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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

I noticed this morning there was a new version of the YouTube app on my Apple TV. I can’t wait to find out how they screwed this one up.

My personal long-term complaint is the length of video titles.

Lots of people like to make really long video titles. So right now there is one on my screen titled “The Best Decisions Every Video Game Console Developer Made”.

Now if you didn’t know, that is not the whole title. But there’s absolutely no indication of that. The only way you actually know that is either by checking or if the stuff on the screen is clearly not the end of a sentence.

So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in the title. In this case you also see “(Part”.

Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that.

The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.

Obnoxious.

View on HN

The YouTube app is easily the worst app on Apple TV.

For example, if you pause the video by clicking the main action button brings up an overlay that takes up almost the whole screen, so you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame. How do you start it again? By clicking the same button, right? No! By clicking up. For some reason up means back and down means to open some additional UI with related videos and what not.

No other app is like this — Plex, Infuse, Apple, Netflix etc. abide by relatively sane UI controls where the action button pauses and unpauses, and up/down don't scroll between weird overlay elements.

The YouTube filled with these incredible non-unintuitive UX choices that drive me crazy. I never use it unless I have a clear idea of something I want to watch.

Agreed the interface is clunky.

> you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame

You can press up on the D-pad to dismiss that overlay, if you want to see the full paused frame.

> How do you start it again? By clicking the same button, right? No! By clicking up.

Maybe we have different remotes? On the latest model, you play/pause with the same button.

One issue I’ve noticed in the app is there seems to be no way to move the cursor “up” to the channel button when the video is in the last 10% of the playback bar. If you rewind it a bit, then you’re able to move the cursor up there.

Only in the last few days have Shorts appeared at the top of my home page. I fear it may be the end for me.

This is intentional on Google’s part. It’s anticompetitive behavior, to make YouTube service’s app shitty on Google’s competitor’s ecosystem. But no government seems to care—-and what will you do, stop watching YouTube?

This is nonsense. Among other things, the YouTube app on Apple TV is superior to the one on Android TV. No loud startup sound, the back button exits the app rather than popping up a menu asking "if I'm sure" or if I want to go to a screensaver mode - clean straightforward UI.

I guess they just hate their users lmao

Never ascribe to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence. And i think it’s fair to say the best and brightest at Google aren’t turning their attention to YouTube lately. Except maybe to make training datasets for Gemini N+1 :)

In the case of industry giants malice should be assumed.

> Never ascribe to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence.

We were talking about Google here. (you know, former search engine, don't be evil)

Can malice be emergent behaviour?

Well, psychopathy is an inherent feature of corporations. I wouldn't be surprised it malice will quickly develop where that appears profitable.

Their customers are advertisers, not users. By the looks of things they love them.

> the back button exits the app rather than popping up a menu asking "if I'm sure”

YouTube did push a version of the Apple TV app that tried this, but it would cause the app to crash/black screen, no joke. They reverted it.

> This is intentional on Google’s part. It’s anticompetitive behavior, to make YouTube service’s app shitty on Google’s competitor’s ecosystem

This would be true if the Android or Android TV would have been better. It is just profit maximization combined with crappy UX/UI. Google wants your personal data and will make UI changes to get it. (double record/send button in messages, UI elements very close to others so that they can be pressed accidentally, although there is plenty of space between other UI elements)

The YouTube app is the worst on its own site too. I don’t login to any Google account and I turned off site history, and now the homepage is completely blank. Yup. Google won’t even show me a single video on the homepage because I refuse to turn on history. Which is actually kind of nice for preventin distractions

I have the same. While it's a bit jarring the first time you see it, I now consider this a feature instead of a bug.

Maybe it could be styled a bit differently so the search bar is more prominent and in the center of the screen, but just having a search bar without any distractions is a fantastic feature.

If you want a pure search, you can get there from your address bar without even visiting the site first. Or if you really want the search bar on the site, you can go to youtube.com/search for a nice blank page.

You don't need the obnoxious refusal to show videos on the front page.

It's actually good, the default videos are usually fighting videos, dash camera videos and garbage TV series. You don't want to see them anyway.

That's just what it gives you.

Unless you're testing this with blank accounts?

It’s so bad. Last time I tried to use it I was unable to fill in my password for my account because Google had implement some custom input element and custom keyboard which did not contain some of the characters I have in my password. And of course there was no possibility to paste or use keychain.

If you have an iPhone you can input with that, including paste.

> If you have an iPhone you can input with that, including paste.

That popping up on your phone is not 100% reliable, though, and even more hilariously, when using it with YouTube, it'll sometimes just take the first handful of characters and drop the text input box on the phone. Oh, how we laughed.

(this may be a generic Apple TV problem but it's something I've only noticed on the YouTube app)

Swipe down from the upper right and select the "remote" icon. If it's not there, edit the menu and add it.

The YouTube app I have discovered that feature is the only place it is unavailable in.

Tried it from my iPhone now, but no, paste still does NOT work.

You have the keyboard input up and it doesn't work? You see the text on your phone, but it doesn't appear on the ATV? Never seen that one.

Yes! It doesn’t work at all. This is, as I wrote, that the YouTube app on Apple TV has a custom keyboard on-screen input without any way to put actual focus on the text/password field to trigger the Remote app on the iPhone to enable input such as pasting anything.

For example: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254761316?sortBy=rank

> The YouTube app is easily the worst app on Apple TV.

The YouTube app is a walk in the park compared to the app for Hayu which is like torture sometimes it’s so buggy.

> The YouTube app is easily the worst app on Apple TV.

I would've agreed until Netflix did their redesign and started pushing wrestling for whatever braindead reason. Some executives should just quit.

I know Prime did this for quite some time, unaware if they still do. The main YouTube web app also suffers from this same issue, though at least the play button disappears.

Everytime YouTube gets an update it gets worse. This has been true for years. It's like their design and product team is run by second-graders.

Is it a real app anyway on that platform? I doubt it.

Last time I checked, the LG webOS app was just running tv.youtube.com which only expects a TV-specific user agent.

I've been using YouTube.com/tv with a Samsung agent for years. Although I did have to recently switch from abp to ubo because abp stopped playing videos for me.

You’re meant to use the dedicated pause button on the apple tv remote to pause without any overlay. Anything that uses the apple built in player has ui appear when you hit the center button. Same for Netflix.

No, in the Netflix app, the main button both pauses and unpauses. Same in every other app I use — except YouTube.

You'd think they've done it on purpose so you don't watch Youtube on TV. I tried but it's so bad you'd never open it a second time. And that's the platform where there are no ad blockers, so it must be good for them ...

Perhaps it's a dark pattern to keep you using the youtube app on your phone and casting it

The iPhone app has weird bugs too. Currently (for me, at least) the brand text that appears in the overlay box on adverts is black text on a black background and virtually illegible. If they're not even worried about bugs in the revenue-generating ad part of the app, what hope is there for the rest?

oh, that's worse. there's been a bug for months now where airplayed videos forcibly select an autodub track in a random language, and there's no way to disable it or change tracks. i wish i was joking

Apple TV apps, in general, are terrible. Every single one [that I routinely use] (including Apple’s apps) regularly crash or lock up, often leaving it to me, to force-quit.

Amazon has started getting into a state, lately, where it ignores the remote, unless I go back, then go forward again.

This kind of “quality” is considered “acceptable,” in today’s world.

AppleTV has a JavaScript-based development system. It also has a fairly classic native Swift system (which I use). I suspect most apps are JavaScript, though.

[EDIT: Added the “routinely use” qualifier]

I have zero experience with these, but every app crashing could also indicate a hardware issue. Faulty memory perhaps?

I have two sets (one is a 4K, and the other, a regular set). It happens on both. The crashes are different, though, for each app. Usually, it’s the app falling into a fugue state, at some point, as I am channel-surfing (I do that, a lot).

I should also qualify that it’s not really “every single one” (that’s hyperbole). It’s the ones that I routinely use (Apple, Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix).

I’ll probably get another one, sooner or later, but I’ve been waiting for them to release a new version[0],

[0] https://share.google/YL2EBlQfewN9CGDxD

Interestingly enough the same happens on both Spotify's desktop and Chromecast / Apple TV application when you "song surf".

If you rapidly keep skipping through a song, then to the next one and repeat, the performance will keep on tanking. After a while it'll take 5-10 seconds just to load a song, going to other UI sections will take 3-5 seconds to load, and eventually the application completely locks up and soft reboots itself.

Probably JavaScript garbage collectors getting overwhelmed.

Javascript garbage collector wouldn't take so long... probably it's launching a new thread or process (for example, DRM decryption) for every song, and there becomes too many of them. Or it runs out of memory and starts swapping.

> I have zero experience with these

Then please realise your advice is completely unneeded and unhelpful.

That might be something wrong with your particular device - we've had two Apple TVs over 10+ years and they've been remarkably stable. I didn't even know how to "force quit" - I looked it up when you mentioned it.

Edit: Did have one problem where the centre channel would occasionally drop out - this would go away if you changed the volume and didn't happen that often so wasn't a big deal. I had assumed it was a problem with the Denon receiver we use but when we replaced our original Apple TV earlier this year wit a 4K model it stopped so must have been something to do with the device.

would explain why LG smart TV apps run like crap. The devices are not capable of handling a javascript engine at full speed.

Sure they are. The amount of JavaScript that actually needs to run to give you a video browser is very little at a time. The bloat is a software problem.

That is not my experience. It’s extremely rare for me to ever need to kill an app.

Same. I’ve only had to do it with the YouTube app, which does suck.

The odd thing is, they seem to be getting progressively _worse_. The Netflix one was way better when the first ‘modern’ (app-y) appletv came out, say. Even the YouTube one used to be basically _fine_.

This is one of the most painful things about the modern corporate web. Why does everything _have_ to get worse? Just why? Fucking up the basic functionality of your central app just cannot be a profit driven decision but it seems like literally every single giant corporation is constantly moving towards destroying their own systems. I just don't understand. Even windows is destroying itself. I simply cannot remember the last time i got an "update" for any single thing and it got better. Why is this happening?

Noone wants to accept being feature complete even if they actually were feature complete years ago

Large corporations have the reigns of power seized by the political class: MBAs, sales executives, and CEOs that have never stepped foot in a workshop or factory in their entire lives… or even a shopping center, for that matter.

These people care only about each other: power, influence, money, etc.

Actually using or - gasp - improving the product is beneath them.

Or do you seriously think the billionaire CEO of some white goods company knows or cares about the quality of the wash the cheap Chinese-made washing machine does? He’s got staff laundering his clothes!

Similarly it’s very clear nobody with real power at Microsoft uses their own tools. I see their seniour product managers turn up to Microsoft Ignite with Apple Macs, for crying out loud!

I mean, the biggest appeal of AppleTV is competent, high quality video casting via airplay 2 from a phone or laptop. Easily the least bad way to watch youtube on a TV is with airplay turned on from an iphone (with Youtube premium).

I can genuinely only assume that Google simply refuses to do the sane, normal thing for the platform.

Given that every other app manages to get basic interaction right, I’m not inclined to believe it’s an os/hardware issue.

> so you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame.

It's similar on desktop, if you pause the video, an overlay with recommendations appears, and it prevents you from reading the subtitles, for example.

I've only experienced that on embedded videos, not on youtube.com . Are you experiencing it on youtube.com ? I tried it just now, and was able to view a video on youtube.com , pause it, and keep reading the subtitles with no recommendations popping up.

Disclosure: I work at Google but not YouTube.

Yes, it's possible that you are right - I checked it on a random video, and there is no overlay.

Does the search feature work for you? Mine gives me about 2 seconds to enter a search term, but once it has fetched results for the partial input, it keeps reverting the search field as I try to enter more, even if I delete to try again.

I would not be surprised if there is no QA team for the tvOS app.

Oh, and I'll see your youtube and Raise you the Discovery Plus app (Maybe UK only?).

The content they offer is either a big back catalog of reality TV dross, or Live sport. The live sport streams, when left open when the AppleTV is turned off will always crash and go into a frozen state where there's no way out except by force quitting the app.

Reported multiple times to their tech support, no fix in 2 years. This for sports services that cost 30GBP a month, minimum, and with a regional monopoly on coverage.

There are two apps called "DeArrow" and SponsorBlock that basically everyone should be using.

DeArrow replaces thumbnails and titles with crowd sourced versions. I can't use youtube without it anymore. Usually the titles get replaced with stuff like "How to build a table" instead of "Watch the world explode as I try to make a table!!!!!!!!!!!!". Same with thumbnails. No longer are they over-saturated close up AI generated garbage images, but usually just a screenshot from the video that shows what's really going on.

Neither of these are available on Apple TV. Otherwise, you make a good suggestion; install them where available.

At least for SponsorBlock you can run iSponsorBlockTV[1] on another computer on the same network - in addition to skipping sponsored segments, it also mutes YouTube’s own ads and auto-skips them as soon as it can.

[1] https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV

I've been using this for a while. It's certainly better than nothing, but there are limitations. Most notably for me, automatic muting doesn't work when HomePods are the default output[1]

[1] https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV/issues/60#issue...

It’s pretty good, I run this on my little server.

Thanks, it looks like a helpful workaround for now. Hoping someday SponsorBlock can be ported to tvOS.

Except that those two things are fantastic indicators for videos / channels you should be avoiding. Hiding their foolishness and then watching them anyway rewards their behavior.

LTT specifically AB tested the stupid thumbnail vs relevant + titles.

The idiotic clickbait images and titles WORK. People don't use them because they want to, they use them because they have to.

Thus -> DeArrow.

(Or follow the channels via an RSS feed and filter there)

There are great channels that have had acceptable audience growth without resorting to bucket scraping like that. In fact the channels I see that have the most engagement and the most stable view numbers video to video are the ones specifically avoiding the "gaping maw pointing at a red circle" sort of thumbnails and the "YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT" or "X PHENOMENON - THE RESULTS WILL SHOCK YOU" titles. Knowing how Youtube works it's more of a detriment to have those unstable views because that screws with how well Youtube promotes you in the Recommended and Trending pages, and makes it harder to have high paying deals with sponsors since they don't know if your video's going to do five million views or seven hundred and fifty thousand. The only way you can make that work consistently is if you have a captive audience, but people do get tired of it quickly and will start to reflexively avoid your videos. They'll especially avoid them if someone else tried that clickbait format and annoyed or even offended them.

I've heard this argument before as someone with a small number of subscribers, In use relevant titles and thumbnails (I do partially use AI but that is "make me a Tux image with a builders hat on"). When I post a video I get a decent number of viewers for my channel size.

So I don't believe someone like LTT needs to resort to clickbait. LTT has 16 millions subscribers and half a million views per video. They make plenty of ad-revenue from those videos. If he stopped making videos today, he would still be getting a sizeable income by doing nothing for at least a decade. Even some washed up YouTubers from the past get a low five figure income from their Channels.

A single washed up Youtuber getting residual income is very different from someone running a full-ass company with a bit under 100 employees.

The point being made is that he has plenty of income (it is in the 10s of millions I am sure).

If he has that many employees for his YouTube channel he is letting his expenses get out of control. It is as simple as that.

If he fired everyone tomorrow and stopped making videos, he would probably still be making six to seven figures a year just from people (re)-watching the existing content. I wouldn't be surprised if he has other holdings / properties that generate him income outside of YouTube.

You see this happen a lot on YouTube where someone starts getting a lot of money in via YouTube Ad-revenue and they start trying to operate it like it is a television station and paying for co-hosts and researchers etc. Costs then increase ten to twenty fold. Then once inevitably YouTube change how monetisation works or people get bored with their content and their revenue dips they resort to clickbait, scamming, and other nonsense.

This could all be avoided by just keeping control of their costs. So I have little sympathy for him saying "I have to do the click bait guys", when it was his decision to make those hires and he was already rolling in cash.

There are children and there are adults. Children have more free time. Children watch more YouTube than adults. So LTT's audience is probably more children too.

Children are attracted to soy-boy suprised pikachu face on clickbait thumbnails. CHLIDREN are ATTRACTED to EVERY second WORD being IN all CAPS!!! They like the three exclamation marks. They like flashy text on MrWhoseTheBoss videos which repeat the same thing the fucking guy is talking but just with flashy text on screen. They like the whizz-bang animations and ADHD addled three-second shots. They like the Mr. Beastification of Youtube.

I'm not a child. I'm too old and weary for that. LTT wants to do it, he can. Godspeed, and may his next twenty million subscribers fill the hole in his pocket and his soul that the first twenty million couldn't. I just ain't gonna be watching.

> repeat the same thing the fucking guy is talking but just with flashy text on screen

This have been a thing on Japanese TV since long ago, doubling down on the punchlines with subtitles or adding a comment or comeback (conveniently, Japanese text takes less space that Western text, so the characters can be relatively large). So I think they just copied it.

>LTT wants to do it, he can.

LTT does not have a choice

Youtube's system is adversarial. There's more content than eyeballs, so if your brand new video is placed in front of like three people who do not click on it, it stops getting shown to people entirely including subscribers!

Clickbait thumbnails and titles are what Google wants, and they provide tooling to encourage it, and punish you if you do not use it.

You want to get rid of clickbait titles and thumbnails? Kill google. Then also legislate it away because it will naturally arise in any such adversarial system.

>They like the Mr. Beastification of Youtube.

Google likes the Mr. Beastification of Youtube. Google would rather every LTT go away and be replaced with another Mr. Beast. It's more profitable that way.

I don't care, simple as that. I'm also in an adversarial relationship with LTT, and with Google.

I realised over the last years that my weariness with the internet was born mostly out of Youtube and Reddit. Reddit I've successfully cut out of my life, Youtube is more difficult to do because much of modern culture happens there. But I've drawn the line at the worst offenders. In tech, people like Dave2D and Marques Brownlee have managed to avoid having stupid thumbnails, so I'd rather watch them. Thereafter, I have a CalmYoutubers.md file that has the (few) channels that I find are not idiotic, so I stick to them.

> The idiotic clickbait images and titles WORK. People don't use them because they want to, they use them because they have to.

They only "work" if your only goal is to get clicks. Lots of literal toddlers and stupid adults will click on idiotic clickbait. Will they stay and watch the content? Will they understand it? Will they appreciate it? Or, will they just smash their fist at the screen when the next shiny obnoxious looking thing pops up or drool all over themselves until the next video auto-plays?

If all you care about are clicks and views and you don't give a shit about your audience you might as well just start posting disturbing videos of Elsa and pregnant Spider-man because as it turns out that WORKS also.

If on the other hand you respect your audience and don't want to mislead or annoy them with click-bait titles and irrelevant bullshit thumbnails then, yes you will get fewer clicks and views, but the smaller number of people viewing your videos will be people who clicked because they actually care about your content and not just because of bullshit clickbait. Those users will be thankful that your channel isn't polluted with the garbage that plagues so many other videos made by youtubers who don't care about anything but clicks.

Having and maintaining integrity is usually a little inconvenient, but it is also very much appreciated and people with integrity improve the spaces we share. Youtubers sacrificing their integrity for clicks and views isn't something they "have to do", it's just what they choose to do. If their content is actually worth watching then people will watch it without that crap, especially when it comes to an already well established channel like LTT. Don't make excuses for youtubers who care more about clicks and views than they do about their viewers or the quality of what they put out into the world.

It's a business. Clicks (and views) equal money.

You can always "respect your audience", but that won't pay the bills with Youtube's algorithms sadly.

It's not the world I want to live in, but it's the current reality.

A business engaging in unethical practices, not respecting its audience and standing by the quality of its content.

"Watch the world explode as I try to make a table!!!!!!!!!!!!" is unlikely its more like "Watch the world explode as I try to make this thing!!!!!!!!!!!!".

Hey, Only 50% of one of my thumbnails are AI generated Garbage!

I do agree it is annoying. Some people do it quite a lot with car work videos to make the car look in far worse than it is.

I used to use a browser extension that devolved thumbnails and titles. That seemed nice, but I stopped using it a few years ago because I don't want that kind of content in my life and changing the window dressing didn't fix it.

I do this instead: When a thumbnail and/or title is displayed on my screen feels like some variation of spammy clicky ragebait, I use the 3-dot menu and pick "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel".

Nowadays, that kind of stuff is pretty much just gone.

This has certainly nuked whole channels (and also entire categories) from my youtube feed, and that suits me just fine. I need my life to be encumbered neither by clickbait, nor by the subset of creators that are compelled to generate it in the first place.

There's more good, interesting, non-bait content created every day than any person has time to consume. The herd is plenty big enough to be culled.

I think I'll be OK without watching videos -- at all -- from people who are working to jam the cock of influence as hard as possible into whatever they can.

A bad thumbnail doesn't mean bad content. If I rejected them upfront I'm sure I could find something to replace those channels that meets the bar of "interesting", but I'd rather judge videos on the actual video and focus on how much I enjoy watching.

We may have a difference of opinion.

It is my own opinion that a creator who deliberately creates a bad thumbnail and a baited title is a bad creator, and that (by extension) I do not wish to consume their content.

There's plenty of other fish in the sea that aren't introducing themselves to me with one or more damned lies. I'm pleased to go watch what they're doing, instead.

If that's enough of a sin to be a bad creator, I think it does become difficult to find replacements after a while.

Also a bad thumbnail isn't a damned lie. Clickbait usually just means vague and flashy.

In my world, I define myself what I consider to be a sin.

My Youtube feed has an amazing abundance of great content. I'm learning stuff with it all the time from creators that aren't prima facie lying scumbags.

Others are free to keep the likes of Scotty Killmer and Linus employed. That's fine.

They're dead to me, and I do not miss them in my life.

You can decide what's a sin, I'm just saying that fast exclusions really do eat into the watch options.

Though when I go look at the last big bunch of LTT videos I don't see any lies? Scotty Killmer I can find some lies pretty fast. "New Law Will Put You in Jail for Driving Your Car" for example.

I insist that my "watch options" are really very profound and vast.

This discussion is over. You do you.

> Lots of people like to make really long video titles. So right now there is one on my screen titled “The Best Decisions Every Video Game Console Developer Made”.

Even with the missing “ (Part 2!)” added, that’s still only 68 characters. I would probably begrudgingly call this long, but I would definitely not call it “really long”—my threshold for that would be at least 90 characters.

If they’re truncating around 60 characters, I’m content to call it unreasonable.

It’s only “really long“ because it doesn’t fit on my screen.

I agree in the abstract it’s a perfectly reasonable title. It should absolutely be readable.

But it’s not. Because the app sucks.

Google News has this same truncation problem. I thought it would be an obvious thing to, I don't know, use the `title` attribute so mouseover reveals the rest of the snews...

I know no one likes hearing this because it's glib, but there's really no reason to use "apps" whatsoever. They're always worse in some baffling way, and until people start abstaining from them we'll be stuck here.

They can use features like GPU, USB, NFC, etc trivially; whereas websites and PWAs may not be able to at all.

In principle they could have good UIs, but some accident of incentives manages to prevent this. It's better for forgo the features to retain control over your own device.

And how should I use a web browser on my Apple TV?

That’s not an option. And if it was? I wouldn’t want to use it.

>on my Apple TV

Not sure why you would rely on an AppleTV or any bespoke streaming device. It's effectively a service. If you like it right now, it will be worse in a few weeks, months, or years. Eventually it will be unsupported even though the hardware still works fine. You don't own it an it'll just be made worse by the different incentives of the hardware provide and the media streaming companies.

Its disappointing to see your factual post being downvoted.

If somebody disagrees with the above post, then get off your arse and type a fucking rebuttal. Don't lazily click downvote.

'Drive-by' downvoting so is turning this place into another reddit.... and yes this is true, no matter how cliched a comment the admins consider it to be.

You raise an interesting point. Performing the act of browsing the web on the TV from the sofa in the living room has been mostly[1] a non-starter for as long as we've had a web to browse, since the user experience sucks.

Dedicated remote-oriented apps usually do improve upon that user experience.

But does it have to be an app that runs within Apple TV's walled garden?

With a $20 Android streamer box (like the one sold under Wal-Mart's in-house ONN brand), a person can install SmartTube and watch ad-free YouTube with a configurable glitz-free remote-oriented interface and SponsorBlock. (If it dies or something better comes along, it was only $20. $20 doesn't buy very many cheeseburgers these days.)

[1]: There have been attempts to improve the WWW's sofa experience, perhaps with WebTV being the largest effort. And I've sat down with a trackpad-equipped wireless keyboard and run Firefox on some manner of television-connected computing device at various times. It's always pretty severely lacking compared to browsing the web with a laptop, desktop, or pocket supercomputer. Even though it's ostensibly almost exactly the same thing, it just never really flows well at all: It's worse than using a computer and also worse than using a TV remote in ways that compound with eachother.

Every time you see an ellipsis "..." you know that the designer put form over function. Hiding data from the user is never the right answer.

They could use their fancy AI to generate shorter titles.

And if someone puts in a 500 character title, it still can't be truncated?

YouTube making up a shorter title would be so much worse...

> Now if you didn’t know, that is not the whole title. But there’s absolutely no indication of that. The only way you actually know that is either by checking or if the stuff on the screen is clearly not the end of a sentence.

> So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in the title. In this case you also see “(Part”.

> Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that.

> The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.

I'm looking at youtube right now. There's a video displayed with the title "Word Differences Between 11 Countries! | Europe, Africa, Asia , ..."

That "..." is the indicator that the title has been truncated. If you hover the title with your mouse, you can see the entire thing: "Word Differences Between 11 Countries! | Europe, Africa, Asia , America | Why Are They Similar?"

Not far away, there's "Alex Honnold Answers Rock Climbing Questions | Tech Support...", which expands to "Alex Honnold Answers Rock Climbing Questions | Tech Support | WIRED".

Am I using Apple TV? No. Is it really true that they removed the truncation indicator?

It’s different on Apple TV.

> Am I using Apple TV? No. Is it really true that they removed the truncation indicator?

Yes.

Remember when the Youtube app overrode the AppleTV screensavers, to show their own screensavers if Youtube was paused.

Any other app, you leave a video paused, the OS screensaver will come on. Those beautiful, aerial screensavers that are better than any screensaver I've ever seen in all my decades of working with computers. So of course the Youtube app had to block them with their own shitty variant. They have no taste and no respect.

Your comment is past tense - does that mean they’ve stopped doing this? Please, Lord. I had to set my ATV to go to screensaver in a ridiculously short amount of time to preempt the YouTube one.

From what I've seen recently, they have stopped - I get Snoopy (current screensaver of choice) every time, no matter what app is running.

(Although it's on a 5 minute timer which might be short enough to pre-empt everything else.)

It was in place for a couple of days, tops, before they reverted it. The backlash was immense and immediate. And with good reason: in addition to the obvious reasons why it sucked, the YouTube screensavers just looked terrible. I couldn't believe how bad they were.

YES. That was HORRIBLE. Thankfully that only lasted like a day or two.

The fact that they would ever think that was possibly an OK thing to do though shows you how brain dead they are.

The latest version of YouTube for Apple TV has broken swiping on the remote's trackpad to select videos. (For the older style black Siri Remote, at least.)

The direction of your swipe no longer matters. All the app does is interpret wherever your finger _lifts up_ as a _directional tap_ on that side of the trackpad. So you can't do nice smooth accelerated swiping like it works _everywhere else in tvOS_; you can only use the remote as a bad D-pad.

Long titles that put the important context beyond the fold are a form of clickbaiting, I just refuse to watch those videos entirely. I'm sure most of the videos are fine but I cannot reward bad behavior, and besides, clicking on clickbait will get you even more clickbait in the suggestions.

> I noticed this morning there was a new version of the YouTube app on my Apple TV.

Damn it, I still appear to be on 4.51.08/web_20251117_11_RC00 with no indication that there's a new version. Not looking forward to any updates...

> The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.

I sometimes wonder if YouTube is a weird kink cult that gets off on people complaining about the ridiculously user-hostile decisions they make. Because it's either that or they're an evil troll cult that aims to make life just that little bit less pleasant for as many people as possible.

And yet here I am being told by young devs that these kinds of terrible UX decisions don't matter, or I get mocked for bringing them up. They don't have the cognizance of experience to know why these things matter or can, and they struggle to even conceptualize how things like this can be security holes open for spammers and scammers.

If they worked for me, they'd learn fast or wouldn't work for me for long.

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