10 ms·

The author says they don't believe that a lighter version has been shown to reduce engagement. I, on the other hand, fully believe that. The recommended lite-

• tantalor 2y ago
  Why is it slower? It feels same to me (Pixel phone)
  • maxloh 2y ago
    If I understand it correctly, the library displays a thumbnail and defers loading the YouTube embedded player iframe until you click on it, thus improving responsiveness (page load speed is not affected by its iframe however).
• nnf 2y ago
  I would much rather wait a few hundred milliseconds for a video to start during the few times I decide to watch an embedded video than to wait for the full video player to load every single time I visit a page with an embedded video that I'm never going to watch. Similarly, I would much rather have every stoplight I approach be green for me rather than having every light be red but for not very long.
  • vasco 2y ago
    These things are not optimized for what we prefer but for what leads us to behave in a way that maximizes a particular metric, for youtube it's global watch time.
    • Retric 2y ago
      Global watch time isn’t something non Google website owners care about. Remember, Google benefits from making the web worse.
      • FredPret 2y ago
        Do they? They have the biggest browser, an online office suite, a cloud, and a giant ad network. They want to maximize internet use, or they should want to.
        • kibwen 2y ago
          Unfortunately no, Google wants to maximize their profit, and they'll enshittify the web in that pursuit until it collapses. They have Android, they don't need the web to exist.
          • klyrs 2y ago
            > They have Android, they don't need the web to exist. If not for apple, I'd agree.
            • FredPret 2y ago
              Apple sells expensive solutions to cash-rich consumers (some of whom are also time-poor) who are willing to throw money at a technical problem (setting up a device with an OS) to make it go away (ie, buying an iPhone, iPad, and Mac). Why would you ever want to advertise to anyone else? No internet = no Google.
          • troupo 2y ago
            > They have Android, they don't need the web to exist. In 2023 77% of Google's money came from online advertising. While the percentage is lower than in 2017 when it was 86%, Google is fully dependent on the web.
        • troupo 2y ago
  • kylebenzle 2y ago
    Did you even try the example? Obviously not. It's closer to 4 seconds difference, PLENTY of time for me and a lot of people to click away. It doesn't help a discussion to ignore the topic at hand, create a straw man just to easily vanquish him. Who are you even talking to here, just yourself?
    • cornholio 2y ago
      Sounds like a bug that could most likely be fixed. I don't see any noticeable difference, maybe one or more spins of the throbber, practically instant on all versions. What could possibly youtube be preloading in that 1.2MB that could genuinely and legitimately speed up video play by 4 seconds, and that can't be cached? It just stretches credulity.
      • IX-103 2y ago
        Caching on the web has gotten worse/more difficult recently since browsers (including Chrome and Edge) have started to partition the cache by top level site. This was necessary to keep trackers from using the cache status of a resource for tracking users, but had the side effect of making common resources much less likely to be cached. Which is to say that if it's the first time you load a resource on a page, it most likely is not in cache. Sorry for inconvenience.
  • bcrl 2y ago
    How will Google collect data about every page load then?
• dubcanada 2y ago
  I don't think the point of this is to replace highly critical videos. It's to replace videos like installation instructions which may only be needed by 10% of your users. Not only that but 250ms is the average reaction time of a human, you don't notice an extra 5 milliseconds. If a video is required on your website for engagement you probably shouldn't be hosting it on YouTube anyways.
  • lotsofpulp 2y ago
    >Not only that but 250ms is the average reaction time of a human, you don't notice an extra 5 milliseconds. If this is true, then why are online first person shooters noticeably worse when playing with a 250ms ping connection compared to a 5ms ping? 250ms ping is basically unplayable. If I recall correctly. I stopped playing video games many years ago, because my college’s internet connection didn’t offer low enough latency to be able to play.
    • thfuran 2y ago
      The difference between 5 ms and 250 ms is a lot more than 5 ms, so there's no contradiction.
      • lotsofpulp 2y ago
        Oops, yes I misinterpreted that. I was thinking how can 250ms be the average reaction time when it’s too slow of latency to play a video game, wouldn’t average reaction time have to be lower since people do notice lag at 250ms pings?
        • Filligree 2y ago
          Humans can notice and characterise much smaller intervals, down to somewhere around five milliseconds. We still aren’t capable of reacting faster than about 250. However, if you have latency of 250ms then your total reaction time isn’t 250, it’s 500.
• lelandfe 2y ago
  It also seems like it takes two clicks to start a video? Is that a bug?
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• dangus 2y ago
  This is a good point. Google doesn’t care about the total page load time of your website, they care about the load time of their video.
• knome 2y ago
  Does the potential lesser engagement with videos matter in the face of those videos causing a delay in loading the page that displays them? You'd need to check per-video engagement drop against people not bothering to engage with the site in the first place.
  • estebank 2y ago
    This is an example of the tragedy of the commons: the watch time effect is tracked by YouTube, which maximises for it, but the drop off of visitors to the site is something YouTube doesn't "care" about (doesn't track it directly, doesn't optimize for it, etc.).
    • crabmusket 2y ago
      In this scenario, what is the "commons"?
      • paulmd 2y ago
        everyone else’s engagement except Google’s will be degraded by the increased page load times
• qwery 2y ago
  I'm not seeing such a difference, but it is there. I'd be surprised if it was as high as 100ms. Obviously different computer environments[0] will have an impact here. I would be much less likely to notice it as "slow" if it didn't show me a spinny-spin. It's advertising that it's slow! I agree that the click-to-playback lag time would have such an effect, but how significant it would be is unclear. It would take an entity the size of, say, Youtube, to begin to measure this sufficiently. [0] Firefox, 2(?) year old laptop, i7-1185G7, windows 11, updating Edge (in 32-bit mode) 24/7, haven't rebooted for a few weeks
  • divbzero 2y ago
    Same here: While the difference in speed is noticeable, I would be surprised if it’s much more than 100ms on this specific machine (Safari, 1 year old laptop, Apple M2, macOS Sonoma).
• skybrian 2y ago
  I suspect you’re right, but on the other hand, I think it’s useful to think critically about whether starting the video faster is worth it if it makes the web page that it’s embedded in load slower. The “every millisecond counts” argument applies to the web page too. If the user bounces off the web page, they won’t get to the video anyway. Also, maybe it’s fine if people don’t want to play the video? Personally, I appreciate it when a web page includes a summary, so that I can avoid watching a video. (I prefer not using YouTube for anything other than listening to music or occasionally watching a movie.) Video can be a useful tool, but consider whose interest it’s in for you to encourage your audience to watch more TV. Is it really serving your users? Even when I do want to watch a video, it’s selective. One thing I find rather frustrating about YouTube’s redesign (on desktop) is that it devotes so much screen real estate to promoting videos other than the one you’re actually there to watch. I’d prefer fewer distractions.
  • Stratoscope 2y ago
    > One thing I find rather frustrating about YouTube’s redesign (on desktop) is that it devotes so much screen real estate to promoting videos other than the one you’re actually there to watch. I’d prefer fewer distractions. The F key is your friend. It puts the video full screen. You don't even have to find the full screen icon at the bottom right of the video, just hit F.
    • brookst 2y ago
      But I don’t want full screen, I want it to take up the full window that I have allocated to the browser, while still allowing me to multitask in other windows.
      • nulbyte 2y ago
        I love Firefox's picture-in-picture mode for this exact reason. I think there is an extension for Chrome also.
        • hombre_fatal 2y ago
• tjoff 2y ago
  >Every additional millisecond of load time will reduce engagement This is something people believed in the 90s. None of the megacorps give a damn about that as is evident by their behavior. If it doesn't matter for them it doesn't make sense for you to optimize that on their behalf. It is a non-issue for this usecase. But please do care about it for the rest of your stack.
  • qwery 2y ago
    In the 90s, there was no "engagement" and "content" just meant the content of the thing you were talking about, but I digress... > None of the megacorps give a damn about that as is evident by their behavior. The rumour (and extrapolation) the discussion is based on is that Youtube prefers their bloated player to an unknown alternative because it makes the videos play faster, which drives "engagement". That is, in this case, the "megacorp" literally does care about that. > it doesn't make sense for you to optimize that on their behalf This is certainly true, but I don't think that's what the parent comment was suggesting.
    • froggit 2y ago
      > In the 90s, there was no "engagement" and "content" just meant the content of the thing you were talking about, but I digress... Sometimes i think back at this idea from the 80s when i need some perspective: "Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other." https://lawsofux.com/doherty-threshold/ https://lawsofux.com/doherty-threshold/
      • qwery 2y ago
        That website/page is a bit weird. It seems to be based on a TV show[basedon]? What I assume is the actual IBM report[0] might interest you. [0] https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102751398 https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10275139... [basedon] https://daverupert.com/2015/06/doherty-threshold/ https://daverupert.com/2015/06/doherty-threshold/
  • IX-103 2y ago
• _wire_ 2y ago
  > Every additional millisecond of load time will reduce engagement LOL! What's engagement?! Half the embeds I see don't work because the content is censored or rotted. For content that plays, the rush for my attention includes an overwhelming dynamic of at least three parties with vested commercial interested in the occupation of my mind cramming unrequested and unwanted advertorial content into my nervous system. Blocking unrequested content and keeping a healthy distance from tracking adds many seconds of delay to access of requested content, and the requested content typically has a cognitive half-life of a few seconds to minutes. And the requested content itself typically contains order 10,000x milliseconds of insipid attention mgmt jingles and branding setup. Then to finish it off. Even the most high-minded productions waste minutes of egress begging for "likes, subscribe, comments," reading off lists of sponsors with silly handles, admonishments for upsells, and cappers to "hit the bell, it's so, so, important", immediately following which the player bot resets to cramming a new unrelated vid into my sockets. Engagement?! Pfft. It's an incursion.
• giancarlostoro 2y ago
  I remember when the old youtube player would just load and buffer the entire video, making replay ability very easy since you didnt need to redownload it. Somehow we regressed. Google takes everything that works PERFECTLY FINE and turns it into a steaming pile of … I am gonna stop right there.
  • marcosdumay 2y ago
    It used to be that if your network was bad, you could just play the video once without watching, and then you could play it again and watch it without it locking. Nowadays, if your network is bad, you can just forget it. Every single media site seem to have migrated into this format at around the same time. It's obviously to stop downloaders, what it evidently didn't, but it will never change back.
    • ric2b 2y ago
      Is it to stop downloaders? I doubt it since they work just fine, it's probably just a way to reduce resource usage on more constrained platforms like low end mobile phones or smart tvs. There is probably a lot of code sharing among all platforms such that companies don't want to support two different buffering flows.
      • chris_pie 2y ago
        It also decreases bandwidth and processing server-side, when a user leaves before finishing the video.
    • kylebenzle 2y ago
      Why not just go with the flow and use/develop a downloader browser extension?
      • marcosdumay 2y ago
        I've used them a few times for dealing with a bad network. But this is a "me" solution, and I'd imagine those sites would like to be accessible for more people. (I'm personally a very bad "customer" for them.) Anyway, it's a mild annoyance for me (I have that "me" solution), and not really my problem to solve.
• cogman10 2y ago
  > Every additional millisecond of load time will reduce engagement, I do not believe this. Humans can't tell the difference between 1 and 10ms. I'd love to see the study that actually proves this assertion. I suspect, it's never been done for embedded videos just webpage load time. But further, we are talking about embedded videos that you have to click to start anyways. Presumably, the person clicking the video has a desire to watch it and thus can stand that the video takes an extra 300ms to load.
  • 57FkMytWjyFu 2y ago
    Drummers can discern down to 6ms, this producer states they can barely discern 3ms. https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/133356/what-is-the-limit-to-which-humans-can-precisely-time-notes-on-an-instrument-or-p https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/133356/what-is-the... So from those metrics, it's pretty easy to tell those two divisions apart.
• squigz 2y ago
  > Every additional millisecond of load time will reduce engagement Is there any data on this?
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• stemlord 2y ago
  I thought we were past the era of counting in milliseconds for load time now that half the web insists on using cloudflare security checks