YouTube seems to once again be rolling out its widely hated new web redesign | Hacker News Reader

YouTube seems to once again be rolling out its widely hated new web redesign

9to5google.com

125 pointsmikece93 comments

They seem determined to move the description every couple years just to make sure creators are always pointing to the wrong spot.

On the plus side, maybe past videos will become correct again!

This does seem to put the video description where I remember it once was many years ago; on the right side of the video

And they made the description so hard to find that they had to let creators pin comments as a second description.

which might be a hack to get the user to load the comments (esp. on mobile). This means they get to artificially prop up the interaction level!

And this time it requires an additional click to get to. Like fucking Christ why??

This is why having a horde of UI designers on payroll is never a positive.

Some metric they're aiming to improve probably shows this change keeps users on the site a little longer.

LOL. I can see it now:

User: Nice video! I'd like to learn more, so I'll just look at the descritiopn. Wait, where's the description? Where did that stupid thing go? It's got to be here somewhere - Oh! You've got to click on it! Like fucking Christ why?? Why hide it from me?

UI Expert: People are definitely spending more time per video. Mission accomplished!

or just "Engagement is up! people interact with the page so much more now!"

Google is Goodhart’s Law in action at corporate scale.

Every big company is Goodhart's Law in action, Google just hired the best metric maximizers so they are the best at showing it.

You know the PM is the one who ultimately greenlit the changes cause they can take credit for it.

There's a pattern: they move a feature, making it inconvenient, and then remove the feature because it is not being used. See Google cache links for an example.

It's had a pretty short limit before it shoved things below the "more" fold for a while now if memory serves.

Maybe just to encourage the screamface-esque [points all over the place] 'wherever it is' cringey behaviour. For engagement or something.

I feel anxiety when watching videos with the thumbnails for other videos visible below. Also, I was unable to find the description of videos for waaay too long. Absolutely horrible.

I've been using for many years now the unhook youtube[1] extension to hide any distracting nonsense on youtube, you can select piecemeal what to hide, like the recommended trash in the sidebar, cards at the end of the video and even the main page. Supports firefox, chrome and edge.

[1] https://unhook.app/

I second this recommendation. Unhook is a game-changer if you spend a lot of time on YouTube. It makes the site so much more pleasant to use.

In addition to Unhook, I also use SponsorBlock [1] and Return YouTube Dislike [2].

While SponsorBlock is something that some people might not want/need, I find Return YouTube Dislike to be particularly useful because the like/dislike ratio is a valuable data point for a video I'm about to watch even if it's just an approximate/predicted value.

[1] https://sponsor.ajay.app/

[2] https://returnyoutubedislike.com/

interesting, why do you get anxiety? Is this the equivalent of doom scrolling? Doom watching a never ending queue of videos?

Not the OP, but I sometimes get rather disgusting/distressing "you might also like" in search results (not home screen). Think thumbnails for diseases/injuries/gore, with shock thumbail and so on.

No, I do not want to see thumbnail for parasite infested arm in my search results.

I guess if you’re watching YouTube because you’re avoiding something else, your mind already learned to keep whopping between videos and suddenly it’s a TikTok experience.

I can't really explain it. First of all, because thumbnails are mostly eyegore I guess and because it takes the focus away from a much less visually assaulting video? It also doesn't help they're not fully visible.

How am I supposed to focus on the video like this?

https://i.imgur.com/A0DRmD5.png

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

    cd ~/tmp; yt-dlp --write-info-json --write-sub \
      --write-auto-sub --sub-lang en,es -f '[height<800]' \
      --restrict-filenames --max-downloads "$@"

also, mpv can use yt-dlp to play youtube urls

on android, https://f-droid.org/es/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/ (hopefully f-droid will renew their ssl cert before you read this comment)

Can also recommend the newpipe fork Tubular which integrates sponsor block

https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/org.polymorphicshad...

ooh, thanks

How did you know f-droid's certificate was about to expire? Do you keep track?

In Firefox it's easy to see the details of the HTTPS certificate by clicking on the small padlock in the navigation bar.

It's not 'about to' it's expired. Did you not get a warning?

Or for those on low disk space netbook try invidious:

Here is a list of running instances:

https://api.invidious.io/

YOu can turn off the phone screen while playing sound. Much much more light weight than YOutube

Add the sponsorblock flag in there too and its perfect

this is missing a number after --max-downloads, oops

Ah yes, this is so much more user friendly than the redesign!

i know! it's motherfucking awesome!

In general, "everyone" always hates every re-design. Yet we collectively think that stuff looks better than it does 20 years ago. (You don't have to tell me if you personally liked it better, you're an outlier)

The problem isn't the redesign as such. The problem usually is a redesign is top cover for hostile features. Reddit is a perfect example where the new design is crawling with dark patterns, popups, nags, more "integrated" (i.e. camouflaged) ads and so on. To enable all that crapware there's a ton of JS and then you need a massive framework thing, and everything is asynchronous now so load all the content with a billion API calls to make everything lag, and then because now you can, you plug in analytics to everything.

If it was just about some rounded corners and it works on mobile now (like old Reddit doesn't) only the real NIMBYs would care.

We don't collectively think things look better than they did 20 years ago...

That's impossible to ascertain as a statistic. Nothing has stayed the same. And if it had, then people don't know what the "worse" or "better" is.

And things that change are rarely changed purely cosmetically.

There are two kinds of people: those who think "everyone hates every redesign, so we shouldn't do one", and those who think "everyone hates every redesign, so we can ignore how much everyone hates ours".

>Yet we collectively think that stuff looks better than it does 20 years ago.

This is completely meaningless. Most people don't actually know what they prefer and just default to "new good, old bad" when asked.

>You don't have to tell me if you personally liked it better, you're an outlier

If I don't have any data to the contrary, then I'll extrapolate from my sample size of one. In fact I do have more data, in the form of regularly seeing others say they prefer a variety of older UIs. Granted that everyone hates every redesign, and we can fairly assume that much of this is simple familiarity. But that doesn't mean that every single redesign is an improvement either.

Even if you're right that everyone prefers interfaces "now" to stuff 20 years ago, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's because people are wrongly biased against new redesigns. New designs have problems and bugs that are ironed out over a period of several years, wherein a new redesign doesn't occur. Most of the problems people have with redesigns are these problems, or sometimes outright mistakes that get reverted. That's why repeated redesigns, rather than getting it right followed by stability, is such a problem. You lose all the work you did in ironing out problems with a specific version of an interface.

I'm not sure how true your pronouncement about "people in general" is, either. Sure, most people don't look at Firefox from 20 years ago and say "yeah, we should go back to that". I'm an outlier for thinking that. But in part that's because going back to that would itself be another redesign, and Mozilla (for example) is famous for fouling them up. No one trusts them to do a redesign, and no one wants to have to relearn an interface, even if they might be convinced it's superior in some way.

No we don't. I still want this design back: https://web.archive.org/web/20171130235040/https://www.youtu...

Do you have a source that says people actually prefer modern design rather than tolerate it? Like what percentage of people prefer Google's modern "ads blend in with search results" redesign compared to older Google designs where ads were visually distinct and clearly marked?

One of my favorite uses of uBlock Origin has been to turn off the comments and recommended videos on YouTube. I'll probably have to recreate my filters after this, but other than that it won't affect me much.

I highly recommend it! Even if you don't use any ad lists at all, being able to eliminate distracting elements of frequently used sites is a huge QoL improvement.

Sometimes I scroll down to read a few comments and then just close the entire video out of disgust. Killing comments is a godsend.

I like the Enhancer for YouTube plugin that blocks all that, and also automatically sets the resolution, makes the video take up the whole browser widow without going fullscreen, and allows speeds greater than 2x

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-...

After the redesign blocking video suggestions is easier than ever. It's just a div with #id.

Late-stage product management.

DING DING DING

I’ll have you know they spent three weeks getting the colour of that button just right! Value was added to society!

Nothing short of the greatest minds our universities can produce could have pulled of such a feat

Probably driven by late-stage data science. I’m sure there was an A/B test somewhere that moved some metric by 2% that made this possible. Most likely this was also not tested for long term effects.

Not a fan of this one. Is this a race to the bottom because of TikTok? The bottom videos sticking out are gross to me.

That comment is right, you can now watch the video while reading comments, seems like a useful change.

Agreed, I always need to scroll to see video description content and comments which I would rather be able to see while still watching the video.

While, instinctively, the previews below the video feel odd because they've been to the right for so long. Logically, I can see the improvement they are going for here and would welcome it.

I have the Enhancer for Youtube extension which solves this problem.

And maybe I'm being an anti-change curmudgeon but the previews below seem to be putting more emphasis into engagement chasing social media by having Google try to convince users to click one more video. It's more distracting from the video you're watching than having it to the side in a widescreen monitor.

Why on earth would you want to read the comments? It's not like the bad old days where they only displayed the ones written by the angriest people to ever live, now they're just whichever people are willing so suck up to the creator the hardest.

> where they only displayed the ones written by the angriest people to ever live

https://xkcd.com/202/

I wonder if Google is going to kill us all, with that comment change.

Before the mega-angry were posting such comments, and youtube was absorbing it as some sort of great heat sync.

Now, the comments are gone, and the angry crazys will return to the streets, the villages, and this anger will flow into violence, war, nuclear annihilation.

Local news site comment sections are our last hope.

I'm glad I'm not the only one to be bothered by this. I watch a lot of interesting videos by smart people and clever makers, so I want to see some intelligent discussion in the comments. But every single comment is "omg you're SUCH a greater content creator!! Why don't you have more subs you're soo amazing!!". It's completely asinine and valueless.

>> Why on earth would you want to read the comments?

I do.

I really only use YouTube for specific stuff these days. Mainly tutorials from people in the sports/activities I am active in - rock climbing, hockey, hiking, rucking, mountain biking and snowboarding. I also really only use it for product reviews for stuff like backpacks, snowboards, technology reviews, etc.

I read the comments while I'm watching the videos to see what other people are saying about say, a certain pack I'm interested in. Most of the people commenting have either bought or have had said product and their two cents (good or bad) is generally reliable. Its not people sucking up to the creators, its just more opinions I can use to determine if this product or service is worth it. I do this frequently with hi-fi equipment since there are some really good YT reviewers out there for beginners just getting into hi-fi. Or like myself, getting back into it.

If nothing else, the comments give me a more well rounded view of whatever it is I'm looking at.

The quality of the comments reflects the quality of the content. Insightful and thoughtful videos tend to have insightful and thoughtful comments. Low brow videos have low brow comments. Ragebait videos have rageful comments.

If all you see is shitty comments, I'm afraid that says a lot about what you watch.

The insightful videos I see mostly have comments like "thanks xxx this video was super helpful". Which I guess is nice and polite and models good behavior. But it also doesn't add much value for me.

Eh, insightful and thoughtful videos tend to have better comments than the low brow videos, but they're still not useful. The best of them read like a decent-but-not-great subreddit's comment thread.

Taking one example, 3Blue1Brown's Deep Learning series, episode 6. Here are the top few comments [0]:

> I'm a university lecturer with a PhD in AI, and I cannot compete with the quality of this work. Videos like this put the entire higher education system to shame. Fantastic!

This is a nice comment, but doesn't contribute anything to my day. I'm sure the creator is glad to see it and I'm glad someone said it, but I don't need to read it.

> Are you kidding me? ONE WEEK FOR 2 MASTERPIECES?!

> Thank you so much!

Same story.

> I've got to say - "Attention Is All You Need" is an incredible title for a research paper.

And now we're down to the reddit comments.

> As a graduating PhD student working in Natural Language Processing, I still found that video to be extremely beneficial. Awesome!

Nice.

> 3b1b is the only content producer whose videos I start by first making coffee, then upvoting, then hitting the play button.

Nice.

> Attention existed before the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need".

> The main contribution was that attention was... all you needed for sequence processing (you didn't need recurrence). Self-attention specifically was novel though.

Finally a comment that contributed something. Not much, mind you (the video doesn't actually claim otherwise), but something.

Unfortunately, that's it. I kept scrolling for a while longer through pages and pages of thank-yous. And that's typically my experience with comments on thoughtful videos. It's not usually like the HN comments where you can actually get a lot of value from the comments alone, they're just... shallow. Sometimes nice shallow, but still shallow.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMlx5fFNoYc

> Why on earth would you want to read the comments?

Because after Youtube themselves made the most corpo-speak video which became the most downvoted video in history[1], they removed their downvote feature.

Now you need to be able to read the comments of each video to see whenever someone releases a scam or has made a major error or correction in their video.

-------------------------------------

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Rewind_2018:_Everyone_...

Why would I want to read the comments while watching the video? That happens always when it's finished, the comments are a second class citizen.

A lot of videos don't require your undivided attention (e.g. podcasts, vlogs, music, video game streams) and people like reading comments while watching.

That's how it's been forever in the iPad app. If you tap on the top comment it opens all the comments on the right and you can scroll/read them while you watch the video.

I think the new design is great, honestly. Not sure why there is a huge uproar.

I like it too. Bigger video, more visual information without scrolling

Just switch to cinema/theater mode on the old design and the whole right section goes away. You pretty much only see the video.

Pure change aversion from users.

This is a more sensible design. You can now read comments while you watch a video, which is clearly a more important use-case than browsing a bunch of recommended videos while you watch a video. The comments should scroll independently from the main column though.

I can't remember ever once reading a youtube comment and being glad I did. They are certainly not valuable enough to take away video real estate.

I mostly only watch 'technical' videos like machining, 3D printing, electronics, etc. so sometimes I might think something's wrong or strange and appreciate validation from a commenter saying the same (or learn with them when someone replies in correction).

Or someone will chime in plausibly claiming experience/relevance to the thing discussed and provide some additional interesting information, in the same way we see in comments on HN.

There's a lot of crap too of course, but at least on content that's informational to begin with (not saying memes and music videos) there do exist good comments.

you can expand the video into "theater mode" and it will fill the window width. just as before.

For some people, the comments are the worst part of YouTube. I could see them being pretty vocal about not liking the design that makes them more visible.

I have the feeling these comments went from overwhelmingly hateful tu overwhelmingly praiseful. I don't know how they managed that transition. Moderation or culture change? They are useless either way.

Truly. I have an extension that blocks them ("Hide YouTube Comments, Live Chat, & Related"). Every so often I will unblock them for a certain video, but life is not better with them for the most part.

Youtube comments used to be the worst comments on the net, but for a while now youtube comments have been decent. And no better or worse than reddit comments yet people go to reddit just to read the comments. I find myself often reading comments alongside youtube videos.

I agree with this redesign since it turns the right side of the video into a general social space: chat when it's a live video, comments when it's a normal video.

Related videos, on the other hand, are static and can be easily moved beneath the video.

Isn't this what YouTube looked like circa 2008? I remember the title, description, and comments were to the right of the video. Then they moved the title and description to below the video, and everyone hated it. This feels to me like just undoing the previous redesign.

What I'm not liking is (on iPhone, anyway) having half the vids not having a way to save on a playlist or watchlist. They are more like blog posts, and I have to break my selection flow to look at them.

YouTube is now autoplaying stuff it thinks I might like, and there's no way to stop it.

I really like the redesign! I was dissapointed they've changed it back for me.

Comments don't need space that wide, they work better on the side, where they gain additional vertical space.

I think it's designed to keep the video on screen while reading comments. Because NOBODY should scroll down during a commercial!

Just improving some okr bound to a metric "time a user spent on video page".

Next time, they will make user do 2 clicks to open the description.

Not sure I care at this point. As long as they don’t break the subscription page (further) I can get to what I need

Are they doing away with those annoying floating video recs that cover the end of every video?

Unskippable a/b test that ruins the last 10 seconds of every video. Suck. I hope they do away with it but they won’t.

You can use the pop out video feature in a web browser to see the video directly without any overlays. It works on Firefox, though managing that new pinned-on-top window is messy sometimes.

does anyone know which A/B teat flag i have to switch to get the redesign?

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1c0v9gn/comment/ky...

Keep in mind that A/B tests are all about measuring engagement. If you're in a test you don't like, the most effective thing you can do is reduce your YouTube usage and cancel any subscriptions for the duration

This change is benefitting someone within the company, exactly one person, at the expense of millions of Users with no voice.

Shouldn't a "free" product even approaching the popularity at this scale involve democracy?

Lets leave it up to a vote. Your stupid change vs. the opinion of the User.

Looks like a UX designer really trying to get that next promotion.

“Look guyz, designed this new YT UI. People staying on the site longer!!1 Haters always goin to hate tho. I pumped the KPIs with new design proven in A/B testing, advertising clicks increased 10X, revenue up.

Give me promo, bro?”

it seems like an excuse to introduce banner ads below the video for non-premium users.

EDIT: on second thought, about the nudge to use the comments section comes across as tone deaf.

comments to me appear as a portion of the page visited by a small fraction of users as is. meanwhile, it is spammed with spam and phishing comments generated by ever-changing means. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38652681)

without fully addressing this issue, exposing the comments to more users will probably lead to an increase in more outroar.

on the other hand, more people need to see "who is listening this in May 2024?" comments on a song that came out last week. /s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com