to a label's channel or something), but it's still very annoying.
Years ago, tcp/ip was cool to explore. Now, its just ad-bait for tabloid and low aptitude fodder populations.
At least on IOS, "Halt" is a good browser that blocks all youtube ads, beginning to end.
Much like grocery shopping, I only have a short list of content to view on youtube, with their algo recomendations and UI being moot for the past several years.
Even google places low quality results littered with ad-infested pages in the SERPs for inferior time suck pennies.
I have no idea how I’m “supposed to use” YouTube. I assume because I’m a fairly light user my confusion must be because it has some powerful tools/ interface for power users that confuses light users like me.
But then I try to understand how I should find what I’m looking for and it seems there’s no good / efficient way to use it where I don’t end up wondering why I can’t just click this or that to get what I want.
It is hard to process for me how could they screw simple things so bad.
No doubt there's particular reasons for not doing so, but a "don't show me videos I've already seen" would be quite effective for my aims.
I recently watched some of the trial of the mass murderer who killed a bunch of people at a parade in Wisconsin.
Now almost my entire youtube feed is things like "Trial lawyer REACTS to Darrel Brooks VERDICT!" - just absolute click bait garbage. I hate it, and I genuinely don't know how to make it go away.
I really hate the endless short videos of youtube, instagram, and tiktok. I have no tiktok but they've essentially recreated the same crap on youtube.
The experience of YouTube has been pretty much completely ruined for me. The content of videos seems to have gone way down too. I think this may have coincided with the change in monetization strategy. Seems like the quality of recommendations has gone WAYYY down since then.
Besides this, I too have found the content quality declining. The best content now comes from channels/creators I followed years ago, while most new stuff that's being recommended is of the reaction to reaction to reaction variety.
- Adding : hover the video 1000ms to reveal the button
- Removing : 2 clicks away under a menu
Why hide the 2 most frequent actions? Do you even do user testing?
Imagine if opening a Google result took 2 clicks, it'd be infuriating.
Yes, not user hostile is exactly NOT how I would describe Amazon's trash heap that is Market
I don't even do that. I use mpv + yt-dlp + SponsorBlock plugin: `script-opts=ytdl_hook-ytdl_path=yt-dlp`