7 ms·
YouTube seems to once again be rolling out its widely hated new web redesign
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- alternatetwo 2y agoI feel anxiety when watching videos with the thumbnails for other videos visible below. Also, I was unable to find the description of videos for waaay too long. Absolutely horrible.
- amlib 2y agoI've been using for many years now the unhook youtube[1] extension to hide any distracting nonsense on youtube, you can select piecemeal what to hide, like the recommended trash in the sidebar, cards at the end of the video and even the main page. Supports firefox, chrome and edge. [1] https://unhook.app/ https://unhook.app/
- pfist 2y agoI second this recommendation. Unhook is a game-changer if you spend a lot of time on YouTube. It makes the site so much more pleasant to use.
- rpozarickij 2y agoIn addition to Unhook, I also use SponsorBlock [1] and Return YouTube Dislike [2]. While SponsorBlock is something that some people might not want/need, I find Return YouTube Dislike to be particularly useful because the like/dislike ratio is a valuable data point for a video I'm about to watch even if it's just an approximate/predicted value. [1] https://sponsor.ajay.app/ https://sponsor.ajay.app/ [2] https://returnyoutubedislike.com/ https://returnyoutubedislike.com/
- xyst 2y agointeresting, why do you get anxiety? Is this the equivalent of doom scrolling? Doom watching a never ending queue of videos?
- mnau 2y agoNot the OP, but I sometimes get rather disgusting/distressing "you might also like" in search results (not home screen). Think thumbnails for diseases/injuries/gore, with shock thumbail and so on. No, I do not want to see thumbnail for parasite infested arm in my search results.
- balder1991 2y agoI guess if you’re watching YouTube because you’re avoiding something else, your mind already learned to keep whopping between videos and suddenly it’s a TikTok experience.
- alternatetwo 2y agoI can't really explain it. First of all, because thumbnails are mostly eyegore I guess and because it takes the focus away from a much less visually assaulting video? It also doesn't help they're not fully visible. How am I supposed to focus on the video like this? https://i.imgur.com/A0DRmD5.png https://i.imgur.com/A0DRmD5.png
- fullshark 2y agoThat comment is right, you can now watch the video while reading comments, seems like a useful change.
- hmcdona1 2y agoAgreed, I always need to scroll to see video description content and comments which I would rather be able to see while still watching the video. While, instinctively, the previews below the video feel odd because they've been to the right for so long. Logically, I can see the improvement they are going for here and would welcome it.
- jowea 2y agoI have the Enhancer for Youtube extension which solves this problem. And maybe I'm being an anti-change curmudgeon but the previews below seem to be putting more emphasis into engagement chasing social media by having Google try to convince users to click one more video. It's more distracting from the video you're watching than having it to the side in a widescreen monitor.
- AnarchismIsCool 2y agoWhy on earth would you want to read the comments? It's not like the bad old days where they only displayed the ones written by the angriest people to ever live, now they're just whichever people are willing so suck up to the creator the hardest.
- paulddraper 2y ago> where they only displayed the ones written by the angriest people to ever live https://xkcd.com/202/ https://xkcd.com/202/
- b112 2y agoI wonder if Google is going to kill us all, with that comment change. Before the mega-angry were posting such comments, and youtube was absorbing it as some sort of great heat sync. Now, the comments are gone, and the angry crazys will return to the streets, the villages, and this anger will flow into violence, war, nuclear annihilation.
- alphazard 2y agoLate-stage product management.
- rootedbox 2y agoDING DING DING
- Havoc 2y agoI’ll have you know they spent three weeks getting the colour of that button just right! Value was added to society! Nothing short of the greatest minds our universities can produce could have pulled of such a feat
- darth_avocado 2y agoProbably driven by late-stage data science. I’m sure there was an A/B test somewhere that moved some metric by 2% that made this possible. Most likely this was also not tested for long term effects.
- kragen 2y agohttps://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp cd ~/tmp; yt-dlp --write-info-json --write-sub \ --write-auto-sub --sub-lang en,es -f '[height<800]' \ --restrict-filenames --max-downloads "$@" also, mpv can use yt-dlp to play youtube urls on android, https://f-droid.org/es/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/ https://f-droid.org/es/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/ (hopefully f-droid will renew their ssl cert before you read this comment)
- SushiHippie 2y agoCan also recommend the newpipe fork Tubular which integrates sponsor block https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/org.polymorphicshade.tubular https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/org.polymorphicshad...
- kragen 2y agoooh, thanks
- JackGreyhat 2y agoHow did you know f-droid's certificate was about to expire? Do you keep track?
- zaik 2y agoIn Firefox it's easy to see the details of the HTTPS certificate by clicking on the small padlock in the navigation bar.
- contravariant 2y agoIt's not 'about to' it's expired. Did you not get a warning?
- factormeta 2y agoOr for those on low disk space netbook try invidious: Here is a list of running instances: https://api.invidious.io/ https://api.invidious.io/ YOu can turn off the phone screen while playing sound. Much much more light weight than YOutube
- rtkwe 2y agoThey seem determined to move the description every couple years just to make sure creators are always pointing to the wrong spot.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y agoOn the plus side, maybe past videos will become correct again!
- codetrotter 2y agoThis does seem to put the video description where I remember it once was many years ago; on the right side of the video
- kevincox 2y agoAnd they made the description so hard to find that they had to let creators pin comments as a second description.
- chii 2y agowhich might be a hack to get the user to load the comments (esp. on mobile). This means they get to artificially prop up the interaction level!
- JasserInicide 2y agoAnd this time it requires an additional click to get to. Like fucking Christ why?? This is why having a horde of UI designers on payroll is never a positive.
- davidmurdoch 2y agoSome metric they're aiming to improve probably shows this change keeps users on the site a little longer.
- 2y ago
- bluetidepro 2y agoI think the new design is great, honestly. Not sure why there is a huge uproar.
- recursive 2y agoIn general, "everyone" always hates every re-design. Yet we collectively think that stuff looks better than it does 20 years ago. (You don't have to tell me if you personally liked it better, you're an outlier)
- gravescale 2y agoThe problem isn't the redesign as such. The problem usually is a redesign is top cover for hostile features. Reddit is a perfect example where the new design is crawling with dark patterns, popups, nags, more "integrated" (i.e. camouflaged) ads and so on. To enable all that crapware there's a ton of JS and then you need a massive framework thing, and everything is asynchronous now so load all the content with a billion API calls to make everything lag, and then because now you can, you plug in analytics to everything. If it was just about some rounded corners and it works on mobile now (like old Reddit doesn't) only the real NIMBYs would care.
- seoulmetro 2y agoWe don't collectively think things look better than they did 20 years ago... That's impossible to ascertain as a statistic. Nothing has stayed the same. And if it had, then people don't know what the "worse" or "better" is. And things that change are rarely changed purely cosmetically.
- edflsafoiewq 2y agoThere are two kinds of people: those who think "everyone hates every redesign, so we shouldn't do one", and those who think "everyone hates every redesign, so we can ignore how much everyone hates ours".
- bakugo 2y ago>Yet we collectively think that stuff looks better than it does 20 years ago. This is completely meaningless. Most people don't actually know what they prefer and just default to "new good, old bad" when asked.
- f33d5173 2y ago>You don't have to tell me if you personally liked it better, you're an outlier If I don't have any data to the contrary, then I'll extrapolate from my sample size of one. In fact I do have more data, in the form of regularly seeing others say they prefer a variety of older UIs. Granted that everyone hates every redesign, and we can fairly assume that much of this is simple familiarity. But that doesn't mean that every single redesign is an improvement either.
- blehn 2y agoPure change aversion from users. This is a more sensible design. You can now read comments while you watch a video, which is clearly a more important use-case than browsing a bunch of recommended videos while you watch a video. The comments should scroll independently from the main column though.
- wing-_-nuts 2y agoI can't remember ever once reading a youtube comment and being glad I did. They are certainly not valuable enough to take away video real estate.
- OJFord 2y agoI mostly only watch 'technical' videos like machining, 3D printing, electronics, etc. so sometimes I might think something's wrong or strange and appreciate validation from a commenter saying the same (or learn with them when someone replies in correction). Or someone will chime in plausibly claiming experience/relevance to the thing discussed and provide some additional interesting information, in the same way we see in comments on HN. There's a lot of crap too of course, but at least on content that's informational to begin with (not saying memes and music videos) there do exist good comments.
- blehn 2y agoyou can expand the video into "theater mode" and it will fill the window width. just as before.
- viscanti 2y agoFor some people, the comments are the worst part of YouTube. I could see them being pretty vocal about not liking the design that makes them more visible.
- yodsanklai 2y agoI have the feeling these comments went from overwhelmingly hateful tu overwhelmingly praiseful. I don't know how they managed that transition. Moderation or culture change? They are useless either way.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoAre they doing away with those annoying floating video recs that cover the end of every video?
- billy_bitchtits 2y agoUnskippable a/b test that ruins the last 10 seconds of every video. Suck. I hope they do away with it but they won’t.
- ImAnAmateur 2y agoYou can use the pop out video feature in a web browser to see the video directly without any overlays. It works on Firefox, though managing that new pinned-on-top window is messy sometimes.
- m1guelpf 2y agodoes anyone know which A/B teat flag i have to switch to get the redesign?
- Rebelgecko 2y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1c0v9gn/comment/kyztrlq/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1c0v9gn/comment/ky... Keep in mind that A/B tests are all about measuring engagement. If you're in a test you don't like, the most effective thing you can do is reduce your YouTube usage and cancel any subscriptions for the duration
- lolinder 2y agoOne of my favorite uses of uBlock Origin has been to turn off the comments and recommended videos on YouTube. I'll probably have to recreate my filters after this, but other than that it won't affect me much. I highly recommend it! Even if you don't use any ad lists at all, being able to eliminate distracting elements of frequently used sites is a huge QoL improvement.
- vsuperpower2020 2y agoSometimes I scroll down to read a few comments and then just close the entire video out of disgust. Killing comments is a godsend.
- ranger207 2y agoI like the Enhancer for YouTube plugin that blocks all that, and also automatically sets the resolution, makes the video take up the whole browser widow without going fullscreen, and allows speeds greater than 2x https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-youtube/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-...
- ivanjermakov 2y agoAfter the redesign blocking video suggestions is easier than ever. It's just a div with #id.
- NotYourLawyer 2y ago[flagged]
- Havoc 2y agoNot sure I care at this point. As long as they don’t break the subscription page (further) I can get to what I need
- TriangleEdge 2y agoNot a fan of this one. Is this a race to the bottom because of TikTok? The bottom videos sticking out are gross to me.
- xyst 2y agoLooks like a UX designer really trying to get that next promotion. “Look guyz, designed this new YT UI. People staying on the site longer!!1 Haters always goin to hate tho. I pumped the KPIs with new design proven in A/B testing, advertising clicks increased 10X, revenue up. Give me promo, bro?”
- tflol 2y agoThis change is benefitting someone within the company, exactly one person, at the expense of millions of Users with no voice. Shouldn't a "free" product even approaching the popularity at this scale involve democracy? Lets leave it up to a vote. Your stupid change vs. the opinion of the User.
- zx8080 2y agoJust improving some okr bound to a metric "time a user spent on video page". Next time, they will make user do 2 clicks to open the description.
- wrycoder 2y agoWhat I'm not liking is (on iPhone, anyway) having half the vids not having a way to save on a playlist or watchlist. They are more like blog posts, and I have to break my selection flow to look at them. YouTube is now autoplaying stuff it thinks I might like, and there's no way to stop it.
- huhuhu111 2y ago[dead]
- lopkeny12ko 2y agoIsn't this what YouTube looked like circa 2008? I remember the title, description, and comments were to the right of the video. Then they moved the title and description to below the video, and everyone hated it. This feels to me like just undoing the previous redesign.
- M95D 2y agoI think it's designed to keep the video on screen while reading comments. Because NOBODY should scroll down during a commercial!
- rldjbpin 2y agoit seems like an excuse to introduce banner ads below the video for non-premium users. EDIT: on second thought, about the nudge to use the comments section comes across as tone deaf. comments to me appear as a portion of the page visited by a small fraction of users as is. meanwhile, it is spammed with spam and phishing comments generated by ever-changing means. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38652681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38652681) without fully addressing this issue, exposing the comments to more users will probably lead to an increase in more outroar. on the other hand, more people need to see "who is listening this in May 2024?" comments on a song that came out last week. /s
- miniupuchaty 2y agoI really like the redesign! I was dissapointed they've changed it back for me. Comments don't need space that wide, they work better on the side, where they gain additional vertical space.