Someone at YouTube needs glasses | Hacker News Reader

Someone at YouTube needs glasses

jayd.ml

1,424 pointsjaydenmilne694 comments

For a long time the grid of videos on the homepage has been slightly misaligned. I imagine the different rows belong to different teams. This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over.

I find the autoplay so annoying because it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage. Often the video gets inexplicably added to my watch history, and if I do choose to click on it I have to go back to the beginning because I missed the start of the audio

What kills me with the autoplay (at least on mobile), is that the video continues from where it was when you click it. But the autoplay had no sound, and I probably didn't watch it closely. So I always have to scroll back to the beginning, as I've just now been put in the middle of a sentence a bit into the video. Especially for channels which actually gets straight to the point (like Numberphile) it's annoying. Such a stupid design.

Additionally there's a bug on the Android app that it sometimes doesn't show video titles (or the worlds worst A/B test?), so scrolling through I just see talking heads (since it autoplays instead of showing the video thumb) and have to force restart it to actually understand what's going on.

THIS. THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS.

This has been one of the most frustrating things I run into with Youtube scrolling the page. Can’t leave your cursor on the page while scrolling without managing to have the spacing shift the thumbnails just so slightly so that your cursor lands back into a thumbnail for an autoplay to start and add to the metrics.

> This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over

You can disable autoplay at https://www.youtube.com/account_playback, then uncheck "Video previews". It resets itself every 15 days or so, but at least one can have some peace in the meantime.

A sea of perfectly crafted misleading YouTuber pog faces isn’t necessarily better than autoplaying previews.

The automatically generated thumbnails were often the best at conveying what the video actual is in combination with a title and description that is currently overlooked in place of thumbnails.

These went away when people started gaming the system with a thumbnail frame right in the middle to intentionally misrepresent the content of the video. Same problem with the current YouTuber pog faces. The next step is to automatically generate multiple random frames to preview.

The garbage stock footage doesn’t work well here because it’s not great content to begin with. It’s lazy filler often used to hit the bare minimum arbitrary adsense time limit which wastes countless amounts of user hours.

This bugged me so much and yet I ended up noticing a simple workaround: keep the mouse in the top bar where the search box is.

By all UI logic this should not scroll as this element is not scrollable (it's the top bar above the scrollable content), but YouTube and Google in their infinite UX wisdom kept the scroll mouse events go behind the hovered element. I won't complain about this one too.

I know this is just a weird workaround, but you can put your mouse cursor on top of the scroll bar. The scroll wheel still works like normal there (at least in my tests on Linux / Firefox).

> you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over

This might be intentional. Depending on how they calculate a view, this means they can pump up their stats they use to sell ads by making you "view" more videos than you actually click on.

I like the previews TBH. If you turn on sound in the preview, you can watch part of a video without seeing an ad. It only shows me an ad when I actually click the video to watch it, so I can spend the first minute or two watching the thumbnail to decide if the video is going to get into meaningful content and be worth watching the ad. Without previews, you click on a video, watch an ad, then watch the video for a minute or two before deciding you don't want to finish.

Hmm, on one hand I agree that autoplaying videos should be illegal but on the other hand the clickbaitiness of YouTube thumbnails has reached a point where it's almost better. (cue deArrow comment)

Which ones are misaligned? At least the ones shown to me are perfectly aligned on my computer (both Safari and Chrome on a Mac).

Is it maybe caused by an adblocker? (I have YouTube premium, so no ads.)

Edit: Actually, the picture in the article shows a misalignment in the "Breaking News" section. It's odd, because the sections align perfectly for me on various screen sizes

The video grid is mind boggling now, they keep making the thumbnails bigger, and now they don't even show two rows of 3, it's a row of 3 then a row of 3 but with only 2 links! There's a giant blank box for no reason!

They added fuchsia to the timeline bar so that it now clashes in an ugly way with everything else on the page.

Don't like Shorts? TOO BAD!

> I find the autoplay so annoying

Me too! So I turned them all off:

    Youtube Settings -> Playback and performance -> Browsing -> video previews (off)

Kind of forgot how horrible they were until I saw your comment.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who gets annoyed by these details.

I never noticed that weird space between videos not stopping autoplay--I always just kept moving my mouse around until it stopped. You can start by entering the thumbnail space, but to stop it you have to enter another thumbnail space or get very close to it--the main spacing between won't stop autoplay. There's hysteresis between the start/stop edges.

>I find the autoplay so annoying

Fortunately, there's an actual setting to get rid of that. Found out yesterday, when trying to fix the OP problem (which youtube sadly forced on me).

That's extremely depressing on 27" 4k screen. Give me a density setting! I want compact thumbnails and to glance at a pack of vids at once.

> I find the autoplay so annoying because it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage.

If anything, I feel like that this is by design to hyperstimulate their core audience seeking instant gratification.

I have to admit I like autoplay… because the entire video will play, and it will never show ads. I often watch YouTube videos from the homepage entirely in autoplay and just zoom the browser in.

Irritating, but the quality is fine for most things and I save a few minutes not watching ads.

I personally love the autoplay (on hovering), as often I just want to see some part of the video without having to click on it and see a bunch of ads before any playback.

I thought i was the only one! I did realize at some point that you can avoid it if you hover on the left or right of the main grid. Still very annoying though

Why do you even need _different teams_ for the homepage ?

The home page is made up of: a search bar with some extra buttons that link to different pages, a sidebar with some more buttons and a list of videos. What are the multiple teams for ? And even assuming it is necessary, there is really no single person responsible for the page so that issues like this can be seen and fixed ?

And since we are talking about pet peeves, on my laptop when you open the homepage you get a placeholder with 4 videos per row, and then you get 3 videos per row (or 5 shorts per row)

You can disable autoplay. Both on desktop and on mobile (not sure about TVs)

It's buried in the settings but it's there.

If you didn’t look away fast enough then they want to count it as a view so they can profit.

I always open videos in new tabs and they start from the beginning.

> This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over.

Nobody cares about coherent UI/UX anymore. They certainly don‘t care about your fringe usages. Do new stuff. Do good enough. Expensive designers with a clear vision and attention to detail? Sounds slow. And expensive.

The move towards forced autoplay and infinite scroll will continue in any media app. AB tests show it is what humans crave.

I tend to select some text in long textblocks to keep a point of reference while reading. Medium and other new generation slop loves to open an obtrusive menu above my selection.

NewPipe is the better app by far in terms of usability, despite having no budget in comparison. It's impressive how far you can get by just not adding bs

> it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage.

Wait what? Thumbnails are useless. DeArrow has been god sent.

It used to be 12 videos until about a year ago. If you zoom in and out the thumbnails don't change size!

The worst casualty of the current design is the search. You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations. No? Fuck off? Do what I tell you to do!

> Do what I tell you to do!

Maybe a good opportunity to remember that you watching the videos you want to watch is actually just a workaround Google suffers through in the YouTube product.

They have to do it so that you come to the site, but it costs them money and makes it harder for them to optimize the revenue they get from your eyeballs.

Strycturally, their goal is to push the line as far as they can, and they spend a lot of product design and engineering effort to do so. They're only going to get better at it as time goes by.

And of course this principle doesn't just apply to YouTube, but at pretty much all media sites once they get large enough to pivot from growing their audience to optimizing its profitability.

> You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations

This has become increasingly annoying for me. Sometimes I want to find a reference I saw a few years ago on some topic. Even if I know the speaker, the topic, sometimes even the title, I can't find the video. I get a handful of results vaguely related to the search terms and then a never ending list of garbage not even slightly related to my search terms.

I really want my own memory augmentation. A personal tracker for all of the content I have ever consumed in any form, indexed and searchable (like in a personal Elastic Search cluster). The trouble is, I only want it for like 1% of the content I have consumed. The modern web is so hostile in general that aggregating any kind of data about my own usage is so onerous that it might as well be impossible. The friction they have purposefully created worked exactly as they intended.

Zooming out actually makes the thumbnails bigger, because they grow to fill the space ceded by the rest of the UI. Just incredible design all the way through.

The homepage of YT has become a disaster area, it has almost zero customizability or exploration value. Can't remove vertical video shorts, can't control the topics displayed at the top. It maximizes engagement and time waste, not what I need.

But you can use Gemini for better search, recommendations and you can play videos right in the chat window. At the very least replace search and recommendations with the model. You can explain what you want to explore and guide the recommender much better than on YT. There are no ads in Gemini itself.

I just wish they'd fix the "sort by date" bug in search. I search for something, it gives me endless results. If I then choose to sort by upload date, whoopsie, no results found!

> You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations

Worst part about this is you search for food recipes and after the first 5 results there are gross out videos, "popping" videos, kids dying in an elevator video.

I'm about to eat dinner here... I know Neal Mohan REAAAALLLLY wants people to watch the video about the kids dying in the elevator because he keeps putting it in the trio of videos that show up when you search unrelated to your search but can he not wait till I'm doing a search that isn't food related to try and make me watch gross out content if he's so desperate to make me watch it.

Report it every time, makes no difference it all has millions of views so they'll keep doing it.

The dummy "loading" grey boxes it shows are still this size. Such a great "user experience."

Yes, this search thing is absolutely infuriating.

You can insert (and tweak) this into uBlock Origin filters:

    ! YouTube Fix & Customization by Arch v1.8.4 ! (1/11) YouTube 4 Videos Per Row Fix (Home and Channel Pages) / YouTube Fix & Customization

    youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row, #contents.ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;)

    youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 5 !important;)

    youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-posts-per-row: 5 !important;)

(source: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1g5l9mc/comment/ls...)

This filter list is the most up-to-date that I've found to hide shorts with uBlock Origin:

https://github.com/Harren06/ublock-yt-shorts

Didn't the new Chrome update break uBlock, or is that just for my test cell? I've been in mourning...

Add this to the list.

youtube.com##ytm-paid-content-overlay-renderer

The `this video includes sponsored content` that covers and takes over the click into a video.

Whoever designed that, implemented that, approved that, needs to be fired and blacklisted from doing user-facing code changes.

Magic, thank you. Works, at least for now, until they mess up with the layout again. So much better...

Another source from there: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1fkkcn1/youtube_de...

Thank you for writing this post! I opened youtube a few days ago to this as well. On a 24" 1440p monitor its ridiculous. It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this. Thank you again for writing this post. After searching it seems like they've been "testing" this in segments for a while now.

As a result I installed the "Control Panel for Youtube" chrome plugin and Im able to fix it back to 6 videos per row. I also found I could make shorts play in the traditional youtube player by default - which is an added relief.

You assume the UX team has any say in any of this.

Some of the revelations from the various lawsuits against Google by the US and other governments over the years have been about this.

The company replaced leaders who cared about users with leaders who cared about revenue optimization and those leaders changed the direction of the company to what we all see in all of their products these days.

"It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this."

Unfortunately UX teams aren't actually paid to make great UX, especially at large corps and any place ad-driven. They're paid to move the metrics and move the revenue line.

Most likely what happened is some MBA ran a short A/B test of smaller vs. bigger video thumbnails, and the A/B results showed more "engagement" with the larger size thumbs, and so, of course, to meet his/her performance goals, the MBA had the page altered to the version that showed "more engagement".

>It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this.

this is the story of the big company web sites

- huge budget

- best programmers

- terrible design

- terrible usability

- doesnt make sense

- gets worse over time

it's unreal. seen on many major sites.

It's not enough to have hindustantimes.com articles for local American news on google-- even YouTube must be sacrificed. The rivers of enshittification must flow.

It's infuriating that a plugin/extension is needed to bring back what should be the a setting, if not the default, in the UI for this.

FYI: YouTube provides RSS feed for every channel. The URL is as follows:

    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID

And without downloading with yt-dlp, videos can be watched from youtube-nocookie.com in full-window mode (no distractions) under:

    https://cinemaphile.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID

Pssst! Keep this on the down-low or they'll take all of this away from us. >smile<

Seriously, though, w/o RSS feeds Youtube would be completely useless to me. I keep waiting for Google to kill them.

In the past several months, I've moved to using an RSS Reader + Watch Later Playlist + DF Tube extension (you could use whatever to nuke parts of the UI you dislike). This has greatly improved how I use YouTube. This method allows me to be significantly more intentional with what I'm watching and how much time I'm spending. The only frustrating part is that YT shorts still come through RSS, but they are much easier to avoid in a reader than YT's UI.

The excellent “Play”⁽¹⁾ app (available for iOS, macOS, Apple TV and Vision Pro) can also use these feeds, plus give you the ability to conveniently save other videos to “watch later”. Highly recommended!

⁽¹⁾ https://marcosatanaka.com/

Can also use google sheet + app scripts + youtube api to add new videos from channels in playlists. Sheet can trigger every few hours to keep things up to date.

It does get more complicated if monitoring too many channels since execution will timeout due to sheets limit. But can make it to pickup where previously timedout.

Bonus using API gets you video info so you can filter by length (shorts), keywords etc. Limitation is ~150 videos added per day due to API limits.

I used this to make a Youtube viewer "application" that lists my subscriptions most recent videos, and i can watch them when i get a chance. Just a list. no thumbnails, no click bait, no random algorithm recommendations, just stuff i want to watch.

You can use the wonderful mpv player to view videos directly from a yt-url (yt-dlp backend).

i made a tool to extract the rss feed from a channel too!

https://shorts.aviparshan.com/rss-feed

What gets me the thumbnails are now so big, they're blurry since the images need to be stretched to fit now!

The preview is 530x300px on a 1920x1080 screen vs the image shown being 336x188px

How this passed any sort of QA is beyond me

They clearly need to conserve bandwidth for the most important assets - the 12 whole megabytes of Javascript.

I've recently noticed that the thumbnails on the homepage are higher resolution than the thumbnails on the subscriptions page

they want more money, less videos more ads, probably the UX/UI team was against it but you know how those big techs are

The perfect oppurtunity for more AI, image upscaling! /s

Or maybe the next step will be automated AI-generated thumbnails based on the video and the user itself, so each user will be grouped into a different category and gets served a different thumbnail accordingly.

The worst thing about YouTube in 2025 is auto-translation. Whoever is behind this doesn’t seem to understand that many people outside the US actually understand two languages rather well.

In my case: German and English. I don’t want either to be translated to the other, but no chance. If you switch languages in the UI, you will get the garbage translated titles.

Google is institutionally incapable of accepting that people can speak more than one idiom.

I need to open a private window to have proper Portuguese search results. No matter what language preferences I set, I cannot get what seems to be most reasonable: show results matching the language of your query.

And the auto-dubbing introduced these last weeks makes it so much worse.

I am BEGGING someone, anyone at Google/YouTube to let me permanently disable YouTube Shorts.

I HATE Short form video content and no matter how many times I select "show me less of this" I still get them front and center when I open the app or website.

The annoying bit is similar to reels, shorts are good for engagement.

It’s similar to why I don’t buy Oreos. I like Oreos, everyone likes Oreos - they’re engineered to be liked, but they’re bad for you. The best way to not eat them is to not have them in the house.

Short form videos are the heroin of media consumption - meta having to pivot instagram to it is because they’re facing competitive pressure. Same with YouTube. You can’t only have vegetables when your competitors are dealing heroin and your revenue is engagement based.

It seems the revealed preference of addicting consumption for engagement is tv with with a novelty button. TikTok and short form videos are that distilled to its purest form.

These companies can’t turn them off - they’re trapped by market incentives, it’s moloch. A few years back when Facebook had a more dominant market position Zuck said they were intentionally going to focus on human connections and friends despite the revenue cost that would cause because it was the ideal he wanted. In battle against TikTok you can’t hold those kinds of ideals unfortunately.

Summary of the proposed solutions to block YouTube Shorts:

-Enhancer for YouTube extension (Firefox) — mopsi

-Unhook extension (Chrome/Firefox) — jabroni_salad, kelvinjps10

-YouTube-shorts block add-on — timbit42

-ReVanced for mobile — kelvinjps10

-Shorts filter list in Brave browser (works on mobile) — my personal favorite

Same.

I HATE youtube shorts. Not their content (I've never watched one) but how they've infected the whole youtube experience.

You search for something and half the results are irrelevant... which includes a ton of shorts.

create a new folder, put two files there:

manifest.json

containing: { "manifest_version": 3, "name": "Hide YouTube Shorts", "version": "1.0", "description": "Hides YouTube Shorts", "content_scripts": [ { "matches": ["://www.youtube.com/"], "js": ["content.js"] } ] }

and a file named content.js

containing:

add the contents of this folder as a chrome extension

> I am BEGGING someone, anyone at Google/YouTube to let me permanently disable YouTube Shorts.

Absolutely this! I was looking to see if it was an option yesterday. Annoyingly not :/

I go to TikTok, shorts.

I go to Youtube, shorts.

I go to Instagram, shorts.

I go to Facebook, shorts.

I go to Imgur, shorts.

I go to Pinterest, no shorts because it only plays 1 video per screen, but on mobile the screen is smaller so, shorts.

I go to Reddit, shorts.

I go to Bluesky, shorts.

I don't go to Twitter.

Tumblr is probably the only social media that isn't filled with vertical videos and that has an algorithmic feed. I go to Explore and I get dandelions. A static photo of them, not a video. I'm crossing my fingers it stays that way.

This works: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-shorts-bloc...

I also hate shorts, however, if this is to believed, we're for sure stuck with it: https://www.zebracat.ai/post/youtube-shorts-statistics

Are you still using YouTube despite this frustration?

If yes, then they don't care. Sorry. If you'll tolerate it and some other cohort of users will engage with the site for 0.1 seconds more than they would otherwise, it stays. YouTube is an optimization machine.

On Firefox, you can get rid of Shorts with Enhancer for Youtube extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-...

Right here folks we see the consequences of not having open source alternatives.

Not your software, not your control.

The games, too. Clicking to hide them hides them for at most 30 days, then you have to tell them once more that it's of no interest.

I cancelled YouTube premium and stopped using YouTube entirely because of this

Ublock origin allows you to block any part of a page. Solved!

I'm happy with the extensions that I've been using, makes using YouTube much better and protects me from the wonderful world of "Shorts".

Use the unhook extension, and on mobile revanced

Yes, and I also want to permanently disable hover to autoplay on desktop / 'video previews' on mobile browser. It's stored locally in the browser and is forgotten about every four days for me.

I hate that 'feature' so much.

The unhook extension can get rid of them.

It also gets rid of that nonsense they did to the search page.

I use invidious, and if I can't because it's down or something, I use a FF extension called "unhook". I hadn't been on to youtube proper in a good few years, but with unhook, I can block everything (suggested videos of all kinds, comments, etc). I can re-enable comments by clicking on the extension in the toolbar and unchecking comments. Easy peasy.

You get almost a complete blank page and a search bar when you go to "youtube.com", and then when you search, you get the results. Just simple, really.

Yes please!!! I too hate Shorts. I hate that I get sucked into them in a downward doom scroll even more. I'd love nothing more than to completely disable it. But, i think this is also why they will never let me.

I also hate that the first one or two short may be relevant to whatever I'm consuming, researching, then it quickly turns into me watching Kill Tony comedians, girls basically naked in the gym, etc. they know my brain basically just turns off and enters the void

Sorry bro. They get paid to propagandize you. No amount of complaining will change that.

Remember, with normal videos you (primarily) decide what to watch, but in shorts, you decide what not to watch.

But how else are they going to compete with TikTok?

I want something that blocks them from the AppleTV App. Even if I did like them, it's so stupid to watch shorts on a TV.

I agree. YouTube Shorts should be a separate product line. The short form content is polluting the long form ones.

Not a chance. YouTube needs shorts so that they can compete with TikTok. They HAVE to put it in front of everybody so that they can leverage their existing, vast userbase to quickly bootstrap such a product. It's a fight for market relevance for them. You will most likely not see them let that go.

They've increased shorts length to >60s so now it's blending in with 2-3 minute long videos which overlaps with the sweet spot of no nonsense videos. Some shorts are improving, but the shorts UI on desktop is trash.

What I don't understand is why YouTube penalizes creators for creating short "traditional" videos yet also penalizes them if they aren't creating shorts.

I mean, I do know, it's ads and the attention economy, but still. Pick a lane. This is why I pay for Nebula.

Atleast let me disable shorts on the TV app. I can't scroll thru my subscribed channels feed without being spammed with all the shorts, this makes content discovery awful and im just not using the app as much.

Use the NewPipe Android app.

I'm afraid the pressure from tiktok is just too high.

Or at least let me turn off endless repeat. It is an absolutely ridiculous way to watch video to have it auto-repeat endlessly.

I used ublock origin remove it from the page.

I just use freetube most of the time and don't experience shorts at all, and if I do I don't notice

Unhook extension, works on Firefox (computer and android), safari (computer and iPhone).

Youtube Unhook extension does that and it does a lot more to improve Youtube's UI.

Just block the html elements which show YouTube shorts? Use ublock, select, and block.

I've been using an Unhook, the extension, and couldn't have been happier.

>Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.

More guidelines available at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you're on android you can use screenzen. Not sure if they have an ios app.

I love short form video content, but I don't want it from YouTube. And if YouTube feels they need to have it to be competitive then don't put it on my desktop.

EDIT: I said "do put it on my desktop" -- I meant to write "DON"T put it on my desktop".

Have you looked at the "YouTube-shorts block" add-on?

I had to switch to freetube which is a much better experience

Personally, I don't hate Shorts but god I wish that the order of Shorts on the homepage would be the same one that you get when swiping down.

And for fucks sake give me an option to disable the AI translation trash everywhere, and show the title of shorts on a creator's feed page...

>no matter how many times I select "show me less of this"

facebook works the exact same way

billion dollar companies forcing you to look at stuff you dont want and gaslighting you into thinking you have a choice

I want Shorts to format properly on my 1440x2560 screen. All the interaction controls on hidden off the side of the screen. Still have black bars on the left and right of the video too.

And also yes, I want long form and short form videos to be separated, when I'm scrolling through results 6 at a time(minus 1-2 ads) to queue the shorts really mess up the flow.

(sorry for the repost but it's long thread)

This filter list is the most up-to-date that I've found to hide shorts with uBlock Origin:

https://github.com/Harren06/ublock-yt-shorts

So much this. They haven't even paywalled it behind Premium. They know they're dealing crack. Such a disgusting company.

Huge +1. Please.

Same. Shorts are actually a great product in terms of capturing attention, but I don't want them on youtube. I hear someone from the back shouting, "you're not the customer, you're the product!" but I pay for youtube premium... that makes me the customer; and I pay for the long-form content without ads! But 50% of Youtube shorts are just ads or product marketing. I never feel good after going on a youtube shorts binge. Please, youtube, let me turn it off.

You can disable watch history on your account, which completely disables it. No need to install any extension (which may not work on all your devices)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795204

Yeah this is late-stage 'growth.' Hamstring your other products to reconcentrate activity, 'rebalance' usage to Shorts content by making the original offering, long-form content less usable, lower quality, less interesting; and so shall it remain until some congress finally forces these players cut a dividend instead of this moronic buybacks situation, hysterical that <well-liked female northeast senator and presidential primary candidate whose policy positions had been featured here> abruptly stopped talking about this for no apparent reason.

It's kind of conceptually like a Shepard's tone, though, which is maybe interesting.

I can't speak for the desktop experience lately, but just last weekend I opened the YouTube app on iOS to this peak user experience:

https://files.catbox.moe/vzo65c.JPG

Apple will need to make the modal backgrounds animated and customised with each user's background image to make these fake popups more obvious.

Wow, that's just a blatant scam. Wakes up bad memories of the old Windows XP days, when this type of trick was used everywhere. And people wonder why we use adblock. Google (the most wealthy company on earth) will of course claim they don't have the resources to review them, when the truth is they are happy to reap their profits from scamming old people. Same with Facebook, happy to serve ads that lure old people into logging in to fake banks and get all their savings stolen.

There's probably a rule against apps impersonating the OS on the App Store, one could only wish for Apple using a more heavy hand against this type of "experience".

well at least was funny

I make an extension which lets you fix this to your liking (choose the minimum number of videos you want per row, while also fixing the spacing issues overriding the underlying --ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row CSS variable causes), plus many, many more annoyances and what I felt were missing options and features for YouTube, like being able to completely hide Shorts:

https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube

Edit: for comparison with the screenshot in TFA, this is my Home feed on a 14" MacBook. No Shorts, no Mixes, videos which are 85% (configurable) watched or more are hidden, stream VODs from channels which also stream, Movies and TV, and any channels "Don't recommend channel" refuses to work on, can all be hidden for you:

https://imgur.com/LUnpz9e

On the extrapolation to zero videos by September 2026: it is already here.

Seriously. Clear your cookies or open a private window. All of the videos are replaced by the message "Try searching to get started". Granted, as someone who clears cookies regularly, I like the change.

Its oddly relaxing.

As an aside, this is something I've noticed recently switching to KDE from Windows/OSX No one is trying to get me to do anything with my computer to pump their metrics. You log in the first time, there's a little welcome popup, and that's it. You are now free to use your computer as you wish.

It's oddly stressful being a rat in a bunch of PM's maze.

Except the results will be what the algorithm has determined that people accessing from your IP address at your location using your exact version of your browser on your exact version of your operating system on a screen with your exact width and height and pixel resolution are into lol

I like that too. It reminds me of the classic Google home page: just a search bar so you have to search to get started.

Yeah I find this so strange. Why not take the opportunity to throw a bunch of heavily cached shorts recommendations in our faces when signed out? I don't understand how the anon home page is not both a money maker and extremely cacheable and cheap to serve

does anyone know why when I do this all my recommended videos are always "10 hours star pattern" or the like? does youtube figure any cookie-less machine is usually just a stick pc in a restaurant serving screensavers?

"Feed Me Seymour"

Yes, for all their A/B testing they could really do with a bit more common sense.

Like why do thumbnails have an invisible overlay that appears on hover over, hijacks the click and takes you to a support page about paid product placement?

I'm clicking on the thumbnail to watch the video not for a jarring detour off the youtube page to a boring help article. Honestly WTF. Maybe the UI designers don't use youtube themselves?

This freakin page:

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10588440?nohelpkit...

100%. YouTube is a chapter in a textbook about how to destroy UX.

I actually cancelled my YT Premium sub after this latest change with the thumbnails. I realised it doesn't really offer me that much value, and often using the platform just annoys me.

It's better now, the support page opens in a new tab, so you can close the tab and go back and click on the (right place of the) video thumbnail.

It used to open that page in the same tab you were in. So you press the browser's back button, you get back to the YouTube home page, but now it's shown you different recommendations and the video you wanted to click on is gone, and you've no idea what it was called...

The nastiest trick for me is that no matter how times I tell YouTube not to show me shorts on the home page, they always sneak back in.

The top tier engineers were struggling to make it so that auto-play would stay off. This is no surprise.

The "fix" I've seen them testing is changing the wording to "show less shorts."

Yeah, they changed it to “stop showing as often”. I love the gaslighting forced features, so much…

The YouTube abominations keep piling up: Vertical videos on a desktop, endless ads (thanks to the Chrome manifest change that disables decent adblockers), useless feed.

I highly recommend installing an extension that hides the home feed and sidebar recommendations, which at least makes YT non-distracting again.

I think in (South-East) Asia the people like vertical videos for some reason. Seems how many people record videos on their phones - at least in Thailand.

Been looking for a comment to post my own pet peeve under:

Pausing a Youtube video overlays the video with a row of more video recommendations.

So if I'm pausing the video to see something in the video, video thumbnails are in the way.

This happens in the Roku app and sometimes in the desktop browser, but for some reason I couldn't trigger it when I tested it just now. Maybe one of my extensions blocks it.

uBlock Origin lite is V3. And blocks youtube ads

Also disturbing is how absolutely awful it is at basic design. You can even see it on the screenshot that the Videos on the third row aren't properly aligned.

This is one of the largest corporations in the world and they make one of the most visited sites on the entire internet look like it was someone's hobby project and they just couldn't be bothered to align things correctly. This is insane.

The YouTube Startpage is incredibly bad in so many regards. Low in information density, full of things people do not want to see and fails at basic design. Even a basic, low effort redesign would be a major improvement.

Obviously the model at the end of the post is a joke, but it implies that after September 2026 there will be negative videos on the screen. What does it even mean to be a negative video? There will be videos, but mirrored? There will be videos but the colors will be reversed? Will they play backwards? Is a negative video where multiple ads overlap each other?

I think a negative video is a requirement that you upload one before you may continue

What makes more sense is that one thumbnail would be so zoomed in that the borders of it are off screen. Less than one full thumbnail.

Only ads.

The quality of the content on YouTube has declined so aggressively that the terrible UX almost doesn’t even matter anymore. They optimize to promote the most cancerous, low-effort, viral clickbait trash and the algorithm makes it incredibly difficult for anything else to survive or be discoverable. The culture of YouTube is absolutely vile.

Turn off watch history. That disables the homepage. Which in turn means you only see things you directly link to, or things you have subscribed to (after going to the subscriptions page).

Can I also have an option to block/disable all YouTube Shorts on AppleTV and Samsung TV apps? Shorts is the biggest disservice to civilization - promoting time-wasting behaviours.

Also, promoting 10-20 minute videos with 2-5 minutes of content is also wasteful. Most videos are extended to 10-20 minutes just to be recommended by YouTube.

Finally, videos with AI voice, which I hope can be easily detected, need to have a label clearly visible and I want to have preferences to hide those completely.

Also add a "stolen content" option for reporting. There is an insane amount of content that has been blatantly ripped of from others to produce cheap AI generated Shorts. Unless you own the stolen content, there's nothing you can do, even if it's clearly an Instagram video or a Reddit posts run through an AI.

Short form content, especially combined with AI is an abomination foisted upon this world in search of a meagre profit.

My issue with Shorts are that you watch it, conclude that it was garbage and a waste of your time, so you hit "thumbs down". That apparently does NOTHING in YouTube land, because you watched, and hit a button, so you "engaged" with the content. There's so much good, well made, quality content on YouTube, but even if you pay for Premium, the algorithm, tweaked for engagement and ad impression just ruins it and the more YouTube push Shorts the worse it gets.

Displaying more videos gives more choice to the users. It may also be slightly better for collecting data about the user. But that's reducing the impact of the algorithmic feed and is opposite to what tiktok does. I unironically agree with the prediction that the endgame is just one video.

> I unironically agree with the prediction that the endgame is just one video.

Tthe youtube shorts are already there, so yeah that is what they want you to do, just watch the first thing.

On the topic of A/B testing, it would be really neat if there was a way to opt out of it.

I cannot remember a single time in the last 5+ years when the website wasn't broken in some way. Right now the UI has at least 5 separate bugs and a Premium feature of the iPad app has 5 distinct bugs which are also so obvious that it's clear YT doesn't even test their paid version at all.

YouTube is the best argument against opt-out (or forced) telemetry in apps.

YouTube overall quality has been in a slow decline for the last several years and I'm sure it has to do with $$.

The UI is slower in almost all aspects, the grid mentioned here isn't even aligned properly. Playback buttons are slow to respond to hovers and clicks and the 1080p quality is no longer a "true" 1080p quality.

Don't even get me started with shorts because while the baseline functionality of it works, its pretty buggy for what it is. Maybe they are just too busy with scaling the entire thing that UI is an afterthought because the basic functionality is there and now its profits over quality.

I already have no videos on my homepage! Just turn off all the suggested video in your account settings. I only use youtube to watch channels I've subscribed to or videos people send me.

I don't care to waste time letting the machine guide me to "discover" something. There is the thing I need to learn/watch/enjoy _now_, and that's it.

Ublock Origin in Firefox:

``` ! Display 6 per row youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row, #contents.ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;) youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 6 !important;) youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-posts-per-row: 6 !important;)

! Block on profiles "/videos" youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row:matches-path(/.\/videos/):style(display: none !important) youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer:matches-path(/.\/videos/):style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 4 !important) ```

I'm not a fan of this trend either. My suspicion is this change is to increase scrolling to pump more ad space; it makes sense from a business standpoint. But this combined with the Algo changes makes it hard to keep coming back looking for new content VS just consuming the people/content I know and enjoy.

I've said it before. The secret to sanity when consuming YoutTube content is to never consume it on YouTube. The interface has been actively user-hostile for over 15 years.

On my roku youtube app, you can only see 2 videos in full. Yes that's right, 2 videos. You can technically see 6 but there's so much cutoff on the right and bottom that you can't see what those videos are.

It's insane. I don't use it on roku anymore.

This feels symptomatic of Google getting more and more desperate to have Youtube generate net revenue. All of the changes pointed out (and all of the 'shorts' that litter the site) are explained as 'additional monetization.'

If the author scrolls down another 5 videos and an ad will appear, etc. Shorts are designed so that they can feed more ads/hour to viewers. Both are strategies to increase monetization on the site at the cost of customer experience.

My guess would be that this is in support of the preview hover feature. For a while now, you can watch an entire video just by hovering over it, complete with captions, scrubbing and audio. This wouldn't be very useful if the thumbnails were still tiny like in the past. Personally, I like this feature and don't often need to look at tons of thumbnails at once, but to each their own.

People see videos on the front page of YouTube? I've turned YouTube history off, and all I get is a warning that says that if I want "the latest videos tailored to me", I need to turn that on. This is without being signed in.

Honestly, I think I prefer this. It makes my use of YouTube a little more deliberate since there's no clickbait to click, initially.

One other point of annoyance with the new UI is that the videos actually aren't aligned vertically.

I really dislike auto-play so I have always strategically rested my cursor in between the columns of video. Now, as I scroll, my cursor will end up within a column that is misaligned and start autoplay. The worst!

As a subscriber, I get 6 algorithm suggested videos (even split 50/50 on subscribed vs suggested).

Then of course the content is also routinely interrupted by rows that take up more space than a row of video suggestions: * Premium movie suggestions, which also manages to take up half the width with just two sentences: "Discover your next favourite movie. Watch without ads, included with your Premium membership" * Shorts, despite me continually pressing the triple dots and saying "Stop showing me this crap". * Interactive Apps (same, I keep saying "not interested" or whatever variant message it shows me).

I think I'm more irritated that youtube gives me the choice to say "don't show me this" and ignores it, than I would be by not having a choice in the first place.

>YouTube homepage will just be one video

On Smart TV devices, there is One large ad on the first row, then 2.5 video thumbnails on the second row, no other thumbnails.

Looks like this...

https://www.google.com/imgres?q=youtube%20app%20on%20smart%2...

This is painfully accurate. I just opened YouTube on my 4K monitor and counted four videos before the ads and algorithm sludge took over. It’s like they’re actively hostile to screen real estate now.

The 2019 layout actually respected your time — now it’s just dopamine bait on rails. Feels like they’re optimizing for engagement metrics only a machine would love.

That graph made me laugh way too hard. "Zero videos by September" might honestly be the most realistic roadmap Google’s shipped lately.

Also, I’d 100% use a lightweight frontend that just shows recent uploads from my subs in a clean grid. No shorts, no nonsense. If no one builds it, I might.

Everybody needs glasses, not just YouTube. Excessive padding and large flat UI widgets, where only 4 points of actual content are shown at a time, is a bad trend that's taken over the whole web in recent years.

I’ve also noticed YouTubes lack of attention to finding me new videos that aren’t maybe in a category I’ve watched before. I find my homepage filled with videos I’ve seen before or just the same categories churning similar videos. Similar to Spotify, the app struggles to push new music and instead just regurgitates old music I’ve previously listened. I don’t get the same refreshing/random feeling YouTube created before.

I use a combination of add-ons to fix YouTube that let me:

* Block shorts

* Adjust the number of thumbnails per line, thumbnail shape, border, etc

* Limit the length of titles/descriptions

* Force titles/descriptions into normal upper/lowercase

* Change the default player window size

* Show thumbnails actually in the video (from start, middle or end)

* Fix literally dozens of other annoyances

For Windows desktop under Firefox:

* "Nova YouTube" https://github.com/raingart/Nova-YouTube-extension script running under ViolentMonkey add-on. Nova YouTube is framework that puts modular YouTube fix scripts under one UI.

* "AdashimaaTube" script running under Stylus add-on.

* "Enhancer for YouTube" add-on

* uBlock Origin (of course)

For Android phones: Revanced Extended

For Android-based streaming sticks: SmartTube

Note: The set of add-ons & scripts I use in desktop Firefox is just what I happened to end up with at the time I finally got fed up a few years ago, looked for solutions, tried out several and settled on this mix as working for my needs and preferences. YouTube is constantly changing (usually for the worse), so the landscape of community add-ons and scripts is constantly evolving in response. You'll probably need to update to latest version on whatever solution(s) you use at least every couple months.

Hmm interesting. My laptop is about the only place where I occasionally open Youtube. I get 3 videos per row and it looks just fine(tm) because it's a 14 inch screen.

I just experimentally opened youtube in a maximized window on my desktop with the 24" monitor and ... it's 3 videos per row again but I never noticed.

Perhaps all youtube UI "experts" work from cafes on tiny laptop screens?

This https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-remove-youtu... and yt-dlp to download things from only subscriptions that interest me (and watch later offline) changed my life.

They trying to turn all video platform UX into reels/shorts/tiktoks. Hell theyre even shooting movies on verticle IMAX cameras now for better translation to phones.

They would rather focus your attention on a single short video you can lock into and then transfer that focus to an ad suddenly. Its perfect for their business model.

If you have a FireTV stick or something Android based for your TV, I can recommend SmartTubenext for browsing/watching YouTube.

I still use AppleTV for pretty much everything else, but got a firetv stick just to use that. https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube

> I miss YouTube before they turned the pain dial all the way towards money.

The worst part is everyone who tries to compete quickly turns the pain dial up to 11 as well. I realize YouTube existed for many years as a Google subsidized product, but Rumble is the best competitor we have and they can get quite annoying as well.

I'm surprised nobody mentioned the volume slider being moved from the left to the right side on the player... They also removed the ability the use mouse wheel to control the slider too.

How does something as big as a player redesign go through so little QA on one of the largest websites in the world?

I actually didn't notice until recently. Guess I'm also in the test group.

I wonder what's the purpose of this A/B test? Definitely has nothing to do with revenue, right? So what could it be? More engagement? I doubt that few seconds added upon more scrolling won't be much. Retention? Hard to tell.

This is most likely to do with changing viewing habits. Very little YouTube is watched on a monitor anymore. In fact for most channels it is 40% mobile, 40% on a TV and 20% other. I’m guessing the new format is to optimize for the TV viewer as this is also the fastest growing segment.

This is totally orthogonal to the issue but I think the best fix possible is to block the YouTube home page. I have gained value from algorithm-curated feeds in the past but it's no longer a net positive in my life. I recommend checking out News Feed Eradicator[0], Distraction Free YouTube[1], and set up some extremely aggressive uBlock Origin rules.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/news-feed-era...

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/df-youtube/

For me they made it so large that I can only see 3 full thumbnails. The rest don't even fit the screen anymore. https://i.imgur.com/11iI4sI.jpeg

> Unfortunately, using an advanced analytics package I’ve projected that around May 2026 the YouTube homepage will just be one video, and by September there will be no videos at all on the homepage.

Doesn't exactly that already exist with TikTok?

Here are more screenshots/data points https://x.com/nikitonsky/status/1916085438915150006

And on the iOS app, I can now only see 1.5 at a time because the thumbnails are so huge.

Which is somehow still an upgrade over the last version of the UI, where the titles of the videos were getting clipped off after about 16 characters.

This makes me appreciate my newly discovered "Remove YouTube Suggestions"[0]-extension a lot more. My homepage looks like this[1] and I absolutely do not get the feeling I'm "missing out" on any content. I just go to my subscriptions page, look at some videos and then close YT :)

[0] https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions

[1] https://i.imgur.com/zst96wo.png

I'm not a webdev, but I suspect an overwhelming majority of their traffic is on mobile devices. So that's where a majority of eng time is probably spent. Not that it shouldn't be fixed.

I've stopped using YouTube directly. This is only for Apple users, but I started using the app Play[1]. It manages my subscriptions, keeps a watch later list (with smart tags and filtering, if you'd like), and you can even play videos directly in the app (and it remembers your place, better than YouTube itself does sometimes), though I still open it in the browser so I can use SponsorBlock.

[1]: https://marcosatanaka.com/#play

People have always complained whenever YouTube changed its layout but I think the Polymer skin crossed a threshold of awfulness that caused people to start actively fighting against it by creating their own interfaces or finding workarounds on a scale we never saw with prior changes. I would take ANY of the pre-Polymer designs over Polymer which is truly in a league of its own, exemplifying everything wrong with corporate Web-design.

My homepage on 14" laptop has degraded from 12-16 previews (4 in row) to 9 (3 in row), lately since around late 2024 has a whopping 4 (four) previews. Amazing evolution. Such courage.

Also there are bugs there, and after some magic combinations of clicks I sometimes see 9 grid, or even rarely a 16 grid. Though it lasts only for one session and I can't ever reproduce the bug. So the support is there, they made it shitty on purpose. And I even pay for that crap :(

I wish we could go back; A lot of googles UI/UX is based on the next billion users experiences. I'm unsure how much influence this has on a day to day design choices they make. My experience right now on a 1440p monitor is 5 visible videos, 2 video ads, a ton of tags that I can't turn off for finding videos.

There are a ton of great UI/UX choices they've done over the years too; I just wish we had more options as a users.

It's possible at that size (32") you're triggering 'leanback' UI mode, which is optimized for longer distance (TV like) viewing.

It sure would be nice if they fixed the YouTube Apple TV app so you didn’t have to select which YouTube account you want to use every single time you launch the app on Apple TV. I guess someone thought it was better than the blank screen that used to greet greet folks when they loaded the Apple TV app after 24 hours. But this is just comically lame for folks who don’t ever switch accounts nor want to.

One thing I don't like about the "old" style (that I haven't seen anyone here mention yet) is that it has all that whitespace on either side of the list. So much monitor space wasted! The new site uses it all. I wish sites would stop limiting their content to a small vertical strip of the screen. I bought a gigantic monitor and I rather like being able to use all of its pixels.

Biggest gripes: 1) touch screen nav on a user profile is nearly impossible to scroll vertically, as any left/right movements will cause you to jump sections (videos→playlists, etc)

2) Windowed mini-viewer (is a total PITA)

3) The "full screen" mode never seems to lign up where I'm either cropping part of the picture out or I have some stupid white slider-looking thing in one corner of my screen.

This inspired me to check out my YouTube.com home page, and I have zero videos. I just see a message telling me I should turn Watch History on.

Well YouTube no longer shows videos on the landing page if you’re not logged in so the tongue-in-cheek conclusion is prescient in this case.

I love how YouTube makes it impossible to resize your browser window to cover the title and description and all the flying animated like and view numbers. If you try to resize vertically, it pillarboxes the video to make the title box fit.

I have a vertical monitor and all I want is to put the video on one half of the screen without all this crap constantly cloying for my attention.

I still don't know how to "go back" after viewing a video on the mobile app. It's so confusing. I just keep swiping stuff and eventually it works.

The google maps app has similar bizareness.

I guess somehow this all makes G more money, but it sure is painful as a consumer.

I'd pay money for a good hand-crafted (non a/b tested) experience. Competition should be the true a/b test :).

I wonder if this reduction in videos on screen is a result of an experiment due to "The Paradox of Choice" / "Choice Overload"?

https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/economics/the-par...

FWIW - the YouTube app on Apple TV has a similar issue. The video previews are so large, that one can't get a proper overview.

Highly recommend https://untrap.app/ if you want to remove some of the shit from YouTube like shorts, comments or the recommendation bar to the right of videos. It has a safari extension on iOS too (this costs about 3 bucks). Disclaimer: not my software

If you have a new account or use it less frequently, there are no videos .... It just says start watching so we could recommend you something like this . What are they trying? All they want to show users are targeted ads , won't even show any video recommendations until you give the algo something to target you with ads.

Some of this is probably driven by mobile usage and unifying the experience between mobile <> desktop. But the truth is a team almost certainly tested this and measured an improvement of some topline performance metric. (Hacker News articles comparing YT before and after screenshots is not one of their topline metrics.)

Has anyone else run into the issue of having a horizontal scrollbar while viewing videos in full-screen (on desktop)?

There are some hits when I search online for this issue but in my case, it's been happening intermittently for the past few weeks. Reloading the page fixes it. Not sure if I'm part of some A/B test.

The reason I use old.reddit.com with RES instead of sh.reddit.com is very simple. The more posts that are displayed on the screen at once, the more I can subvert the algorithm by cherry picking just the high quality posts. If the UI is inflated, the more time I'll waste on crap posts.

Use invidious. Youtube has gotten so bloated it takes seconds just to navigate between pages and load videos

The bottom graphic is the best thing I've seen this week. That alone made me happy today. Thanks, stranger.

I stopped using YouTube a few years ago. It's just so many ads that I no longer enjoy using the platform.

>zero thumbnails on the homepage I have this manually enabled, but also consider it could be true if they take the instagram/x approach where you just have no thumbnail and are just dropped down the video flume right out of the gate. Don't worry. We know what you want.

What bugs me is that often several of the videos will be things that I've already watched and it somehow forgets that. Or it shows videos that it's shown me again and again and again and I'm not clicking on because I'm not interested.

Based on the projected rate of change, it sounds like the homepage will, after falling to 0 videos, eventually start removing videos from the site, so I consider it a win. There are only so many reaction channels that should be allowed to exist.

Exactly, and maybe YouTube have a plan, have a god damn plan...By the way, I use https://github.com/KcodeGG/UserStyles this to make YouTube back to old style :)

Why does the youtube miniplayer suck so much?! X has the best one i've seen on any platform. You can actually pop the player out of the browser and move it anywhere you want and it has 0 chrome just a window with the video in it amazing!

Google must not only sell Chrome, but also Youtube. Tiktok might be interested to buy it.

Mobile-first design. Get used to it, we haven't even started to see the worst of it

One of the 5 videos on his home page is on mine. I always wondered how prevalent that was, because sometimes I get videos recommended from sources with a small number of views and channels with not that many subs.

>Presumably by then we’ll have our mandatory NeuraLinks and the YouTube algorithm will be able to inject real-time ML generated content (and ads) straight into our brains

exactly what happens on a black mirror episode. Recommended!

For the past decade or so my bookmark has been set to /feed/subscriptions and I can only recommend that. The one or two times a year I end up on the front page act as proof it should remain that way.

Has anyone commented already about the absurdity of watching Youtube Shorts? A wide empty white space, with a narrow vertical strip of content that is often stretched and split into two smaller videos.

It's not the count if thumbnails, it's the algo that either does not work at all or works only for them. Average engagement and zero control. Paid or free, they do not care.

An unmissable browser plugin is “clickbait remover for youtube” (or whatever it is called), it replaces the video preview image by a still taken from somewhere else in the video.

The iphone and its consequences have been a catastrophe for web design.

If you use Youtube without an account, and disable watch and search history in the left menu the homepage stays completely empty of videos/recommendations. It's great.

My chain of thought:

1) Aaron Marcus - who found optimal menu count to be 5 +/- 2

2) Magic number 7 +/- 2

3) Fitt's Law selectivity (bigger is easier)

4) Shared layout for mobile + desktop

5) I hate short form

6) Is 5) a non-sequitur?

7) No! I now have the attention span of a goldfish.

8) Maybe I should read a book

Goal for them to not watch too much content. I changed my YouTube account and increased from 3 width to 4. So probably if you are watching too much to discourage they are doing this.

One thing that made Youtube work well in its early days was a robust and interesting recommendations system (for those who are old, like me). There was also a robust Trending section

They chipped away and chipped away at the usefulness of Youtube and the recommendations got worse and worse (and sometimes blatantly corporate), then they lied about what was trending, and now it's just a mess (some of the recommendations can still be good). And I'll forever maintain they absolutely do regularly remove videos (or demonetize channels) for reasons of 'misinformation' (which they aren't, at least some of the time); they've taken an ideological stance. And there's a reason why the default homepage isn't your subscriptions page

Companies do not listen to their users. I guess in part it's because if you did you'd have to take on board every asinine suggestion under the cover of "the customer is always right" but there's a middle ground, y'know? They just really don't seem to care, giving any sort of feedback is like screaming into the void

Those of us "of a certain age" are grateful not to look at a screen of 30 videos, all of them illegible because our eyes are old :)

My YouTube changed recently from 6-wide to 4-wide. I wonder why I get 4 across instead of everyone else's 3? Still annoying, and I still much, much prefer 6 videos across.

Anyone else's YouTube home page just a white screen telling you to type in the search box? Because after reading this blog I might ask the author for some stock tips.

Glad I'm not the only one who noticed and hates this change!

I ranted about this a couple of weeks ago: two ⌘- taps has become my default just to make most sites readable.

When did 32-pixel headlines and 18-pixel body copy become “desktop friendly”?

Their mobile site is also terrible. It's like the designers forgot that people watch videos in landscape mode. For example, comments won't load unless you rotate to portrait mode first. I mean, come on.

Similar with Reddit. The redesign serves you less content and more ads, and zooms everything in. There's no profit in giving you everything you want all at once.

Youtube has always been an abomination. I pause a video to see a detail and the UI covers the video in suggestions and nonsense when in full screen mode.

I quite like the 2x3 grid of videos. No complaints, actually.

I found YouTube completely insufferable until installing ublock origin, sponsorblock, and youtube redux to return to a more old school interface. How a single website single-handedly justifies 3 extensions in my browser I will never know but those geniuses at google have managed it.

Can't recommend youtube redux alongside disabling watch and search history highly enough.

When you open any video on youtube.com the video players menus appear for a split second (some CSS is not hiding them). Keep getting this on chrome/windows

I got this view the other day and was shocked. Went and found a browser plugin to fix it. But I wish our voices could be heard or we could give some feedback.

Someone at HN needs glasses too, until then we're stuck with this borderline hostile text/UI size and colors trying to be as unreadable as possible.

This is so annoying, plus them injecting shorts basically every other row. Almost like they don't want you wanting something that's not trending.

There's just so much low hanging fruit at YouTube (and other places) that it's wild. I can't believe this shit goes on. No, it isn't just OP I see 3 videos in the first row, and 2-3 in the second. First row contains a fundraiser video or membership video each time. And the info about ads takes up so much space a frequently click on it instead of the fucking video I'm trying to watch.

Also, I can't believe this is a problem. But if you watch with subtitles and the video has embedded subtitles, they just clash. A fucking intern can write you the program to turn them off (ADAPTIVELY!) as needed. But when they clash both become unreadable!! It's so fucking bad that everyone that makes shorts puts captions in the middle of the screen because YouTube puts theirs at the top. Like you got all this machine learning and you can't use it for something useful?!?!?

Oh, I got this and thought it was a bug - I reported it assuming that somehow I must have been served the mobile interface on my 4k monitor :P

it's just a big company doing big company things, don't care about the user, only thing that matters is money and power, like dictators

I've seen it display *two* videos at the top of the home screen (plus an ad and five "shorts"). Kind of comical when it happens.

100% this. Please listen to what seems like overwhelming user feedback. Thanks, A disgruntled YT Premium subscriber.

YouTube without the PocketTube extension (where you can customize stuff like that) is basically unusable on desktop. Give it a try!

The problem is simply that managers at Google think that designs have to change all the time.

The idea that a design is perfect does not exist at Google.

It's because they want you to get hooked when the videos auto-play on hover, and that's less likely with small thumbnails.

if you use tampermonkey, there's a semi-decent script to change youtube back to what it was like in 2016 : https://7kt.se/

it does jank up a bit sometimes (i can't change the youtube region, and some other defects), but it's sufficiently good that i keep it.

Youtube on AndroidTV is even worse. Most of the pic is taken by the first video which is always a massive ad.

They've made it terrible.

> I’ve projected that around May 2026 the YouTube homepage will just be one video

Well, of course. It’s all gonna be Shorts by then.

On recommendation from someone here -on another Youtube-related thread- I started using the browser extension Unhook.

Can recommend!!

It's painful, but every single person in this comment thread is no longer part of youtube's target demographic.

Idk but I prefer the modern one as the other one I feel there are too many videos and I'm unable to see them well

I noticed this exact same thing! I looked in every menu for the setting to change it back. Nothing.

So who is building their competitor? Any shot in hell at this because of their huge library?

This happened to me last week, used uBlock origin to set it back to 8 video's per row.

Yes this change is super annoying

Fun thing to open first thing in the morning as I wait for my coffee to brew at YouTube

Funnily, when loading the page, it still display 5 of the placeholder boxes per row

Let's also not forget about automatic title and audio translations...

> using an advanced analytics package I’ve projected that around May 2026 the YouTube homepage will just be one video, and by September there will be no videos at all on the homepage

Ah, the same advanced analytics package used by most consultancies and all politicians, which consists in prolonging a trend as a straight line until it reaches then end of times, and beyond.

The same very powerful analytics package that was recently used by AI fanboys to predict AI will consume 100% of the world electricity in a few years.

Jokes aside, I just keep my watch history off so the homepage is blank

That advanced analytics package for projection gave me a good chuckle

Vote with your attention.

Blame all the children on their iPads who can't read.

I believe YouTube is crushing it as a content provider.

I assume they have the resources to measure _everything_.

They know what they're doing. Your use case may be desirable, but they've determined it's not profitable.

Never visit the home page of any social media site.

This reminds me of Pinterest, a platform I used to love for finding art and inspirational content as an artist myself. Without ad blockers, I would say 1/3 to 1/2 of all “pins” or images are actually ads, some of which are the nefarious “shopping” ads which look just like images and when clicked, take you directly to the sellers site. With the ad blocker, it is full of weird holes that just make the page look terrible. It feels honestly terrible as a consumer to have the experience degraded this much, its like having a storefront and half of the items on display are actually garbage you need to toss aside. And unfortunately there isn’t an obvious better choice or option. Also don’t even get me started on the scammy ads that are ai generated images or just all of the pins that are ai generated slop…

They should isolate shorts from real YouTube.

You’d think they’d all be using google glass

I don't even let Youtube suggest videos to me, nor do I use their jank Subscription system. I simply maintain a markdown file with a direct link to the '/videos' page of each channel I care about.

This way I'm always in control of what I see. Sure Youtube can still slather me with ADs injected into videos every 2 minutes, and much of the content I watch has ADs right in the video, but at least I feel more in control by never giving Youtube the chance to unleash their algos on me to entice me into as much fake AI-Generated garbage recommendations as they can jam onto a page. That's no longer a problem. I no longer dig thru their dumpster fire of a home page.

Let's not forget defaulting the audio to an automatic translation. That is so dumb that I still a have hard time believing that there is not an option to disable this. They don't even get any ad revenue out of this, it is just idiotic.

Pretty sure this is intentional to encourage doom scroll and to make the giant video titles and shocked-face-tiles easier to see and thus click on. Whatever gets you to click faster and make those ad dollars.

I'm more than a little disgusted by how moronic we are made to look now that every video tile caters to the dumbest person with the most base instincts. If YOU aren't SHOCKED by this TITLE how will we get you to CLICK IT? :O :O :O MUST SEE this video BEFORE YOU CONTINUE READING HN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvFZjo5PgG0

It's the same with Google news on Mobile. I found an old Nexus one in a drawer the other day and tried charging it up, it still worked fine. When I opened Google News (from~12 years ago!) it was just a list of categories and 8-10 headlines within each category, a small picture for the top story in each category.

On my modern phone it's all pictures and you can see at most 2 headlines at once. It takes a bunch of scrolling (= 'engagement' = $) just to see what the top headlines are. Worse, the categories are all mixed together, so I keep being subject to sports 'news'. Absolute garbage.

> This is on a 32” 1440p display

What in the world.

Doesnt doing this make youtube impressions go up, since they are showing you the video with less immediate competition around it.

Lmao

YouTube is removing videos and moving to Shorts-only in a couple months, so this shouldn't be an issue for long

Absolutely. It's like they only test youtube on small laptop displays.

So many websites are not tested on large monitors ffs.

From the top of my head I remember the previous Gumroad marketing website. It looked terrible. Everything was huge. Even the new one doesn't work that well on a large monitor:

https://gumroad.com/

I mean I applied as SWE 2 but they don't even proceed with any app, at least I solved meanwhile around 1000 lcs. So I can't solve it for you sadly and people working there are probably to much in the ad business then doing actual core changes these days, to hard probably need for 1 small css change 7 higher manager approvals....

Another reason to use FreeTube.

https://freetubeapp.io/

I thought it was just me experiencing this last week. I thought I accidentally changed some setting, even checked my browser's zoom mode, and then just lived with it.

Also the lack of 'gutters' to lay my mouse cursor to rest while scrolling is annoying.

But hey, I subscribed to your RSS feed. That's at least some good news.

never realized how annoying this was until now

List view, gang

> Unfortunately, using an advanced analytics package I’ve projected that around May 2026 the YouTube homepage will just be one video

Algorithm will be 50/50 - it could either be gore or AI slop.

almost like they think a desktop monitor is a portrait mode phone screen... it's not like we dont have media query API, google, but hey, it fits with the general dumbing down and phonification of all interfaces that should have stopped by now.

it's not like they don't have 3 layout sizes already enshrined, it's that they are forcing the desktop layout to act like a portrait mode phone screen for no apparent reason other than trying to be on trend with enshittification or somesuch.

Honestly, this, and the other reasons in the thread (like the resetting preferences) is the reason why I don't invest emotionally into platforms anymore. Been burned too many times. In most cases, I won't fight the system at all - I'll use the defaults, and if I don't like it, I'll go elsewhere. This have freed up so much mental energy for me.

SO much stupid bullshit is going on that boggles the mind. But they are only bullshit from "our" consumer perspective - they make perfect sense from other perspectives, like the creators, the platform providers, and so on. Most just boils down to the participants having different priorities. And to the power dynamics between them. For example - yeah you might not like YouTube (addressed to the creator or the consumer), but where else will you go?

Is it just me... have they improved this today?

I'm back to 10 videos on the homepage from 2.

Another recommendation for the Unhook extension. Literally cannot use YT without it now.

I hate to be that guy, but how many of us are actually paying for this service? Yeah we pay with ads and attention, but is there another company that's prepared to store over 500 hours of new content every single minute? Yeah it sucks, but free is as free does.

Well, I've been holding this one in for a while but now's the time, so it's flame on.

YouTube sucks so bad.

On the one hand, you have the amazing engineering prowess, enormous hardware resources, reliability and scaling of Google. The amount of sheer bandwidth of video that YouTube can pump is absolutely staggering. Having to deal with fraud, abuse, content moderation, copyright disputes, and to create an ecosystem that rewards creators and all...a lot of problems were solved. AFAIR from my days at Google, YouTube finally broke even in terms of revenue in the early 2010s. It turns a profit now--a massive one for any company except Google scale. Compared to search ads its still a pittance.

And yet, the product is getting worse and worse and worse. It's worse for users and worse for creators and worse for society.

The UI is atrocious and the ads are annoying. It regularly breaks for me on non-Chrome browsers (maybe partly attributable to adblockers I run, who knows). It's unusable with full blown ads. I just don't know who has the patience to spend any time at all on a site.

With ads, it's on again off again with interruptions in the middle of videos. Entire classes of use cases are utterly destroyed by ads in the middle. For example, I spent a significant amount of time collecting backing track and play along videos for guitar. Play along use cases are just ruined by ads. Full stop. YouTube is completely unusable without an ad blocker. So I do what I should have done, which is to rip the audio tracks out of videos and put them on my local computer. What an absolute fail of a computer system. The internet sucks.

But that's just the ads. The UI--even optimized for tablets--is so stupid as to be nearly unusable. The basic functionality I want to use--SEARCH FOR A VIDEO--is hidden somewhere in a corner somewhere, doesn't show up on most pages, tries to hide itself whenever possible, and in addition to that, the pages are clunky, slow, poorly organized, confusing, and reorganize themselves every six months. FFS I WANT TO SEARCH FOR A VIDEO. I don't know how to find it now. I don't know how to use any of the crap anymore. I counted and for some workflows it literally required me to use the back button three times to even get to a page where the search ICON was hidden in the corner somewhere using the quietest, unobtrusive labeling possible. They don't even want you to search anymore.

What is this new UI regime we are in where the five basic functions of the video browser (at least for me)--play/stop, advance, go back, search, and toggle full screen--are so badly labeled, hard to get to, and laggy, that it's basically unusable? Oh, that's right. All of those things are annoying for YouTube engagement that spends all of my screen on stuff that IT WANTS ME TO SEE--including ads. Like literally the entire point is to pull you away from whatever you are doing to watch something else...

Don't even get me started on how bad search has gotten and how the ecosystem of videos is totally borked by the attention economy now. I find myself wishing for an option where any video made in the last 5 years is just excluded. Otherwise I just get some 8K video of some fool sitting in a racecar chair talking so fast and loud that I feel frankly assaulted. And some people edit their videos to literally delete the spaces between words and sentences.

It's all so terrible and I kind of don't want it.

...except that YouTube just kind of became the world's repository of all video data? What does that mean for history when an ad company takes it over?

A 32” monitor should be 4k. If anyone needs glasses, it might be the author of this blog post as that is the typical market for low pixel density displays.

I always laugh at these shots from the hip criticizing YouTube and Google. As though Google doesn't have a entire team of data scientists and top tier engineers managing this experiment and driving it to optimal results. (Spoiler: they do)

If you don't like the service, you can stop using it. And if you do, they have already factored that into their metrics guardrail, and it was the right decision.

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