4 ms·

To YouTube: I'd gladly pay you if your website was de-bloated and fast like this

69 points by behnamoh 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[dupe] Large piped thread over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37911989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37911989
renegat0x0 3y ago
Joking aside, I am surprised how fast invidious and other open source projects run, and how slow runs youtube. Does algorithm need to think about which advert to put? Is it because JS/CSS is so bloated? Is it because everything corporate runs slower on firefox? Maybe youtube just runs faster on chrome? Dark design?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rascul 3y ago
There seem to be no search filters. And I had to go to the docs to find that changing to a light theme requires ?theme=light URL parameter which doesn't appear to persist to a new session.
jaybrendansmith 3y ago
YouTube is the best thing on the internet. Prove me wrong. I scoffed for many years, but honestly Google Search and Gmail could go away tomorrow. Sure, if it did, it would make my life hell for a few weeks as I switch all my email accounts to a new provider, and maybe I would miss search a little. But YouTube?? The entire knowledge of the human race now resides in YouTube. It should be replicated to the Library of Congress, the Internet Archive, and the Encyclopedia Galactica.
johnea 3y ago
You'd gladly pay them to track your sexual orientation and hernia condition? People are weird...
jitl 3y ago
wow, I thought the iOS app was actually pretty good, but this site feels like 3x faster than the app! It’s wild how doing less but better is so hard as companies to pursue. I struggle with it at work also.
- treyd 3y ago
  > It’s wild how doing less but better is so hard as companies to pursue It's because so much of the slowdown is tooling for tracking, ad delivery, A/B test tooling, etc. that foss projects don't have to do.
- foota 3y ago
  Eh, sure, but also the videos have a bit of a delay. It looks like the frontpage itself is aggressively cacheable (no personalization), so it's not too surprising it's fast.
Apreche 3y ago
Fast? Search queries are taking several seconds. On actual YouTube they are instantaneous.
- eska 3y ago
  Must be the instance getting overloaded by hn. It’s instant for me right now.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
chaps 3y ago
Think it got slashdotted.
fastball 3y ago
I have honestly never had an issue with feeling like YouTube was slow. It continues to be best-in-class if I am watching a video online.
anon-3988 3y ago
But you're not going to pay because it is quite literally the biggest library of high quality videos ever existed? It is so weird how people can buy ridiculously expensive coffee but cannot fathom paying 2x that monthly for a service that they use almost 24/7 for music, videos and most importantly, for archiving. As it stands, Youtube have absolutely zero obligations to store any videos indefinitely. If Youtube "owes" its user some service, which it provides for free, then it might as well be state funded or become non-profit. I keep asking people the same question; if YOU are the owner of Youtube, how would you stay afloat? Good will of the people to donate money? lol. inb4 they make so much money from ads!! Well, there you go, theres the answer. They (and we) need ads to keep Youtube afloat.
- kazinator 3y ago
  Archiving? Wut? If you find anything you really like on YT, you better download it before it disappears.
- duluca 3y ago
  2x? More like one cup in this economy.
- zinclozenge 3y ago
  I specifically started paying for youtube premium because spotify just didn't have nearly as much of the music I listen to, and specifically the artists I listen to, and the youtube music app was good enough. The fact that I can watch youtube without ads is a nice little bonus. For my purposes, youtube premium is 100% worth it.
  - politelemon 3y ago
    I'm actually not super familiar with Spotify. Does it not allow users to upload their own music? I understand YouTube, it's easy to upload to it, so all an artist needs to do it add some cover art and upload the music. Surely Spotify wants to encompass the SoundCloud functionality. As a listener, I use yt because it's easy to find new things similar to what I just heard. And people also do mixes of many different pieces together, like a mixtape from someone I don't know. Those are great for uninterrupted listening. Can you do that on Spotify?
eska 3y ago
The web version of youtube on mobile seems to default to 360p (I don’t like using the apps because of tracking), but this even allows setting a chosen default. I feel like the official web version is intentionally bad in addition to being unintentionally bad (breaking back button, refresh loading the wrong page, title being that of the previously watched video, getting stuck in ajax hell etc)
goalonetwo 3y ago
use alternative clients like smarttube (And with SponsorBlock for the ultimate combo)
- montzark 3y ago
  Firefox seems to work as well?
sen 3y ago
I personally think YouTube premium is one of the best (legal) bang-for-buck entertainment services out there right now. A bajillion times the content of all the other video streaming services combined, plus music videos, for half the cost of Netflix. It’s the only monthly subscription I have anymore, despite despising Google as a company. Netflix/etc are a total ripoff in comparison.
weird-eye-issue 3y ago
YouTube is fast enough, lets not pretend the difference between you paying them or not comes down to 1 second faster load times
- esolyt 3y ago
  Youtube is fast but the interface is certainly bloated. I highly recommend the browser extension Unhook which declutters and simplifies Youtube's interface.
christiangenco 3y ago
> Failed with error code 1002, see logs for more info
- O1111OOO 3y ago
  > Failed with error code 1002, see logs for more info I've been seeing the same thing. I want this to work on my browser because it's wicked fast. Getting the error with LibreWolf (FF w/tweaks and a ton of extensions) with only occasional success. Also the same error with Firefox (some extensions) but I have slightly more success. Flashpeak Slimjet (Chrome, closed source): Some error msgs but mostly trying to load the video with no success (ie, "hourglass", no error msg). No issues with Vivaldi (some extensions) & Brave (no extensions).
parker_mountain 3y ago
" I'd gladly pay you if " no, you wouldn't.
- cwillu 3y ago
  I know why I stopped paying them.
mydogmuppet 3y ago
I had a You Tube Developer account for a year or two. I never saw an advert anywhere.
irksomehails 3y ago
Personally, YouTube premium is without a doubt the service I feel I get the most value out of, for the money I pay. A close second is Prime and Spotify. I do not care for any YT exclusive content, just the ad-free experience.
mvdtnz 3y ago
If there's one thing I've learned from my web career it's that people who make claims like "I'd pay for it if you'd just..." will never pay you a cent.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  And, in turn, developers never just, thereby ensuring it.
jancsika 3y ago
"Fast like this" means when you click on a video, the page loads header and footer, does a relayout to show a spinner, then another relayout to display the video (and possibly another relayout for video controls?) Reality is so lame that even when we dream everything's still janky
compiler-guy 3y ago
YouTube has a bunch of issues, but I have never felt speed was high in the list. Sure, faster is better than slower, but if I ran the zoo, I would solve the takedown issues, radicalization, and click bait long before I spent time making it faster.
_nivlac_ 3y ago
The title of this is quite editorialised, I'd suggest changing it to something less so as per the guidelines.
readthenotes1 3y ago
I'm not sure how you're paying for this. I realize the content is free to you, but surely the bandwidth is not?
geuis 3y ago
What I would like to see: - stop recommending videos from subscribed channels that are in some case over a decade old. Sometimes I want to watch those but I go directly to the channel to filter by oldest. - stop recommending videos I've already seen. The fact that there's a "new to you" filter allllll the way to the right in what ever they call the filter bar is, tells me there's a user need for it that some product manager is trying to minimize. - be more specific with recommended videos. Currently I am supremely interested in educational videos specifically related to new 3d printing videos where the creator takes 2d images to 3d printable models. Yeah that is very specific, and I absolutely know that new videos on that topic are being produced because different searches find relevant videos some times. - search should only include relevant search results. Ffs it's so annoying that more than half of the search results are shorts and then "related" content. I don't give 3 shits about related videos. I just simply want to see all of the search results in descending order of relation to my search term. - there are more
kyle-rb 3y ago
Do you use any other streaming sites? Because all of the ones I've used are significantly worse. Most video platforms don't seem to give a shit whether their keyboard controls work consistently (or whether they have any), or being able to reload the page and resume playback from the last known video/timestamp when things fail due to some unrecoverable error. I've been too busy cursing every other site to notice whether YouTube is bloated.

69 points by behnamoh 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

[dupe] Large piped thread over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37911989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37911989

renegat0x0 3y ago

Joking aside, I am surprised how fast invidious and other open source projects run, and how slow runs youtube. Does algorithm need to think about which advert to put? Is it because JS/CSS is so bloated? Is it because everything corporate runs slower on firefox? Maybe youtube just runs faster on chrome? Dark design?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

rascul 3y ago

There seem to be no search filters. And I had to go to the docs to find that changing to a light theme requires ?theme=light URL parameter which doesn't appear to persist to a new session.

jaybrendansmith 3y ago

YouTube is the best thing on the internet. Prove me wrong. I scoffed for many years, but honestly Google Search and Gmail could go away tomorrow. Sure, if it did, it would make my life hell for a few weeks as I switch all my email accounts to a new provider, and maybe I would miss search a little. But YouTube?? The entire knowledge of the human race now resides in YouTube. It should be replicated to the Library of Congress, the Internet Archive, and the Encyclopedia Galactica.

johnea 3y ago

You'd gladly pay them to track your sexual orientation and hernia condition? People are weird...

jitl 3y ago

wow, I thought the iOS app was actually pretty good, but this site feels like 3x faster than the app! It’s wild how doing less but better is so hard as companies to pursue. I struggle with it at work also.

treyd 3y ago
> It’s wild how doing less but better is so hard as companies to pursue It's because so much of the slowdown is tooling for tracking, ad delivery, A/B test tooling, etc. that foss projects don't have to do.
foota 3y ago
Eh, sure, but also the videos have a bit of a delay. It looks like the frontpage itself is aggressively cacheable (no personalization), so it's not too surprising it's fast.

Apreche 3y ago

Fast? Search queries are taking several seconds. On actual YouTube they are instantaneous.

eska 3y ago
Must be the instance getting overloaded by hn. It’s instant for me right now.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

chaps 3y ago

Think it got slashdotted.

fastball 3y ago

I have honestly never had an issue with feeling like YouTube was slow. It continues to be best-in-class if I am watching a video online.

anon-3988 3y ago

But you're not going to pay because it is quite literally the biggest library of high quality videos ever existed? It is so weird how people can buy ridiculously expensive coffee but cannot fathom paying 2x that monthly for a service that they use almost 24/7 for music, videos and most importantly, for archiving. As it stands, Youtube have absolutely zero obligations to store any videos indefinitely. If Youtube "owes" its user some service, which it provides for free, then it might as well be state funded or become non-profit. I keep asking people the same question; if YOU are the owner of Youtube, how would you stay afloat? Good will of the people to donate money? lol. inb4 they make so much money from ads!! Well, there you go, theres the answer. They (and we) need ads to keep Youtube afloat.

kazinator 3y ago
Archiving? Wut? If you find anything you really like on YT, you better download it before it disappears.
duluca 3y ago
2x? More like one cup in this economy.
zinclozenge 3y ago
I specifically started paying for youtube premium because spotify just didn't have nearly as much of the music I listen to, and specifically the artists I listen to, and the youtube music app was good enough. The fact that I can watch youtube without ads is a nice little bonus. For my purposes, youtube premium is 100% worth it.
- politelemon 3y ago
  I'm actually not super familiar with Spotify. Does it not allow users to upload their own music? I understand YouTube, it's easy to upload to it, so all an artist needs to do it add some cover art and upload the music. Surely Spotify wants to encompass the SoundCloud functionality. As a listener, I use yt because it's easy to find new things similar to what I just heard. And people also do mixes of many different pieces together, like a mixtape from someone I don't know. Those are great for uninterrupted listening. Can you do that on Spotify?

eska 3y ago

The web version of youtube on mobile seems to default to 360p (I don’t like using the apps because of tracking), but this even allows setting a chosen default. I feel like the official web version is intentionally bad in addition to being unintentionally bad (breaking back button, refresh loading the wrong page, title being that of the previously watched video, getting stuck in ajax hell etc)

goalonetwo 3y ago

use alternative clients like smarttube (And with SponsorBlock for the ultimate combo)

montzark 3y ago
Firefox seems to work as well?

sen 3y ago

I personally think YouTube premium is one of the best (legal) bang-for-buck entertainment services out there right now. A bajillion times the content of all the other video streaming services combined, plus music videos, for half the cost of Netflix. It’s the only monthly subscription I have anymore, despite despising Google as a company. Netflix/etc are a total ripoff in comparison.

weird-eye-issue 3y ago

YouTube is fast enough, lets not pretend the difference between you paying them or not comes down to 1 second faster load times

esolyt 3y ago
Youtube is fast but the interface is certainly bloated. I highly recommend the browser extension Unhook which declutters and simplifies Youtube's interface.

christiangenco 3y ago

> Failed with error code 1002, see logs for more info

O1111OOO 3y ago
> Failed with error code 1002, see logs for more info I've been seeing the same thing. I want this to work on my browser because it's wicked fast. Getting the error with LibreWolf (FF w/tweaks and a ton of extensions) with only occasional success. Also the same error with Firefox (some extensions) but I have slightly more success. Flashpeak Slimjet (Chrome, closed source): Some error msgs but mostly trying to load the video with no success (ie, "hourglass", no error msg). No issues with Vivaldi (some extensions) & Brave (no extensions).

parker_mountain 3y ago

" I'd gladly pay you if " no, you wouldn't.

cwillu 3y ago
I know why I stopped paying them.

mydogmuppet 3y ago

I had a You Tube Developer account for a year or two. I never saw an advert anywhere.

irksomehails 3y ago

Personally, YouTube premium is without a doubt the service I feel I get the most value out of, for the money I pay. A close second is Prime and Spotify. I do not care for any YT exclusive content, just the ad-free experience.

mvdtnz 3y ago

If there's one thing I've learned from my web career it's that people who make claims like "I'd pay for it if you'd just..." will never pay you a cent.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
And, in turn, developers never just, thereby ensuring it.

jancsika 3y ago

"Fast like this" means when you click on a video, the page loads header and footer, does a relayout to show a spinner, then another relayout to display the video (and possibly another relayout for video controls?) Reality is so lame that even when we dream everything's still janky

compiler-guy 3y ago

YouTube has a bunch of issues, but I have never felt speed was high in the list. Sure, faster is better than slower, but if I ran the zoo, I would solve the takedown issues, radicalization, and click bait long before I spent time making it faster.

_nivlac_ 3y ago

The title of this is quite editorialised, I'd suggest changing it to something less so as per the guidelines.

readthenotes1 3y ago

I'm not sure how you're paying for this. I realize the content is free to you, but surely the bandwidth is not?

geuis 3y ago

What I would like to see: - stop recommending videos from subscribed channels that are in some case over a decade old. Sometimes I want to watch those but I go directly to the channel to filter by oldest. - stop recommending videos I've already seen. The fact that there's a "new to you" filter allllll the way to the right in what ever they call the filter bar is, tells me there's a user need for it that some product manager is trying to minimize. - be more specific with recommended videos. Currently I am supremely interested in educational videos specifically related to new 3d printing videos where the creator takes 2d images to 3d printable models. Yeah that is very specific, and I absolutely know that new videos on that topic are being produced because different searches find relevant videos some times. - search should only include relevant search results. Ffs it's so annoying that more than half of the search results are shorts and then "related" content. I don't give 3 shits about related videos. I just simply want to see all of the search results in descending order of relation to my search term. - there are more

kyle-rb 3y ago

Do you use any other streaming sites? Because all of the ones I've used are significantly worse. Most video platforms don't seem to give a shit whether their keyboard controls work consistently (or whether they have any), or being able to reload the page and resume playback from the last known video/timestamp when things fail due to some unrecoverable error. I've been too busy cursing every other site to notice whether YouTube is bloated.