19 ms·

Tell HN: YouTube's web UI just got even worse

343 points by Pooge 4y ago

The only two possible filters on the list of videos of a channel now are most recent and most popular. I know it's a small thing but somehow this hits me really hard. Also, there's less videos on a single row now. Because we can't read more than that without our attention span going poof.

beanjuiceII 4y ago
I feel like many Google UI's have been getting progressively worse... I used to watch my movies on google play..now i have no idea where they have gone... in the web i can still access via play, but phone app not there?! no idea what this company is doing left and right hand aren't in sync
- gibbonsrcool 4y ago
  I was just thinking the same thing this morning using the Play Store dev console, which reminded me of Cloud console. Everything is randomly jumbled into a bunch of menus on the left. I can't remember where anything is.
- superkuh 4y ago
  Definitely. Were you aware that Google search will never return more than 400 results? Most people don't run into this because they use the default of 10 results per page and it takes 38 pages. But I use 100 per page and that's only 3 page of results. I can (and do) scan through that in under a minute. http://googlesearchonlyreturns400results.lol/ http://googlesearchonlyreturns400results.lol/ Google search has been severely gimped. And it's not alone. Bing too will only ever return under 900 results. The days of surfing the web are over. The tools to do so no longer exist. Now the searchable web it's just whatever has been posted on a corporate walled garden in the last year.
  - yupper32 4y ago
    I've literally never in my life needed more than 400 results. What could you possibly be doing where you need over 400 results? Severely gimped? Are you sure your use case doesn't just represent an extremely extremely small percentage of users?
    - superkuh 4y ago
      I'm absolutely sure that people who actually search the internet are so few that google does not think serving them is profitable. That's what I'm saying. Most people are like you and only click the first couple results. And this is a terrible situation. There's an entire generation of people that can never learn how to search, even if they wanted to, since it is no longer available.
      - beanjuiceII 4y ago
        yea this is how i feel as well, no longer searching, more like spoonfeeding and that's your only option
blondin 4y ago
how else did you filter uploaded videos? i don't remember what the other options are. also, the new UI is faster on my old 10 yo machine.
- baud147258 4y ago
  you could also filter by oldest first.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    It's so annoying that they keep removing ways to watch a channel from it's beginning. This isn't the first time. Do you not want me to spend more time watching videos, YouTube?
- replygirl 4y ago
  In the dropdown there was oldest, and they had been playing with a shorts/videos toggle
  - dylan604 4y ago
    I love how everything keeps getting "condensed". Tweets took us to 140 characters, but then doubled. Vines took video to short short short segments, then everyone else followed. Eventually, we're going to have some SV darling of a startup release a new app called Frmz that only allows for 1 frame video segments. They're going to try to release a photo app as a video app and the sheeple will fall over themselves trying to become the next big video influencer. Some VC trying to challenge SoftBank will go big on Framz and the hype will be insane.
3np 4y ago
As usual, Piped is an alternative front-end made with users in mind. You can self-host (persistence not necessary) or use public instances. Original author is the same as the equally excellent NewPiped mobile app. https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped
- ChildOfChaos 4y ago
  Thanks, i'm going to check this out. I hate how youtube doesn't just show whats new from my subscribed content creators, it's insane to me that instead is a bunch of random crap and I miss content from the people I have already told the algorithm I want to see. Hoping this has a way of just showing the content from the creators I want to watch, trying to have a more balance digital life and remove the crap these companies put on you, while keeping up to date with stuff that is interesting to me, it's always a difficult battle.
- brnaftr361 4y ago
  Am I missing something, or is there no sorting option beyond channel? That's what drives me nuts about Youtube, is that I can't put "science" youtubers in to a particular, very narrow category separated from other elements. This seems like the feature that would make Youtube infinitely more useful. I can't count how many times I've had to bounce back and forth through the shitty subscription view trying to associate some infinitesimally small avatar with a tutorial video I watched two months ago. Somehow I inevitably miss it, too. Of course there's no incentive for Google to do this, but these other guys..?
- rexreed 4y ago
  How does this differ from Invidious?
  - TT-392 4y ago
    Same idea, but it also has sponsorblock and the bring dislikes back thing. Also less limited resolution options. They are very similar, but I generally prefer piped
W3cUYxYwmXb5c 4y ago
they keep making minor changes like this that invariably make things worse. For me it's the loss of controls for quickly removing individual videos from the Watch Later playlist.
ysavir 4y ago
I wonder if they're A/B testing it. Yesterday I wanted to filter a channel's videos and didn't see _any_ options to filter or sort. Now I'm seeing the option to sort by most popular, newest first, and oldest first, which is still different from your experience. Or maybe they just had a bug interfering with it and are still getting a solution in place (if they even noticed it)
guerrilla 4y ago
Oh I see what you mean. I'm not sure I ever used those filters so I don't know what it was before... but the overall frontpage seems to keep getting less enjoyable. Shorts, which I'll never watch, taking up tons of room and less videos. I'm not conscious of all the differences, but it sure was better before...
everdrive 4y ago
Eventually, YouTube will degrade to the point where it’s not worth using. If you know of any truly precious videos up there, I’d start downloading them now.
- blueflow 4y ago
  I'm using https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp to download my favorite videos, and after years of using it, its worth the effort. Many good memories would have been inaccessible otherwise.
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    To expand on this, setup one of the various yt-dlp "servers" (It's just software, often in a docker container. I have an old one that uses youtube-dl, I need to update it) where you can post over to them and it will download the video and drop it in a folder somewhere. Then setup a Shortcut (iOS), bookmarklet, etc so that on any platform you are on, you are 1 click away from kicking off a download. Then sort/organize those videos as you see fit at a later date. Bonus points for putting your intake folder in a place your media server can see.
    - ericd 4y ago
      Sounds great. Any shortcut/bookmarklet code or pointers to servers to share? I'm sure readers could set that up themselves, but time/attention are always limited resources.
      - joshstrange 4y ago
        Something like this: https://github.com/frznman/yt-dlp-server https://github.com/frznman/yt-dlp-server In my case I stuck my instance (not that exact software but similar) behind Caddy and added basic auth. Then I just setup Shortcuts or bookmarklets that just did: curl -X POST --data-urlencode "url={{url}}" http://{{address}}:8080/yt/q Where {{url}} was the current page I was on and {{address}} was where my instance was available (with username:password added to it, example: "https://user:pass@ytdlp.mydomain.com/yt/q https://user:pass@ytdlp.mydomain.com/yt/q").
Sin2x 4y ago
They should rename it to just Tube without You to better reflect the reality.
- bionsystem 4y ago
  Funny because it's been a few months that the algorithm has been getting worse at giving personal suggestions. I used to have a lot of videos I enjoyed on my feed (maybe 75% of the time I didn't have to scroll to find something I'd be willing to watch) and now I often end up scrolling a lot to find a suitable suggestion. And when I watch one all I get as a suggestion is all of the things I didn't want before + another video from the same channel of the video I just watched. I don't know if people experience the same but I feel like I'm just being fed whatever is trending now instead of things I actually want to watch.
  - YourCupOTea 4y ago
    My suggestions have become increasingly stale. Before it felt like they were trying to work in related videos but now it is just the same 30-50 videos on the home page for the last 3 weeks.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    > getting worse at giving personal suggestions I agree; which is astonishing, given how bad it was before. I wish there were some way I could actually tell it what I'm interested in watching; but no, I have to let it infer my preferences using it's "algorithms". Even searching fails, even if I type in the full name of the documentary I want to watch. You really have to bend over backwards to make a literal search for the title of a show give you a completely different show, with a completely different title.
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    I've been hearing this criticism of "the suggestions are getting worse recently" for so long that, if it was actually true, YouTube would be only suggesting videos you actively hate by now. My suggestions are still totally fine, as they have always been.
- 4y ago
koofdoof 4y ago
I've seen weirdly different sorting options for a while now that vary channel by channel. I assumed it was set by the uploader, but I would believe that its a global change now.
- rayrag 4y ago
  I've noticed few months ago that Metallica channel didn't had any sorting options. I could only switch between uploads and past live streams.
andybak 4y ago
Why is there such a mania for reducing sort/finest options? They carry such a small cognitive load and are of immense value to many, many use cases. Who decides these things?
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  Usually bottom line efficiency (less surface area to maintain, fewer staff needed etc) drives action more than a long tail of user value. Don’t ask about use case value ask about business value. Don’t like it, well I agree but don’t be surprised that companies aren’t a project to deliver value to humanity.
- truemotive 4y ago
  If it’s no longer an option, the platform can now control that lever with no indication of why. See how Facebook sorts the news feed for you? Oh, it doesn’t? That used to be a user option right up top.
  - gsich 4y ago
    /?sk=h_chr still works maybe
- brezelgoring 4y ago
  I read here in HN (whatever that means to you) that Product Owners in the Youtube team have an incentive to improve certain metrics if they ever want to be promoted. I can imagine a "Watch Later" product owner thinking that if he removes a certain control, he can game the stats and say the feature is seeing more use - securing his promotion. We see this in public administration all the time, no reason to think private enterprise would be any different.
  - pas 4y ago
    okay, but who owns filters and search and whatnot? nobody? oh, okay.
  - conductr 4y ago
BoppreH 4y ago
Some channels have also opted to remove sorting altogether: https://www.youtube.com/user/enyatv/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/enyatv/videos I understand the desire to control how users are exposed to your content, but I think these options err too much on the side of removing user freedom.
- Jasper_ 4y ago
  Music channels are this weird, broken mess; some channels are weirdly split into two under the hood and which one you get depends on where in the UI you click ( try it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aajhC6GjK30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aajhC6GjK30 -- the icon and the artist name right next door under the video go to two different YouTube channels ). Playlists are sometimes replaced with Albums except it doesn't work right, and there's a bug where the infinite scroll repeats the first chunk of options forever when browsing albums. I assume the lack of sorting is just an oversight in the Music Artist template, because it's not like they tested anything else about it.
- tech234a 4y ago
  That happens a lot with music channels, which tend to aggregate videos uploaded across multiple channels but are labeled as coming from one channel. I’m not sure they opted to remove the option.
- swyx 4y ago
  it annoyed me too so made a chrome extension to add it back: https://github.com/sw-yx/youtube-browser-extension https://github.com/sw-yx/youtube-browser-extension
hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
I just tried and changing "dd" to "da" doesn't work, so it looks like they ditched it completely: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_jKrZ130j5QcXycYK_HePw/videos?view=0&sort=da&shelf_id=0 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_jKrZ130j5QcXycYK_HePw/vid...
petargyurov 4y ago
Am I the only one who uses YouTube like this: * Only go on the Subscriptions page; I've never once visited the "Home" page * Blocked the Recommended Videos sidebar using uBlock * Use SponsorBlock * Use uBO filters to remove Shorts from Subscriptions page I come to watch what I want, not get all the clickbait on the side.
- tiborsaas 4y ago
  With this many extensions you could write your own frontend :)
  - timbit42 4y ago
    Like NewPipe?
- blfr 4y ago
  I use SponsorBlock and uBlock quite heavily but you're missing out on Home. The recommendations are surprisingly good. For me, it basically takes a guess what topics and themes I find interesting and pulls content around them. Automatic notifications are also pretty good. YouTube figured out that I like interviews on a certain channel and nothing else, or Ukraine war updates from another channel but not their regular content. Probably through simple similar audience trick but solid selection nevertheless. For whatever reason, it cannot apply this knowledge to shorts which are dreadfully bad.
  - spookthesunset 4y ago
    > Ukraine war updates from another channel but not their regular content Speaking of search and YouTube UI… are you talking about that veteran guy who occasionally does coverage on Ukraine but keeps a level head. He will often point out why it is important to think about why your enemy is doing what it is doing. And he uses some open source map to show what is going on? …and the rest of his content seems to be reviews of military related things, or something else that has nothing to do with Ukraine? Cause yeah I’m subscribed to that guy, I think… but I totally forget what his channel is and don’t seem to be getting any recommendations for his videos anymore.
ricardo81 4y ago
Always found it puzzling that it takes 5 clicks to remove a recommendation from the homepage. 1. dots menu 2. "not interested" 3. "tell us why" 4. I've already watched this video, check. 5. submit. No doubt there's particular reasons for not doing so, but a "don't show me videos I've already seen" would be quite effective for my aims.
- thepasswordis 4y ago
  There needs to be a "Don't show me this type of video ever again." I recently watched some of the trial of the mass murderer who killed a bunch of people at a parade in Wisconsin. Now almost my entire youtube feed is things like "Trial lawyer REACTS to Darrel Brooks VERDICT!" - just absolute click bait garbage. I hate it, and I genuinely don't know how to make it go away.
  - ricardo81 4y ago
    That would be nice. Or in addition to 'liking', an option to 'show me more like this' which can be turned off.
  - gs17 4y ago
    It really needs a "topic" based system like Google News. Their recommendations have serious flaws as well, but at least I can see the topics a story was (potentially) recommended based on and flag one as not for me. The YT homepage kind of does that now, except you can't tell it topics are bad.
stormdennis 4y ago
On a tangent. I used to be able play youtube videos on firefox on my old android phone with the screen turned off. It was some setting in firefox that I can't seem to remember or else is no longer there. It was great because you could listen to a long lecture while walking using up less battery and even more importantly, not inadvertently clicking on something on screen. Anyone have any ideas if it's still possible?
- iamsmooney 4y ago
  I think in the Android app that's only a feature for some videos if you have Premium. Never tried it in the browser.
- clircle 4y ago
  This works fine in Brave using a feature called 'brave playlist' (or something like that)
- Dx5IQ 4y ago
  You can use this Android add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-background-play-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...
- blfr 4y ago
  It's possible with 1. Youtube Vanced (deprecated but still works), 2. ReVanced (in development), 3. Brave mobile browser, 4. NewPipe (opensource, doesn't support most account-based features), 5. YouTube Premium and their regular app.
- Toorkit 4y ago
  Last time I tried this (a few weeks ago), the procedure turned out to be: 1. play video 2. turn off screen 3. video stops, turn on screen 4. pull down the menu from the top, showing a firefox notification with a play button 5. click play 6. turn off screen again This is on Android 11, YMMV.
- vehemenz 4y ago
  This is possible on iOS with the Vinegar extension. In case you are considering Apple or have family/friends with this problem too.
hedora 4y ago
I don't log into google, and I noticed the YouTube search suggestions were hot garbage. Anyway, I was watching a logged in friend using YouTube, and realized their suggestions were equally irrelevant. I wish people would mirror their videos somewhere that's more archival focused and less of a spam shovel.
- 0898 4y ago
  I think this is a YouTube Premium feature now.
  - godshatter 4y ago
    I had naively assumed that "YouTube Premium" would add functionality that users would pay for instead of leaving it the same and reducing the experience for everyone else. I'm apparently a moron.
petargyurov 4y ago
Has anyone experienced a bug with navigating back from a video? It's been happening for months now but it's on and off. When you're watching a video and you go back, the url updates but the page doesn't refresh/redirect, the video just ends up restarting. Very annoying.
- EarthIsHome 4y ago
  This happens to me. I never realized that anything happened and that the URL changed, which means I would naturally click the back button again, and it takes me to the previous-previous page (which is usually a new tab for me). It's very frustrating. Edit: this happens on Firefox on Windows. I haven't tried Chrome.
- phs2501 4y ago
  Yep. On Firefox, haven't tried on other browsers. At this point I just hit "back, back, forward" without thinking about it when I see it happen.
- geo-matik 4y ago
  Happened to me as well, now I click the search button to go back.
- tiluha 4y ago
  Yes, that is very annoying. In general YouTubes UX is getting worse constantly. They moved the read more button for video descriptions up and to the right directly behind the end of the description text, which makes it almost completely invisible. Even now that i know where to look, it is still very hard to find. The like button is now only an outline, which is filled when active. I find this confusing, which lead to me unliking and reliking a video because i could not determine the state of the button visually. Was never a problem, back when the thimb turned blue. The site is quite sluggish in general, at least for me. Overall YouTube makes for a nice example of how modern design often makes the experience worse
  - phs2501 4y ago
    I've seen the new "read more" button sometimes actually completely be invisible... it'll come back if I force a re-layout (i.e. resizing the browser). But yeah the new design is pretty awful. No idea what they were thinking.
seydor 4y ago
This has been going downhill for a while. I don't know if YT engineers actually use the website. Below a certain screen width the date of the video just disappears from view. The video description becomes crammed to the side and is unreadable, with the "more" link rendering on top of the text. This seems to be (??) intentional behavior, why? search has also become ... rather stupid? it shows a few results and then some irrelevant "recommendations" Also would be nice if they stopped pushing shorts so hard. Why does youtube want to become tiktok, that is offensive to both users and creators, becayse YT has a distinct use case
- wongarsu 4y ago
  The push for shorts is somewhat ironic, because Youtube used to have lots of short videos in the early days. But then Youtube pushed everyone to inflate their video lengths, first with a recommendation algorithm that rewarded watch time, then with monetization that rewarded videos over 10 minutes (now 8 minutes). It took TikTok's success to show Youtube that users might like shorter videos. But I'm not sure where Youtube is actually going with this. There's now "normal Youtube", "Shorts" and "Live" coexisting on the same platform, along with Premium exclusives and Youtube Music. All of them integrated somewhat awkwardly.
- Micoloth 4y ago
  Yes thanks! The date of video disappearing is so maddening. It is so blatantly, obviously bad design that is beyond me how that could ever have happened. Also agree with the sibling comment that youtube was _full_ of fun short videos, but they are Not for some reasons counted as shorts, and now there is this situation of channels with yers-old catalogues of short videos, except the newest ones are “shorts” and the oldest ones in exactly the same style are “just videos”. ???
jstx1 4y ago
Now there's "pull up for precise seeking" which doesn't do all that much but it's a new feature. And of course ambient mode which doesn't do much either.
johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago
I wish people would use Twitch more to make it a more viable Youtube alternative. Amazon doesn't have user hostile attitude like Google.
- bakugo 4y ago
  Do you know what Twitch is? It's not a Youtube alternative in the slightest, and it was never meant to be.
- dylan604 4y ago
  >Amazon doesn't have user hostile attitude like Google. Yes, not user hostile is exactly NOT how I would describe Amazon's trash heap that is Market
- vehemenz 4y ago
  Don't mind all those counterfeit goods on Amazon.com.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Vimeo is more of a YT alternative than Twitch is.
clircle 4y ago
What filter/sorter was removed?
Pyrodogg 4y ago
5 out of 12 recommends are future streams/premiers all from the same channel. I like the channel's content but 5/12 suggestions for something I can't even watch _right now_ is just a joke.
culanuchachamim 4y ago
Interesting story I used to procastinate a lot in YouTube, so I installed a plug-in in the browser that don't let me get into YouTube. At the beginning I was worried that it's not going to work for me, because if you use te incognito mode the plug-in doesn't work, so I thinked that every time I would want to procastinate I just open the incognito mode. But surprise! I'm no longer procastinate in YouTube, because every time that I open YouTube in incognito, the recommendations are sooo bad, that I just scroll a few seconds and get out, and now I'm YouTube free for a long time.
- jrmann100 4y ago
  I shut down YouTube's addictive tendencies through a couple of less extreme factors. DF Tube (Distraction Free) web extensions are available[0] for Chrome and Firefox which cut down intrusive UI (comments, recommended videos, the home page). It's easy to clone and extend the add-on if you want to block more. When I'm on mobile, I limit the recommendations I can't block by disabling/clearing YouTube watch history. The new UI is aware of how much worse the suggestions are and hides them altogether—which is exactly what I want. From there, I try only look at my subscriptions feed and occasionally the trending videos page. This makes YouTube less overwhelming—even if I watch just as much content—because I'm in control of what I want to see. Curious if anyone else uses YouTube like this! [0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distraction-free/mjdepdfccjgcndkmemponafgioodelna https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distractio...
carlgreene 4y ago
Ugh. One of my favorite things to do is go to my favorite channels and sort by oldest to see how their videos have progressed over time. Such a shame they’ve made that so difficult for…nothing?
duxup 4y ago
I use YouTube frequently, but I don’t consider myself much of a power user. I have no idea how I’m “supposed to use” YouTube. I assume because I’m a fairly light user my confusion must be because it has some powerful tools/ interface for power users that confuses light users like me. But then I try to understand how I should find what I’m looking for and it seems there’s no good / efficient way to use it where I don’t end up wondering why I can’t just click this or that to get what I want.
b34r 4y ago
I use the YouTube app on my Tesla often and honestly this UI update has been a welcome improvement so far. The like button is now above the fold so I can easily tap it. It’s the little things
D13Fd 4y ago
What were they before? This post assumes a level of YouTube knowledge that I lack.
hnburnsy 4y ago
It is even worse for a music artist, on the Videos tab there is no sort at all.
crazygringo 4y ago
> The only two possible filters on the list of videos of a channel now are most recent and most popular. Isn't that all there's ever been? Just chronological and popularity? This post isn't very helpful unless you say what you think has been removed. (I, for one, have always wished for most popular over the last 30 days, but oh well.) > Also, there's less videos on a single row now. You're going to have to tell us how many there were before and how many there are now. I'm not seeing any difference. It also depends -- are you talking about the home page? Channel home page? Channel videos tab? Because they all act differently. Are you sure you just haven't changed your zoom settings or something? Or your window width?
- animal_spirits 4y ago
  You used to be able to filter by oldest to newest which doesn't look possible anymore
  - happyopossum 4y ago
    Err, that’s sorting - not filtering. And I’m staring at a YouTube channel right now and the sort options are: Most Popular Date added (oldest) Date added (newest)
    - garblegarble 4y ago
      >Most Popular Date added (oldest) Date added (newest) That's what I see too, but worth remembering that other people might see totally different UI options, given the number of A/B tests that Google run
  - jjice 4y ago
    Was it there recently for you? I hadn't seen that option on a channel's list of videos for what must be years now.
- dartharva 4y ago
  There was an "oldest" filter too. Especially necessary for today's YouTube for us to revisit channels that once used to be good but then gradually fell into dark patterns like everyone else in the industry.
guilamu 4y ago
Imho, Freetube is the best way to use YouTube.
jgworks 4y ago
I very much dislike the "glow" behind the videos now. Its constantly updating and very distracting.
cphoover 4y ago
Youtube has become almost unusable. recommendations are so bad. Because I'm politically independent I've been put into some kind of right-wing recommendation track... Now I'm getting recommended ignorant pwnd the lib shorts. I've pressed not interested and don't recommend this channel but it does nothing. I really hate the endless short videos of youtube, instagram, and tiktok. I have no tiktok but they've essentially recreated the same crap on youtube. The experience of YouTube has been pretty much completely ruined for me. The content of videos seems to have gone way down too. I think this may have coincided with the change in monetization strategy. Seems like the quality of recommendations has gone WAYYY down since then.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  It's not just you, I'm left of Democrat and end up getting Jordan Peterson recommended to me. Especially on shorts. My guess is the algorithm thinks I like "politics" and suggests whatever "political" content it can find. Besides this, I too have found the content quality declining. The best content now comes from channels/creators I followed years ago, while most new stuff that's being recommended is of the reaction to reaction to reaction variety.
maphew 4y ago
Something to keep in mind is that YouTube does A/B testing, showing different interface design changes to different people and then comparing the stats later.
notsahil 4y ago
You can try Invidious it's an open source alternative front-end to YouTube. https://docs.invidious.io/instances/ https://docs.invidious.io/instances/
ryemigie 4y ago
On the TV app it is nuts now. Only 4 rows of recommendations, and 5 videos per row. Like a 1000% reduction in possible recommendations. No idea why.
jraph 4y ago
Invidious is an acceptable interface to YouTube. Some things are missing, like searching and queuing videos while watching one (I guess adding this feature could be a weekend project), but there's no ads, you can listen to video without downloading the video part, it does not stop after a while, and is quite lightweight. You can subscribe to channels and there's no magic happening in the videos you actually see, nor any need for a Google account. The information density is correct. You don't wait before a skeleton while the interface loads, because it's instant. SponsorBlock works with it too. I can recommend. It might not be very sexy, but its interface design is not driven by commercial reasons and does not follow the oversimplification trend.
- onemoresoop 4y ago
  Likewise, I recommend Invidious, it's clean and sane. There are a lot of things missing but that's a feature not a bug.
- rexreed 4y ago
  I am a big user of Invidious as well. The biggest issue is the lack of subtitling, especially foreign language subtitles. Also, the lack of playlist support. Those things often force me back to YouTube when I need to view a video with english language subtitles. Is there any way to get subtitles into the Invidious interface?
ilyt 4y ago
I gave up long time ago and just used RSS feeds from channels I subscribe. I am fully convinced the only reason RSS still works is that someone at YT forgot the feature exists and so it didn't get fucked with from when YT subscription panel was still working.
- delecti 4y ago
  The /feed/subscriptions page has also very consistently worked as a reverse-chronological feed of your subscriptions the whole time.
HurdsTimesNear 4y ago
SOMEBODY pls write a firefox extension that allows you to simulate high engagement for any feature you pick. that way we could ascertain only the stuff we like about websites get's to stay and everything else goes by the wayside...
zeroonetwothree 4y ago
Noticed this UI change today as well and it’s awful. Makes me feel less bad that I canceled premium and won’t be using YT anymore.
deleted 4y ago
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weinzierl 4y ago
The biggest offender is Youtube Shorts at the top. With TikTok at least you can restrict your daily watch time and it is pure entertainment anyway - I don't have to open it when I don't want entertainment. Youtube is different because it has lots of useful stuff too and this mixture of the helpful and the addictive is pure evil. It is almost as if every food item in your life is served with a beer, a cigarette, some coke and some crack for free. A bit OT, but I watch a lot of tutorials with many parts. Is there a good way to track which part I already watched?
- soared 4y ago
  There is a chrome extension to block shorts fyi
- kevincox 4y ago
  I hate shorts with a passion. It's like they just decided to remove half of the features and think it is better. Like you can't cast a short to your TV via the YouTube app. You can cast other portrait videos, but if they have #shorts in the title then it gets blocked. Luckily you can get the regular video UI if you go direct to the video link in your browser, but no casting and if you ever get to the video another way you need to edit the URL to do simple things like seek.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
dpedu 4y ago
On youtube's desktop site, I've also noticed that sometime within the last couple months the home page no longer shows the duration of videos when the page loads. After 3-6 seconds, the timestamps pop in. I don't know if this is intentionally or a result of lazy-loading - but seeing that the video thumb, title, author, view count, and age all load instantly with the page, I struggle to come up with a reason it could be unintentional. This bothers me because I like to know how long a video is before I commit the time to sitting down and watching it. This feels like an attempt at a dark pattern with the intent to improve metrics - surely watch time is a metric youtube cares about.
- spikej 4y ago
  Same with the 3 dots that show extra options like saving to playlist. They pop in after the rest of the site has loaded.
  - bavell 4y ago
    They also have a tiny hotbox which encourages misclicks (trying to click "Not Interested" but whoopsie, another view on that video!). Dark patterns galore. Edit: looks like the dots are 40x40px on desktop
    - lakomen 4y ago
      And then they torture and ban sites who use the same dark patterns with Adsense. It's as hypocritical as it gets.
  - RealStickman_ 4y ago
    And sometimes the save to playlist is a separate button while at other times it's hidden behind the dots. I've had to cancel countless clips from misclicking. (Multiple times in a row even)
- dom96 4y ago
  yeah, I've noticed that timestamp thing as well. Super annoying.
kevinfiol 4y ago
I gave up on the YouTube UI a while ago and now rely on a script that runs every hour to generate an HTML page of my subscriptions (via RSS feeds): https://kevinfiol.com/youtube/ https://kevinfiol.com/youtube/
- tnorthcutt 4y ago
  Are you open to sharing the code you use to generate this?
  - kevinfiol 4y ago
    Sure: https://github.com/kevinfiol/youtube https://github.com/kevinfiol/youtube Some things to note if you'd like to use it: 1. I deploy to Github Pages via Github Actions. See .github/workflows/build.yml for details. The only thing you might wanna change here is the `schedule` of how often to build your page 2. I define my subscriptions in src/feeds.json. It's just an array of tuples [name, rss_url]. 3. I currently redirect to an Invidious instance. You can modify the `YOUTUBE_URL` const in scripts/render.js to `youtube.com` if you don't care for this EDIT: By the way, I also wrote this scrappy user script to quickly download my youtube subscriptions as JSON: https://gist.github.com/kevinfiol/da63cd137327b8f8d6b70706017320ef https://gist.github.com/kevinfiol/da63cd137327b8f8d6b7070601... It'll just create a `get feeds` button at https://www.youtube.com/feed/channels https://www.youtube.com/feed/channels
- pradn 4y ago
  This is actually fantastic. I think we need alternatives like this for every other "algorithmic feed" website. Twitter has become unusable and toxic for me in recent years. It seems like most of the tweets are recommendations - those liked by my follows or their friends. It's maddening to not have control. It seems like no matter how much I try I can't help but see vitriolic politics tweets, million-like jokes, etc.
- MandieD 4y ago
  That is seriously useful on so many levels - thank you for sharing!
c7b 4y ago
I recently got YT premium in response to their push, but it's messed with my YT enjoyment in a somewhat unexpected way: I hadn't realized to what extent I'd become used to having different sets of recommendations and being able to get fresh starts on recommendations by deleting cookies... I've almost started to become strategic about what I click on now instead of just going with whatever flow I'm enjoying right now. Not sure if I'll continue the subscription after the trial if they don't give us more options for managing our preferences. I guess I could get a family option for myself just to get more accounts, but I'll have to see.
- kortex 4y ago
  Can YT premium still have multiple accounts? That's the main way I manage my learned feeds. I do wish there was something like "virtualenv" for youtube, where it's trivial to change your preferences without changing your account (which is still tied to things like subscribers and comments.
  - c7b 4y ago
    > Can YT premium still have multiple accounts? Not that I'm aware of, at least not for a single standard subscription. There's a family option with up to 5 accounts that might work, but it's probably not how that's meant to be used, so you might run into some problems. virtualenv is a good analogy, that's what I'd want as well, but I doubt that we're going to get that.
    - cloogshicer 4y ago
      You can definitely create a new Brand account, which is managed by the same Google Account. The brand account will then also have premium benefits, while having its own watch history. This is how I use it. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/4642409?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/4642409?hl=en
      - c7b 4y ago
        Interesting, thanks!
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villgax 4y ago
Despite having premium there is just no way to get rid of Shorts everywhere. It is the worst form of content which deliberately removes the seekbar & is not enough to convey anything meaningful. It's basically video reddit but minus the option delve further into the content.
mradek 4y ago
As each of these subscription services have gotten worse, I’ve ended my contracts with each one and I’m probably way happier this way. I’m not overloaded by content, and I feel a more enjoyable sense of discovery when I go looking on purpose for a video. I use brave browser, so gg ads.
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woah 4y ago
It's a tale as old as time: Programmer on HN complains about the removal of obscure menu items from a popular social media app
lob_it 4y ago
After archiving petabytes of inferior content, youtube is about worthless if you do not know what you are looking for. UI/UX/IQ/EQ do not apply. Years ago, tcp/ip was cool to explore. Now, its just ad-bait for tabloid and low aptitude fodder populations. At least on IOS, "Halt" is a good browser that blocks all youtube ads, beginning to end. Much like grocery shopping, I only have a short list of content to view on youtube, with their algo recomendations and UI being moot for the past several years. Even google places low quality results littered with ad-infested pages in the SERPs for inferior time suck pennies.
minraws 4y ago
Seconded those pills make me want to commit murder... It's really annoying then there is randomly adjusting css on the home page, they have over done stuff in the name of mobile first.
- holler 4y ago
  the pill/rounded corners make it feel plushy, but are discordant with the square edges of the rectangular video, overall making the design feel off.
the_jesus_villa 4y ago
I'm also annoyed that I can't sort for oldest videos. I remember being a 10-year old and reading these kinds of threads on the Neopets forums everytime a UI change happened. Back then, everyone would promise to switch to a competitor. Then everyone would forget, get attached to the new UI, and then if they ever changed it again (even changing it back to be more similar to the old one!) we'd hear the say peans about how they are ruining it. See also: livejournal users threatening to go to dreamwidth, and /b/day (the 4chan exodus to 7chan).
LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
Waddya mean? https://postimg.cc/Wq3t4Fxn https://postimg.cc/Wq3t4Fxn
activitypea 4y ago
it only ever gets worse
andy_ppp 4y ago
While everyone is complaining sometimes the bottom of the video is cut off on mobile... this is particularly annoying in Chess videos if the bottom row of white pieces is cut off.
input_sh 4y ago
That's not all, there are some channels where you can't even sort by most popular anymore. From what I gather they're mostly music-related ones (perhaps in favour of YouTube's "most popular songs" playlists). Here's a random example: https://youtube.com/c/DomDolla/videos https://youtube.com/c/DomDolla/videos Notice there's no option to even select any type of sort. It makes a tiny bit of sense to use that YouTube playlist instead (for example artists may upload songs to a label's channel or something), but it's still very annoying.
blancNoir 4y ago
What's been driving me nuts is they took away the ability to toggle comments to the right of the video, so you could scroll them while viewing instead of having comments below the video necessitating scrolling the video out of view while reading comments. I thought that toggle was relatively new too.
- mrkramer 4y ago
  You can still do it in YouTube Android app as far as I know. Open video, tap that little empty square in the bottom right corner and your video will be rotated to the horizontal position(view) and then tap that little comments box[0] in the bottom left corner(third icon). [0] https://i.imgur.com/vDzDrio.jpg https://i.imgur.com/vDzDrio.jpg
xg15 4y ago
Conspiracy theory: If the only remaining sorting options all bury old videos, is this maybe a preparation to put old videos into cold storage?
- kderbyma 4y ago
  most definitely. They don't want to support it. they make less money from old content and it would deviate from their fanatical control over suggestions that are probably some of the worst in the industry coupled with the worst user interface, aggressive ads, and dark patterns galore....it's trash....it's like a VLT machine at this point...designed to convert advertiser money and funnel it to affiliated creators for the most part.
comboy 4y ago
Does it matter? It seem to literally throw random videos it thinks you may like into the search results. It is hard to process for me how could they screw simple things so bad.
DaveSchmindel 4y ago
I feel like an old man in my own head, muttering, "I remember the Sort feature like it was yesterday!"
lrvick 4y ago
Install LibRedirect and you never need to visit youtube.com again.
arnaudsm 4y ago
The Watch later UX is atrocious too : - Adding : hover the video 1000ms to reveal the button - Removing : 2 clicks away under a menu Why hide the 2 most frequent actions? Do you even do user testing?
- regularjack 4y ago
  Your most frequent actions aren't necessarily everyone's. I very rarely use the watch later feature. Maybe they are doing user testing.
  - arnaudsm 4y ago
    I'm referring to the UI when you're specifically in watch later mode. Imagine if opening a Google result took 2 clicks, it'd be infuriating.
running101 4y ago
I always feel dumb when using YouTube’s apps and website. It is probably the most non intuitive site I use
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
The funny thing is that Google brags about the science behind their UX and then they have complete garbage UX like Youtube and libs like material design. I also wonder if the Youtube mobile app testers are minors or have transparent fingers.
matsemann 4y ago
My biggest peeve is how on the app, scrolling past a thumbnail removes it and starts playing a preview. So the title or whatever disappears, and instead I get to watch some person talk on mute. Then when I actually click the video, it starts from where I was in the preview, instead from the beginning, so I have to rewind since I obviously didn't catch anything from the small muted preview.
- gs17 4y ago
  For me it shows captions in the preview, so I actually get what they're saying. I don't have captions on for videos, so no idea why it's different between us.
  - matsemann 4y ago
    I do get captions, but they seldom make sense. I guess no one at YouTube have tried watching non-English videos when making this preview feature..? To be fair, the captions are quite bad for the British panel shows I get recommended as well.
    - gs17 4y ago
      That's fair, I forgot how awful the captions can be. Still not sure how we got to a situation where, when watching a video on my Google phone, the phone can make vastly better, and near real-time, captions than YouTube can.
NotYourLawyer 4y ago
YouTube is/was a really good YouTube. It should stop trying to be a second-rate TikTok.
red2awn 4y ago
Everything also have a rounded corner now. This is only in my A/B test group though, I don't see it when in incognito.
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opan 4y ago
They've also hidden away the "save to playlist" button, making it extra clicks to do.
andreyk 4y ago
Why even worse? I use youtube a LOT and I don't particularly dislike it.
deleted 4y ago
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ducktective 4y ago
Yes, and the cure for us users is : yt-dlp I don't even do that. I use mpv + yt-dlp + SponsorBlock plugin: `script-opts=ytdl_hook-ytdl_path=yt-dlp`
mrkramer 4y ago
People at Google don't use Google products, YouTube in particular. It is quite astonishing that so many features are nonsense or not yet implemented. Why I can't search comments in comments section of a video; if a video has 100+ or 1 000+ comments I can't easily find comments that are relevant to me. Why I can't search my playlist videos and my liked videos; I have 1 000+ liked videos and 1 000+ videos in my Watch Later playlist. Maybe I'm disorganized with Watch Later playlist but I'm also a power user which is not satisfied with only casual features. Any yea you can't sort channel videos like you use to(Newest, Oldest, Most Popular). Like you said it's now only Most recent and Most popular. And one thing that I almost forgot, in Web version of YouTube you can search channel for videos and in native mobile app you can't search channel for videos. When I say search channel for videos I mean query with keywords(there is no Search Bar within Channel page or within Videos tab).
- bavell 4y ago
  My pet theory is that they only implement features which are lightweight enough to not cause significant load on their backend and if it does then the feature dies right there, no matter how useful. Extreme cost-focused tunnel vision.
  - mrkramer 4y ago
    But it doesn't make sense when you know that they have billions in cash sitting in bank waiting to be spend. They have the money and the knowledge to implement whatever feature they need to. Backend load and infrastructure scale is not a problem at this point. My somewhat simple explanation is; Google wants to cater to the casual crowd so hard to the point of sacrificing user experience for advanced users or power users who use YouTube every day. They rather prefer status quo than try to bother with more advanced features. But I have to admit, they already have some pretty advanced features but they need to keep pushing.
- numinos1 4y ago
  YouTube is slowly transitioning from a UGC video marketplace into a modern version of cable tv. These technical oversights aren't bugs. They're a deliberate effort to shape user behavior and maximize advertising revenue. Old content is a liability and is slowly being deprecated from the system.
robszumski 4y ago
Am I crazy or did they remove 1.15x playback? That one seemed like the right mix of "I don't have 30 minutes" and not skewing the voices too much.
running101 4y ago
I hope some from YouTube sees this feedback
CyborgCabbage 4y ago
Going to take this opportunity to ask if anyone else hasn't been able to find any playlists in YouTube search results? Whenever I filter for playlists, there is always nothing.
theduder99 4y ago
Same here. Since YT has been going downhill I've started downloading videos and storing them offline (no not on google drive for G to scan and remove in the future) in a couple spots because I've seen many items in my saved lists get removed or set to private over the years.
agentcooper 4y ago
I've created a small macOS app to track YouTube channels without being distracted by the web UI: https://github.com/agentcooper/telik https://github.com/agentcooper/telik. Maybe some of you will find it useful.
deorder 4y ago
Lately I often have trouble finding the date/time a youtube video was posted. Sometimes I find it when I open the description box, but not always.
t0bia_s 4y ago
Freetube - https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube
Fervicus 4y ago
This one makes me really sad. Frequently I find myself wanting to look at the oldest video on a particular channel.
regular 4y ago
garfieldnate 4y ago
One recent change that I really hate is the way the video pops up and follows you down the page when you scroll down to look at comments. It blocks what I'm trying to look at! Very annoying.
kderbyma 4y ago
Needs New Management.... thats the first step. :)

343 points by Pooge 4y ago

beanjuiceII 4y ago

I feel like many Google UI's have been getting progressively worse... I used to watch my movies on google play..now i have no idea where they have gone... in the web i can still access via play, but phone app not there?! no idea what this company is doing left and right hand aren't in sync

gibbonsrcool 4y ago
I was just thinking the same thing this morning using the Play Store dev console, which reminded me of Cloud console. Everything is randomly jumbled into a bunch of menus on the left. I can't remember where anything is.
superkuh 4y ago
Definitely. Were you aware that Google search will never return more than 400 results? Most people don't run into this because they use the default of 10 results per page and it takes 38 pages. But I use 100 per page and that's only 3 page of results. I can (and do) scan through that in under a minute. http://googlesearchonlyreturns400results.lol/ http://googlesearchonlyreturns400results.lol/ Google search has been severely gimped. And it's not alone. Bing too will only ever return under 900 results. The days of surfing the web are over. The tools to do so no longer exist. Now the searchable web it's just whatever has been posted on a corporate walled garden in the last year.
- yupper32 4y ago
  I've literally never in my life needed more than 400 results. What could you possibly be doing where you need over 400 results? Severely gimped? Are you sure your use case doesn't just represent an extremely extremely small percentage of users?
  - superkuh 4y ago
    I'm absolutely sure that people who actually search the internet are so few that google does not think serving them is profitable. That's what I'm saying. Most people are like you and only click the first couple results. And this is a terrible situation. There's an entire generation of people that can never learn how to search, even if they wanted to, since it is no longer available.
    - beanjuiceII 4y ago
      yea this is how i feel as well, no longer searching, more like spoonfeeding and that's your only option

blondin 4y ago

how else did you filter uploaded videos? i don't remember what the other options are. also, the new UI is faster on my old 10 yo machine.

baud147258 4y ago
you could also filter by oldest first.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  It's so annoying that they keep removing ways to watch a channel from it's beginning. This isn't the first time. Do you not want me to spend more time watching videos, YouTube?
replygirl 4y ago
In the dropdown there was oldest, and they had been playing with a shorts/videos toggle
- dylan604 4y ago
  I love how everything keeps getting "condensed". Tweets took us to 140 characters, but then doubled. Vines took video to short short short segments, then everyone else followed. Eventually, we're going to have some SV darling of a startup release a new app called Frmz that only allows for 1 frame video segments. They're going to try to release a photo app as a video app and the sheeple will fall over themselves trying to become the next big video influencer. Some VC trying to challenge SoftBank will go big on Framz and the hype will be insane.

3np 4y ago

As usual, Piped is an alternative front-end made with users in mind. You can self-host (persistence not necessary) or use public instances. Original author is the same as the equally excellent NewPiped mobile app. https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped

ChildOfChaos 4y ago
Thanks, i'm going to check this out. I hate how youtube doesn't just show whats new from my subscribed content creators, it's insane to me that instead is a bunch of random crap and I miss content from the people I have already told the algorithm I want to see. Hoping this has a way of just showing the content from the creators I want to watch, trying to have a more balance digital life and remove the crap these companies put on you, while keeping up to date with stuff that is interesting to me, it's always a difficult battle.
brnaftr361 4y ago
Am I missing something, or is there no sorting option beyond channel? That's what drives me nuts about Youtube, is that I can't put "science" youtubers in to a particular, very narrow category separated from other elements. This seems like the feature that would make Youtube infinitely more useful. I can't count how many times I've had to bounce back and forth through the shitty subscription view trying to associate some infinitesimally small avatar with a tutorial video I watched two months ago. Somehow I inevitably miss it, too. Of course there's no incentive for Google to do this, but these other guys..?
rexreed 4y ago
How does this differ from Invidious?
- TT-392 4y ago
  Same idea, but it also has sponsorblock and the bring dislikes back thing. Also less limited resolution options. They are very similar, but I generally prefer piped

W3cUYxYwmXb5c 4y ago

they keep making minor changes like this that invariably make things worse. For me it's the loss of controls for quickly removing individual videos from the Watch Later playlist.

ysavir 4y ago

I wonder if they're A/B testing it. Yesterday I wanted to filter a channel's videos and didn't see _any_ options to filter or sort. Now I'm seeing the option to sort by most popular, newest first, and oldest first, which is still different from your experience. Or maybe they just had a bug interfering with it and are still getting a solution in place (if they even noticed it)

guerrilla 4y ago

Oh I see what you mean. I'm not sure I ever used those filters so I don't know what it was before... but the overall frontpage seems to keep getting less enjoyable. Shorts, which I'll never watch, taking up tons of room and less videos. I'm not conscious of all the differences, but it sure was better before...

everdrive 4y ago

Eventually, YouTube will degrade to the point where it’s not worth using. If you know of any truly precious videos up there, I’d start downloading them now.

blueflow 4y ago
I'm using https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp to download my favorite videos, and after years of using it, its worth the effort. Many good memories would have been inaccessible otherwise.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  To expand on this, setup one of the various yt-dlp "servers" (It's just software, often in a docker container. I have an old one that uses youtube-dl, I need to update it) where you can post over to them and it will download the video and drop it in a folder somewhere. Then setup a Shortcut (iOS), bookmarklet, etc so that on any platform you are on, you are 1 click away from kicking off a download. Then sort/organize those videos as you see fit at a later date. Bonus points for putting your intake folder in a place your media server can see.
  - ericd 4y ago
    Sounds great. Any shortcut/bookmarklet code or pointers to servers to share? I'm sure readers could set that up themselves, but time/attention are always limited resources.
    - joshstrange 4y ago
      Something like this: https://github.com/frznman/yt-dlp-server https://github.com/frznman/yt-dlp-server In my case I stuck my instance (not that exact software but similar) behind Caddy and added basic auth. Then I just setup Shortcuts or bookmarklets that just did: curl -X POST --data-urlencode "url={{url}}" http://{{address}}:8080/yt/q Where {{url}} was the current page I was on and {{address}} was where my instance was available (with username:password added to it, example: "https://user:pass@ytdlp.mydomain.com/yt/q https://user:pass@ytdlp.mydomain.com/yt/q").

Sin2x 4y ago

They should rename it to just Tube without You to better reflect the reality.

bionsystem 4y ago
Funny because it's been a few months that the algorithm has been getting worse at giving personal suggestions. I used to have a lot of videos I enjoyed on my feed (maybe 75% of the time I didn't have to scroll to find something I'd be willing to watch) and now I often end up scrolling a lot to find a suitable suggestion. And when I watch one all I get as a suggestion is all of the things I didn't want before + another video from the same channel of the video I just watched. I don't know if people experience the same but I feel like I'm just being fed whatever is trending now instead of things I actually want to watch.
- YourCupOTea 4y ago
  My suggestions have become increasingly stale. Before it felt like they were trying to work in related videos but now it is just the same 30-50 videos on the home page for the last 3 weeks.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  > getting worse at giving personal suggestions I agree; which is astonishing, given how bad it was before. I wish there were some way I could actually tell it what I'm interested in watching; but no, I have to let it infer my preferences using it's "algorithms". Even searching fails, even if I type in the full name of the documentary I want to watch. You really have to bend over backwards to make a literal search for the title of a show give you a completely different show, with a completely different title.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  I've been hearing this criticism of "the suggestions are getting worse recently" for so long that, if it was actually true, YouTube would be only suggesting videos you actively hate by now. My suggestions are still totally fine, as they have always been.
4y ago

koofdoof 4y ago

I've seen weirdly different sorting options for a while now that vary channel by channel. I assumed it was set by the uploader, but I would believe that its a global change now.

rayrag 4y ago
I've noticed few months ago that Metallica channel didn't had any sorting options. I could only switch between uploads and past live streams.

andybak 4y ago

Why is there such a mania for reducing sort/finest options? They carry such a small cognitive load and are of immense value to many, many use cases. Who decides these things?

wahnfrieden 4y ago
Usually bottom line efficiency (less surface area to maintain, fewer staff needed etc) drives action more than a long tail of user value. Don’t ask about use case value ask about business value. Don’t like it, well I agree but don’t be surprised that companies aren’t a project to deliver value to humanity.
truemotive 4y ago
If it’s no longer an option, the platform can now control that lever with no indication of why. See how Facebook sorts the news feed for you? Oh, it doesn’t? That used to be a user option right up top.
- gsich 4y ago
  /?sk=h_chr still works maybe
brezelgoring 4y ago
I read here in HN (whatever that means to you) that Product Owners in the Youtube team have an incentive to improve certain metrics if they ever want to be promoted. I can imagine a "Watch Later" product owner thinking that if he removes a certain control, he can game the stats and say the feature is seeing more use - securing his promotion. We see this in public administration all the time, no reason to think private enterprise would be any different.
- pas 4y ago
  okay, but who owns filters and search and whatnot? nobody? oh, okay.
- conductr 4y ago

BoppreH 4y ago

Some channels have also opted to remove sorting altogether: https://www.youtube.com/user/enyatv/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/enyatv/videos I understand the desire to control how users are exposed to your content, but I think these options err too much on the side of removing user freedom.

Jasper_ 4y ago
Music channels are this weird, broken mess; some channels are weirdly split into two under the hood and which one you get depends on where in the UI you click ( try it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aajhC6GjK30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aajhC6GjK30 -- the icon and the artist name right next door under the video go to two different YouTube channels ). Playlists are sometimes replaced with Albums except it doesn't work right, and there's a bug where the infinite scroll repeats the first chunk of options forever when browsing albums. I assume the lack of sorting is just an oversight in the Music Artist template, because it's not like they tested anything else about it.
tech234a 4y ago
That happens a lot with music channels, which tend to aggregate videos uploaded across multiple channels but are labeled as coming from one channel. I’m not sure they opted to remove the option.
swyx 4y ago
it annoyed me too so made a chrome extension to add it back: https://github.com/sw-yx/youtube-browser-extension https://github.com/sw-yx/youtube-browser-extension

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago

I just tried and changing "dd" to "da" doesn't work, so it looks like they ditched it completely: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_jKrZ130j5QcXycYK_HePw/videos?view=0&sort=da&shelf_id=0 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_jKrZ130j5QcXycYK_HePw/vid...

petargyurov 4y ago

Am I the only one who uses YouTube like this: * Only go on the Subscriptions page; I've never once visited the "Home" page * Blocked the Recommended Videos sidebar using uBlock * Use SponsorBlock * Use uBO filters to remove Shorts from Subscriptions page I come to watch what I want, not get all the clickbait on the side.

tiborsaas 4y ago
With this many extensions you could write your own frontend :)
- timbit42 4y ago
  Like NewPipe?
blfr 4y ago
I use SponsorBlock and uBlock quite heavily but you're missing out on Home. The recommendations are surprisingly good. For me, it basically takes a guess what topics and themes I find interesting and pulls content around them. Automatic notifications are also pretty good. YouTube figured out that I like interviews on a certain channel and nothing else, or Ukraine war updates from another channel but not their regular content. Probably through simple similar audience trick but solid selection nevertheless. For whatever reason, it cannot apply this knowledge to shorts which are dreadfully bad.
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  > Ukraine war updates from another channel but not their regular content Speaking of search and YouTube UI… are you talking about that veteran guy who occasionally does coverage on Ukraine but keeps a level head. He will often point out why it is important to think about why your enemy is doing what it is doing. And he uses some open source map to show what is going on? …and the rest of his content seems to be reviews of military related things, or something else that has nothing to do with Ukraine? Cause yeah I’m subscribed to that guy, I think… but I totally forget what his channel is and don’t seem to be getting any recommendations for his videos anymore.

ricardo81 4y ago

Always found it puzzling that it takes 5 clicks to remove a recommendation from the homepage. 1. dots menu 2. "not interested" 3. "tell us why" 4. I've already watched this video, check. 5. submit. No doubt there's particular reasons for not doing so, but a "don't show me videos I've already seen" would be quite effective for my aims.

thepasswordis 4y ago
There needs to be a "Don't show me this type of video ever again." I recently watched some of the trial of the mass murderer who killed a bunch of people at a parade in Wisconsin. Now almost my entire youtube feed is things like "Trial lawyer REACTS to Darrel Brooks VERDICT!" - just absolute click bait garbage. I hate it, and I genuinely don't know how to make it go away.
- ricardo81 4y ago
  That would be nice. Or in addition to 'liking', an option to 'show me more like this' which can be turned off.
- gs17 4y ago
  It really needs a "topic" based system like Google News. Their recommendations have serious flaws as well, but at least I can see the topics a story was (potentially) recommended based on and flag one as not for me. The YT homepage kind of does that now, except you can't tell it topics are bad.

stormdennis 4y ago

On a tangent. I used to be able play youtube videos on firefox on my old android phone with the screen turned off. It was some setting in firefox that I can't seem to remember or else is no longer there. It was great because you could listen to a long lecture while walking using up less battery and even more importantly, not inadvertently clicking on something on screen. Anyone have any ideas if it's still possible?

iamsmooney 4y ago
I think in the Android app that's only a feature for some videos if you have Premium. Never tried it in the browser.
clircle 4y ago
This works fine in Brave using a feature called 'brave playlist' (or something like that)
Dx5IQ 4y ago
You can use this Android add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-background-play-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...
blfr 4y ago
It's possible with 1. Youtube Vanced (deprecated but still works), 2. ReVanced (in development), 3. Brave mobile browser, 4. NewPipe (opensource, doesn't support most account-based features), 5. YouTube Premium and their regular app.
Toorkit 4y ago
Last time I tried this (a few weeks ago), the procedure turned out to be: 1. play video 2. turn off screen 3. video stops, turn on screen 4. pull down the menu from the top, showing a firefox notification with a play button 5. click play 6. turn off screen again This is on Android 11, YMMV.
vehemenz 4y ago
This is possible on iOS with the Vinegar extension. In case you are considering Apple or have family/friends with this problem too.

hedora 4y ago

I don't log into google, and I noticed the YouTube search suggestions were hot garbage. Anyway, I was watching a logged in friend using YouTube, and realized their suggestions were equally irrelevant. I wish people would mirror their videos somewhere that's more archival focused and less of a spam shovel.

0898 4y ago
I think this is a YouTube Premium feature now.
- godshatter 4y ago
  I had naively assumed that "YouTube Premium" would add functionality that users would pay for instead of leaving it the same and reducing the experience for everyone else. I'm apparently a moron.

petargyurov 4y ago

Has anyone experienced a bug with navigating back from a video? It's been happening for months now but it's on and off. When you're watching a video and you go back, the url updates but the page doesn't refresh/redirect, the video just ends up restarting. Very annoying.

EarthIsHome 4y ago
This happens to me. I never realized that anything happened and that the URL changed, which means I would naturally click the back button again, and it takes me to the previous-previous page (which is usually a new tab for me). It's very frustrating. Edit: this happens on Firefox on Windows. I haven't tried Chrome.
phs2501 4y ago
Yep. On Firefox, haven't tried on other browsers. At this point I just hit "back, back, forward" without thinking about it when I see it happen.
geo-matik 4y ago
Happened to me as well, now I click the search button to go back.
tiluha 4y ago
Yes, that is very annoying. In general YouTubes UX is getting worse constantly. They moved the read more button for video descriptions up and to the right directly behind the end of the description text, which makes it almost completely invisible. Even now that i know where to look, it is still very hard to find. The like button is now only an outline, which is filled when active. I find this confusing, which lead to me unliking and reliking a video because i could not determine the state of the button visually. Was never a problem, back when the thimb turned blue. The site is quite sluggish in general, at least for me. Overall YouTube makes for a nice example of how modern design often makes the experience worse
- phs2501 4y ago
  I've seen the new "read more" button sometimes actually completely be invisible... it'll come back if I force a re-layout (i.e. resizing the browser). But yeah the new design is pretty awful. No idea what they were thinking.

seydor 4y ago

This has been going downhill for a while. I don't know if YT engineers actually use the website. Below a certain screen width the date of the video just disappears from view. The video description becomes crammed to the side and is unreadable, with the "more" link rendering on top of the text. This seems to be (??) intentional behavior, why? search has also become ... rather stupid? it shows a few results and then some irrelevant "recommendations" Also would be nice if they stopped pushing shorts so hard. Why does youtube want to become tiktok, that is offensive to both users and creators, becayse YT has a distinct use case

wongarsu 4y ago
The push for shorts is somewhat ironic, because Youtube used to have lots of short videos in the early days. But then Youtube pushed everyone to inflate their video lengths, first with a recommendation algorithm that rewarded watch time, then with monetization that rewarded videos over 10 minutes (now 8 minutes). It took TikTok's success to show Youtube that users might like shorter videos. But I'm not sure where Youtube is actually going with this. There's now "normal Youtube", "Shorts" and "Live" coexisting on the same platform, along with Premium exclusives and Youtube Music. All of them integrated somewhat awkwardly.
Micoloth 4y ago
Yes thanks! The date of video disappearing is so maddening. It is so blatantly, obviously bad design that is beyond me how that could ever have happened. Also agree with the sibling comment that youtube was _full_ of fun short videos, but they are Not for some reasons counted as shorts, and now there is this situation of channels with yers-old catalogues of short videos, except the newest ones are “shorts” and the oldest ones in exactly the same style are “just videos”. ???

jstx1 4y ago

Now there's "pull up for precise seeking" which doesn't do all that much but it's a new feature. And of course ambient mode which doesn't do much either.

johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago

I wish people would use Twitch more to make it a more viable Youtube alternative. Amazon doesn't have user hostile attitude like Google.

bakugo 4y ago
Do you know what Twitch is? It's not a Youtube alternative in the slightest, and it was never meant to be.
dylan604 4y ago
>Amazon doesn't have user hostile attitude like Google. Yes, not user hostile is exactly NOT how I would describe Amazon's trash heap that is Market
vehemenz 4y ago
Don't mind all those counterfeit goods on Amazon.com.
zozbot234 4y ago
Vimeo is more of a YT alternative than Twitch is.

clircle 4y ago

What filter/sorter was removed?

Pyrodogg 4y ago

5 out of 12 recommends are future streams/premiers all from the same channel. I like the channel's content but 5/12 suggestions for something I can't even watch _right now_ is just a joke.

culanuchachamim 4y ago

Interesting story I used to procastinate a lot in YouTube, so I installed a plug-in in the browser that don't let me get into YouTube. At the beginning I was worried that it's not going to work for me, because if you use te incognito mode the plug-in doesn't work, so I thinked that every time I would want to procastinate I just open the incognito mode. But surprise! I'm no longer procastinate in YouTube, because every time that I open YouTube in incognito, the recommendations are sooo bad, that I just scroll a few seconds and get out, and now I'm YouTube free for a long time.

jrmann100 4y ago
I shut down YouTube's addictive tendencies through a couple of less extreme factors. DF Tube (Distraction Free) web extensions are available[0] for Chrome and Firefox which cut down intrusive UI (comments, recommended videos, the home page). It's easy to clone and extend the add-on if you want to block more. When I'm on mobile, I limit the recommendations I can't block by disabling/clearing YouTube watch history. The new UI is aware of how much worse the suggestions are and hides them altogether—which is exactly what I want. From there, I try only look at my subscriptions feed and occasionally the trending videos page. This makes YouTube less overwhelming—even if I watch just as much content—because I'm in control of what I want to see. Curious if anyone else uses YouTube like this! [0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distraction-free/mjdepdfccjgcndkmemponafgioodelna https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distractio...

carlgreene 4y ago

Ugh. One of my favorite things to do is go to my favorite channels and sort by oldest to see how their videos have progressed over time. Such a shame they’ve made that so difficult for…nothing?

duxup 4y ago

I use YouTube frequently, but I don’t consider myself much of a power user. I have no idea how I’m “supposed to use” YouTube. I assume because I’m a fairly light user my confusion must be because it has some powerful tools/ interface for power users that confuses light users like me. But then I try to understand how I should find what I’m looking for and it seems there’s no good / efficient way to use it where I don’t end up wondering why I can’t just click this or that to get what I want.

b34r 4y ago

I use the YouTube app on my Tesla often and honestly this UI update has been a welcome improvement so far. The like button is now above the fold so I can easily tap it. It’s the little things

D13Fd 4y ago

What were they before? This post assumes a level of YouTube knowledge that I lack.

hnburnsy 4y ago

It is even worse for a music artist, on the Videos tab there is no sort at all.

crazygringo 4y ago

> The only two possible filters on the list of videos of a channel now are most recent and most popular. Isn't that all there's ever been? Just chronological and popularity? This post isn't very helpful unless you say what you think has been removed. (I, for one, have always wished for most popular over the last 30 days, but oh well.) > Also, there's less videos on a single row now. You're going to have to tell us how many there were before and how many there are now. I'm not seeing any difference. It also depends -- are you talking about the home page? Channel home page? Channel videos tab? Because they all act differently. Are you sure you just haven't changed your zoom settings or something? Or your window width?

animal_spirits 4y ago
You used to be able to filter by oldest to newest which doesn't look possible anymore
- happyopossum 4y ago
  Err, that’s sorting - not filtering. And I’m staring at a YouTube channel right now and the sort options are: Most Popular Date added (oldest) Date added (newest)
  - garblegarble 4y ago
    >Most Popular Date added (oldest) Date added (newest) That's what I see too, but worth remembering that other people might see totally different UI options, given the number of A/B tests that Google run
- jjice 4y ago
  Was it there recently for you? I hadn't seen that option on a channel's list of videos for what must be years now.
dartharva 4y ago
There was an "oldest" filter too. Especially necessary for today's YouTube for us to revisit channels that once used to be good but then gradually fell into dark patterns like everyone else in the industry.

guilamu 4y ago

Imho, Freetube is the best way to use YouTube.

jgworks 4y ago

I very much dislike the "glow" behind the videos now. Its constantly updating and very distracting.

cphoover 4y ago

Youtube has become almost unusable. recommendations are so bad. Because I'm politically independent I've been put into some kind of right-wing recommendation track... Now I'm getting recommended ignorant pwnd the lib shorts. I've pressed not interested and don't recommend this channel but it does nothing. I really hate the endless short videos of youtube, instagram, and tiktok. I have no tiktok but they've essentially recreated the same crap on youtube. The experience of YouTube has been pretty much completely ruined for me. The content of videos seems to have gone way down too. I think this may have coincided with the change in monetization strategy. Seems like the quality of recommendations has gone WAYYY down since then.

AlexandrB 4y ago
It's not just you, I'm left of Democrat and end up getting Jordan Peterson recommended to me. Especially on shorts. My guess is the algorithm thinks I like "politics" and suggests whatever "political" content it can find. Besides this, I too have found the content quality declining. The best content now comes from channels/creators I followed years ago, while most new stuff that's being recommended is of the reaction to reaction to reaction variety.

maphew 4y ago

Something to keep in mind is that YouTube does A/B testing, showing different interface design changes to different people and then comparing the stats later.

notsahil 4y ago

You can try Invidious it's an open source alternative front-end to YouTube. https://docs.invidious.io/instances/ https://docs.invidious.io/instances/

ryemigie 4y ago

On the TV app it is nuts now. Only 4 rows of recommendations, and 5 videos per row. Like a 1000% reduction in possible recommendations. No idea why.

jraph 4y ago

Invidious is an acceptable interface to YouTube. Some things are missing, like searching and queuing videos while watching one (I guess adding this feature could be a weekend project), but there's no ads, you can listen to video without downloading the video part, it does not stop after a while, and is quite lightweight. You can subscribe to channels and there's no magic happening in the videos you actually see, nor any need for a Google account. The information density is correct. You don't wait before a skeleton while the interface loads, because it's instant. SponsorBlock works with it too. I can recommend. It might not be very sexy, but its interface design is not driven by commercial reasons and does not follow the oversimplification trend.

onemoresoop 4y ago
Likewise, I recommend Invidious, it's clean and sane. There are a lot of things missing but that's a feature not a bug.
rexreed 4y ago
I am a big user of Invidious as well. The biggest issue is the lack of subtitling, especially foreign language subtitles. Also, the lack of playlist support. Those things often force me back to YouTube when I need to view a video with english language subtitles. Is there any way to get subtitles into the Invidious interface?

ilyt 4y ago

I gave up long time ago and just used RSS feeds from channels I subscribe. I am fully convinced the only reason RSS still works is that someone at YT forgot the feature exists and so it didn't get fucked with from when YT subscription panel was still working.

delecti 4y ago
The /feed/subscriptions page has also very consistently worked as a reverse-chronological feed of your subscriptions the whole time.

HurdsTimesNear 4y ago

SOMEBODY pls write a firefox extension that allows you to simulate high engagement for any feature you pick. that way we could ascertain only the stuff we like about websites get's to stay and everything else goes by the wayside...

zeroonetwothree 4y ago

Noticed this UI change today as well and it’s awful. Makes me feel less bad that I canceled premium and won’t be using YT anymore.

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weinzierl 4y ago

The biggest offender is Youtube Shorts at the top. With TikTok at least you can restrict your daily watch time and it is pure entertainment anyway - I don't have to open it when I don't want entertainment. Youtube is different because it has lots of useful stuff too and this mixture of the helpful and the addictive is pure evil. It is almost as if every food item in your life is served with a beer, a cigarette, some coke and some crack for free. A bit OT, but I watch a lot of tutorials with many parts. Is there a good way to track which part I already watched?

soared 4y ago
There is a chrome extension to block shorts fyi
kevincox 4y ago
I hate shorts with a passion. It's like they just decided to remove half of the features and think it is better. Like you can't cast a short to your TV via the YouTube app. You can cast other portrait videos, but if they have #shorts in the title then it gets blocked. Luckily you can get the regular video UI if you go direct to the video link in your browser, but no casting and if you ever get to the video another way you need to edit the URL to do simple things like seek.
- deleted 4y ago
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dpedu 4y ago

On youtube's desktop site, I've also noticed that sometime within the last couple months the home page no longer shows the duration of videos when the page loads. After 3-6 seconds, the timestamps pop in. I don't know if this is intentionally or a result of lazy-loading - but seeing that the video thumb, title, author, view count, and age all load instantly with the page, I struggle to come up with a reason it could be unintentional. This bothers me because I like to know how long a video is before I commit the time to sitting down and watching it. This feels like an attempt at a dark pattern with the intent to improve metrics - surely watch time is a metric youtube cares about.

spikej 4y ago
Same with the 3 dots that show extra options like saving to playlist. They pop in after the rest of the site has loaded.
- bavell 4y ago
  They also have a tiny hotbox which encourages misclicks (trying to click "Not Interested" but whoopsie, another view on that video!). Dark patterns galore. Edit: looks like the dots are 40x40px on desktop
  - lakomen 4y ago
    And then they torture and ban sites who use the same dark patterns with Adsense. It's as hypocritical as it gets.
- RealStickman_ 4y ago
  And sometimes the save to playlist is a separate button while at other times it's hidden behind the dots. I've had to cancel countless clips from misclicking. (Multiple times in a row even)
dom96 4y ago
yeah, I've noticed that timestamp thing as well. Super annoying.

kevinfiol 4y ago

I gave up on the YouTube UI a while ago and now rely on a script that runs every hour to generate an HTML page of my subscriptions (via RSS feeds): https://kevinfiol.com/youtube/ https://kevinfiol.com/youtube/

tnorthcutt 4y ago
Are you open to sharing the code you use to generate this?
- kevinfiol 4y ago
  Sure: https://github.com/kevinfiol/youtube https://github.com/kevinfiol/youtube Some things to note if you'd like to use it: 1. I deploy to Github Pages via Github Actions. See .github/workflows/build.yml for details. The only thing you might wanna change here is the `schedule` of how often to build your page 2. I define my subscriptions in src/feeds.json. It's just an array of tuples [name, rss_url]. 3. I currently redirect to an Invidious instance. You can modify the `YOUTUBE_URL` const in scripts/render.js to `youtube.com` if you don't care for this EDIT: By the way, I also wrote this scrappy user script to quickly download my youtube subscriptions as JSON: https://gist.github.com/kevinfiol/da63cd137327b8f8d6b70706017320ef https://gist.github.com/kevinfiol/da63cd137327b8f8d6b7070601... It'll just create a `get feeds` button at https://www.youtube.com/feed/channels https://www.youtube.com/feed/channels
pradn 4y ago
This is actually fantastic. I think we need alternatives like this for every other "algorithmic feed" website. Twitter has become unusable and toxic for me in recent years. It seems like most of the tweets are recommendations - those liked by my follows or their friends. It's maddening to not have control. It seems like no matter how much I try I can't help but see vitriolic politics tweets, million-like jokes, etc.
MandieD 4y ago
That is seriously useful on so many levels - thank you for sharing!

c7b 4y ago

I recently got YT premium in response to their push, but it's messed with my YT enjoyment in a somewhat unexpected way: I hadn't realized to what extent I'd become used to having different sets of recommendations and being able to get fresh starts on recommendations by deleting cookies... I've almost started to become strategic about what I click on now instead of just going with whatever flow I'm enjoying right now. Not sure if I'll continue the subscription after the trial if they don't give us more options for managing our preferences. I guess I could get a family option for myself just to get more accounts, but I'll have to see.

kortex 4y ago
Can YT premium still have multiple accounts? That's the main way I manage my learned feeds. I do wish there was something like "virtualenv" for youtube, where it's trivial to change your preferences without changing your account (which is still tied to things like subscribers and comments.
- c7b 4y ago
  > Can YT premium still have multiple accounts? Not that I'm aware of, at least not for a single standard subscription. There's a family option with up to 5 accounts that might work, but it's probably not how that's meant to be used, so you might run into some problems. virtualenv is a good analogy, that's what I'd want as well, but I doubt that we're going to get that.
  - cloogshicer 4y ago
    You can definitely create a new Brand account, which is managed by the same Google Account. The brand account will then also have premium benefits, while having its own watch history. This is how I use it. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/4642409?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/4642409?hl=en
    - c7b 4y ago
      Interesting, thanks!

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villgax 4y ago

Despite having premium there is just no way to get rid of Shorts everywhere. It is the worst form of content which deliberately removes the seekbar & is not enough to convey anything meaningful. It's basically video reddit but minus the option delve further into the content.

mradek 4y ago

As each of these subscription services have gotten worse, I’ve ended my contracts with each one and I’m probably way happier this way. I’m not overloaded by content, and I feel a more enjoyable sense of discovery when I go looking on purpose for a video. I use brave browser, so gg ads.

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woah 4y ago

It's a tale as old as time: Programmer on HN complains about the removal of obscure menu items from a popular social media app

lob_it 4y ago

After archiving petabytes of inferior content, youtube is about worthless if you do not know what you are looking for. UI/UX/IQ/EQ do not apply. Years ago, tcp/ip was cool to explore. Now, its just ad-bait for tabloid and low aptitude fodder populations. At least on IOS, "Halt" is a good browser that blocks all youtube ads, beginning to end. Much like grocery shopping, I only have a short list of content to view on youtube, with their algo recomendations and UI being moot for the past several years. Even google places low quality results littered with ad-infested pages in the SERPs for inferior time suck pennies.

minraws 4y ago

Seconded those pills make me want to commit murder... It's really annoying then there is randomly adjusting css on the home page, they have over done stuff in the name of mobile first.

holler 4y ago
the pill/rounded corners make it feel plushy, but are discordant with the square edges of the rectangular video, overall making the design feel off.

the_jesus_villa 4y ago

I'm also annoyed that I can't sort for oldest videos. I remember being a 10-year old and reading these kinds of threads on the Neopets forums everytime a UI change happened. Back then, everyone would promise to switch to a competitor. Then everyone would forget, get attached to the new UI, and then if they ever changed it again (even changing it back to be more similar to the old one!) we'd hear the say peans about how they are ruining it. See also: livejournal users threatening to go to dreamwidth, and /b/day (the 4chan exodus to 7chan).

LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago

Waddya mean? https://postimg.cc/Wq3t4Fxn https://postimg.cc/Wq3t4Fxn

activitypea 4y ago

it only ever gets worse

andy_ppp 4y ago

While everyone is complaining sometimes the bottom of the video is cut off on mobile... this is particularly annoying in Chess videos if the bottom row of white pieces is cut off.

input_sh 4y ago

That's not all, there are some channels where you can't even sort by most popular anymore. From what I gather they're mostly music-related ones (perhaps in favour of YouTube's "most popular songs" playlists). Here's a random example: https://youtube.com/c/DomDolla/videos https://youtube.com/c/DomDolla/videos Notice there's no option to even select any type of sort. It makes a tiny bit of sense to use that YouTube playlist instead (for example artists may upload songs to a label's channel or something), but it's still very annoying.

blancNoir 4y ago

What's been driving me nuts is they took away the ability to toggle comments to the right of the video, so you could scroll them while viewing instead of having comments below the video necessitating scrolling the video out of view while reading comments. I thought that toggle was relatively new too.

mrkramer 4y ago
You can still do it in YouTube Android app as far as I know. Open video, tap that little empty square in the bottom right corner and your video will be rotated to the horizontal position(view) and then tap that little comments box[0] in the bottom left corner(third icon). [0] https://i.imgur.com/vDzDrio.jpg https://i.imgur.com/vDzDrio.jpg

xg15 4y ago

Conspiracy theory: If the only remaining sorting options all bury old videos, is this maybe a preparation to put old videos into cold storage?

kderbyma 4y ago
most definitely. They don't want to support it. they make less money from old content and it would deviate from their fanatical control over suggestions that are probably some of the worst in the industry coupled with the worst user interface, aggressive ads, and dark patterns galore....it's trash....it's like a VLT machine at this point...designed to convert advertiser money and funnel it to affiliated creators for the most part.

comboy 4y ago

Does it matter? It seem to literally throw random videos it thinks you may like into the search results. It is hard to process for me how could they screw simple things so bad.

DaveSchmindel 4y ago

I feel like an old man in my own head, muttering, "I remember the Sort feature like it was yesterday!"

lrvick 4y ago

Install LibRedirect and you never need to visit youtube.com again.

arnaudsm 4y ago

The Watch later UX is atrocious too : - Adding : hover the video 1000ms to reveal the button - Removing : 2 clicks away under a menu Why hide the 2 most frequent actions? Do you even do user testing?

regularjack 4y ago
Your most frequent actions aren't necessarily everyone's. I very rarely use the watch later feature. Maybe they are doing user testing.
- arnaudsm 4y ago
  I'm referring to the UI when you're specifically in watch later mode. Imagine if opening a Google result took 2 clicks, it'd be infuriating.

running101 4y ago

I always feel dumb when using YouTube’s apps and website. It is probably the most non intuitive site I use

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

The funny thing is that Google brags about the science behind their UX and then they have complete garbage UX like Youtube and libs like material design. I also wonder if the Youtube mobile app testers are minors or have transparent fingers.

matsemann 4y ago

My biggest peeve is how on the app, scrolling past a thumbnail removes it and starts playing a preview. So the title or whatever disappears, and instead I get to watch some person talk on mute. Then when I actually click the video, it starts from where I was in the preview, instead from the beginning, so I have to rewind since I obviously didn't catch anything from the small muted preview.

gs17 4y ago
For me it shows captions in the preview, so I actually get what they're saying. I don't have captions on for videos, so no idea why it's different between us.
- matsemann 4y ago
  I do get captions, but they seldom make sense. I guess no one at YouTube have tried watching non-English videos when making this preview feature..? To be fair, the captions are quite bad for the British panel shows I get recommended as well.
  - gs17 4y ago
    That's fair, I forgot how awful the captions can be. Still not sure how we got to a situation where, when watching a video on my Google phone, the phone can make vastly better, and near real-time, captions than YouTube can.

NotYourLawyer 4y ago

YouTube is/was a really good YouTube. It should stop trying to be a second-rate TikTok.

red2awn 4y ago

Everything also have a rounded corner now. This is only in my A/B test group though, I don't see it when in incognito.

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opan 4y ago

They've also hidden away the "save to playlist" button, making it extra clicks to do.

andreyk 4y ago

Why even worse? I use youtube a LOT and I don't particularly dislike it.

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ducktective 4y ago

Yes, and the cure for us users is : yt-dlp I don't even do that. I use mpv + yt-dlp + SponsorBlock plugin: `script-opts=ytdl_hook-ytdl_path=yt-dlp`

mrkramer 4y ago

People at Google don't use Google products, YouTube in particular. It is quite astonishing that so many features are nonsense or not yet implemented. Why I can't search comments in comments section of a video; if a video has 100+ or 1 000+ comments I can't easily find comments that are relevant to me. Why I can't search my playlist videos and my liked videos; I have 1 000+ liked videos and 1 000+ videos in my Watch Later playlist. Maybe I'm disorganized with Watch Later playlist but I'm also a power user which is not satisfied with only casual features. Any yea you can't sort channel videos like you use to(Newest, Oldest, Most Popular). Like you said it's now only Most recent and Most popular. And one thing that I almost forgot, in Web version of YouTube you can search channel for videos and in native mobile app you can't search channel for videos. When I say search channel for videos I mean query with keywords(there is no Search Bar within Channel page or within Videos tab).

bavell 4y ago
My pet theory is that they only implement features which are lightweight enough to not cause significant load on their backend and if it does then the feature dies right there, no matter how useful. Extreme cost-focused tunnel vision.
- mrkramer 4y ago
  But it doesn't make sense when you know that they have billions in cash sitting in bank waiting to be spend. They have the money and the knowledge to implement whatever feature they need to. Backend load and infrastructure scale is not a problem at this point. My somewhat simple explanation is; Google wants to cater to the casual crowd so hard to the point of sacrificing user experience for advanced users or power users who use YouTube every day. They rather prefer status quo than try to bother with more advanced features. But I have to admit, they already have some pretty advanced features but they need to keep pushing.
numinos1 4y ago
YouTube is slowly transitioning from a UGC video marketplace into a modern version of cable tv. These technical oversights aren't bugs. They're a deliberate effort to shape user behavior and maximize advertising revenue. Old content is a liability and is slowly being deprecated from the system.

robszumski 4y ago

Am I crazy or did they remove 1.15x playback? That one seemed like the right mix of "I don't have 30 minutes" and not skewing the voices too much.

running101 4y ago

I hope some from YouTube sees this feedback

CyborgCabbage 4y ago

Going to take this opportunity to ask if anyone else hasn't been able to find any playlists in YouTube search results? Whenever I filter for playlists, there is always nothing.

theduder99 4y ago

Same here. Since YT has been going downhill I've started downloading videos and storing them offline (no not on google drive for G to scan and remove in the future) in a couple spots because I've seen many items in my saved lists get removed or set to private over the years.

agentcooper 4y ago

I've created a small macOS app to track YouTube channels without being distracted by the web UI: https://github.com/agentcooper/telik https://github.com/agentcooper/telik. Maybe some of you will find it useful.

deorder 4y ago

Lately I often have trouble finding the date/time a youtube video was posted. Sometimes I find it when I open the description box, but not always.

t0bia_s 4y ago

Freetube - https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube

Fervicus 4y ago

This one makes me really sad. Frequently I find myself wanting to look at the oldest video on a particular channel.

regular 4y ago

garfieldnate 4y ago

One recent change that I really hate is the way the video pops up and follows you down the page when you scroll down to look at comments. It blocks what I'm trying to look at! Very annoying.

kderbyma 4y ago

Needs New Management.... thats the first step. :)