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Comment by dpedu | Hacker News Reader

On youtube's desktop site, I've also noticed that sometime within the last couple months the home page no longer shows the duration of videos when the page loads. After 3-6 seconds, the timestamps pop in. I don't know if this is intentionally or a result of lazy-loading - but seeing that the video thumb, title, author, view count, and age all load instantly with the page, I struggle to come up with a reason it could be unintentional.

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.

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Another thing I've noticed in Youtube on the smart™ TV, is that the app does not adapt the suggestions based on previous searches anymore. Now it's almost entirely generic crap all the time (Seriously, I am so sick of those thumbnails with the surprise face. I hate them!)

Between the ads and the poor content, I feel like Youtube is pushing hard to become the new public TV.

It's not just you. Mozilla ran a study recently and found user content controls on YouTube such as the 'Like' and 'Dislike' buttons are largely useless and have no effect on what we're recommended.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/research/library/user-cont...

The algorithm might not take it into account but it's useful for viewers to see how downvoted a video is. If I see that it's 50% downvoted then I know the contents to be controversial.

Downvotes haven't been public on YouTube for a few months (Google justified this saying dislikes were "harassment", whatever that means)

(likes / views) is still interesting, but you need to grade on a curve

Same with the 3 dots that show extra options like saving to playlist. They pop in after the rest of the site has loaded.

They also have a tiny hotbox which encourages misclicks (trying to click "Not Interested" but whoopsie, another view on that video!). Dark patterns galore.

Edit: looks like the dots are 40x40px on desktop

And then they torture and ban sites who use the same dark patterns with Adsense. It's as hypocritical as it gets.

And sometimes the save to playlist is a separate button while at other times it's hidden behind the dots. I've had to cancel countless clips from misclicking. (Multiple times in a row even)

My timestamps don't pop in, they're either there immediately or never show up. It's very frustrating, since I also decide what to watch based on them.

Could be your adblocker sometimes blocking them, other times not?

Though it probably is some bug or... rapid A/B testing thing Google has going on.

I'm pretty sure it's just a bug, I don't think adblock caused it for me. Wouldn't put it past them to intentionally break things for adblock users though.

yeah, I've noticed that timestamp thing as well. Super annoying.

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