Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

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The whole YouTube app is weird. Sometimes it lets you do 1.0x-2.0x. Sometimes it lets you range from .25x-4x. Sometimes it pops up a text selection box with every .05x option from .1 to 4.0. Sometimes it has a nicer UI with shortcut selections for common choices and a sliding bar for speed. It recently picked up a bug where if you're listening to a downloaded video, but turn the screen off and on again, the video playback seems to crash. A few months ago it became very, very slow at casting, all manipulations could take 30 seconds to propagate to the cast video (pause, changing videos, etc)... but they didn't usually get lost. (It would be less weird if they did just get lost sometimes.) You aggressively can't cast a short to a TV, in a way that clearly shows this is policy for some incomprehensible reason, but if you use the YouTube app directly on your set top box it'll happily play a short on your TV. Despite its claims in small text that downloads are good for a month without being rechecked, periodically it just loses track of all the downloads and has to redownload them. It also is clearly trying to reauthorize downloads I made just 30 minutes ago sometimes when I'm in a no-Internet zone, defeating the entire purpose. When downloads are about 1/4th done it displays the text "ready to watch on the download screen" but if you try to watch it it'll fail with "not yet fully downloaded".

Feels like the app has passed the complexity threshold of what the team responsible for it can handle. Or possibly, too much AI code and not enough review and testing. And those don't have to be exclusive possibilities.

the control changes sound like you might have gotten caught in some kind of a-b testing

They flop back and forth at a high frequency though. I can hit all three cases in five minutes and it's been like that for months.

Also there is never a sensible reason to offer video speeds as a combo-box popup of all options from .05x to 4.00x. It's like three times the vertical size of my screen.

All that testing and they've never thought to offer a one-tap way to get back into speed control once I've adjusted the speed one or more times on the same video.

Don’t get me started on the “highest quality” account setting absolutely never selecting 4K options when available. They simply have to try to save the bandwidth money by nesting quality options a couple taps away. (A userscript fixes this on desktop and even in Safari iOS/iPadOS, but I don’t deserve the quality I’m paying for if I use their native app.) [Privileged rant over!]

This is becoming a common pattern everywhere now.

Case in point (and sorry for bringing up this topic), LLM providers seem to be doubling down on automatic model selection, and marketing it as a feature that improves experience and response quality for the users, even though it's a blatant attempt to cut serving costs down by tricking users (or taking the choice away) into querying a cheaper, weaker model. It's obviously not what users want - in this space, even more than in video streaming, in 90%+ of end-user cases, what the user wants is the best SOTA model available.

At least with YouTube, I recall them being up front about this in the past, early in the COVID-19 pandemic - IIRC the app itself explained in the UI that the default quality is being lowered to conserve bandwidth that suddenly got much more scarce.

How’d I miss this!

Bloomberg, March 24, 2020:

“YouTube to Limit Video Quality Around the World for a Month”

Guess it’s like a “temporary” tax… how’s a tax ever going to go away once collection starts :)

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