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Comment by exogen | Hacker News Reader

A comment I made when I started noticing the magenta gradient at the end of the progress bar: it's a bit anxiety-inducing for those who remember needing to degauss their monitors, because it looks almost exactly like when you mess up a CRT with a magnet.

(Aside from that: not a fan, it makes the chrome of the video player more distracting.)

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I know I sound silly and dumb for feeling so strongly about something so small, but the gradient really gets on my nerves. It is indeed so subtle as to make it feel like something is wrong with the display, but not subtle enough that I don't notice it _every time_.

Similarly, the "glow" they introduced a while back makes it feel like I'm getting the worlds worst backlight bleed.

Mercifully I use FreeTube to watch YouTube which saves me from these design choices.

That glow I think you're referring to is "theater mode" and fortunately it can be disabled on the gear menu. It's incredibly distracting, especially in Firefox it can sometimes be laggy.

I think you mean "ambient mode". Theater mode is like the halfway point between normal-size an fullscreen-size.

As an aside, does anyone know of any good YouTube settings extensions? I usually open YouTube in incognito tabs to avoid the personalization "features", but this means none of my preferences around ambient mode and "stable volume" are saved.

> so subtle as to make it feel like something is wrong

Nailed it. At first, I thought my eyes were going bad. Or the monitor?

Oh, thankyou for finally naming it. I've had a vague sense of anxiety for months seeing that gradient - like something is wrong and I need to fix it somehow. I just had no idea why I felt that way until I read your comment just now.

My school had a malfunctioning CRT back in the day and seeing the rainbow gave me joy as a kid. I always picked that computer! So no anxiety for me.

This is exactly what it feels like. "Oops, pushed my speaker too near my screen again."

For me, that gradient translates to “cheap”, from the gradient back of cheap Android phones and really badly dyed cheap curtains.

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