10 ms·

For a long time the grid of videos on the homepage has been slightly misaligned. I imagine the different rows belong to different teams. This means you can't ho

by rozab 1y ago

For a long time the grid of videos on the homepage has been slightly misaligned. I imagine the different rows belong to different teams. This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over. I find the autoplay so annoying because it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage. Often the video gets inexplicably added to my watch history, and if I do choose to click on it I have to go back to the beginning because I missed the start of the audio

kotaKat 1y ago
THIS. THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS. This has been one of the most frustrating things I run into with Youtube scrolling the page. Can’t leave your cursor on the page while scrolling without managing to have the spacing shift the thumbnails just so slightly so that your cursor lands back into a thumbnail for an autoplay to start and add to the metrics.
- gwbas1c 1y ago
  It's even worse on mobile. You don't even need to hover for an autoplay video to show in your history.
- jtbayly 1y ago
  I can’t think of other examples, but this exact problem is a constant frustration for me on multiple sites. I can’t scroll with my cursor on the page without crap happening that I don’t want to happen. As to the reason, at least with Youtube and Facebook, the answer is obvious: they want to increase their ad revenue by claiming additional “plays” or “interactions” or whatever they want to call it today. I remember realizing several times over the years that I had been conned when I paid for ads. The top-level numbers looked good, but when I dug in, I realized they were all faked.
  - krisoft 1y ago
    > I can’t scroll with my cursor on the page without crap happening that I don’t want to happen. Same stuff with the mobile youtube app. If you so much as graze the screen anywhere while watching a video the replay speed doubles. This is so sensitive that even a tiny unintentional finger touch, or a water droplet landing on the screen triggers it. Whoever thought that is a good idea as a feature, i can’t comprehend. Plus they have no data to see how badly their feature annoys me. From a metrics perspective “the user wanted to fast forward for 5s” looks the same as “a careless finger cradling the phone triggered the fast forward and it took the user 5s to realise what is going on and adjust their hold, now they are annoyed at how fragile this app is”. Someone might have even used the statistics of all the inadvertent activations in their promo package to show what a popular feature they made!
    - eastbound 1y ago
      Couple this with the no-bezel iPhones, and there is no way to hold your phone without touching the screen and accelerating the video (or clicking on ads).
      - encrypted_bird 1y ago
        Serious question as I use an Android device, but do people not purchase cases for iphones? I use an Otterbox case for my phone and it gives it a bezel (though the phone might have had one to begin with—I don't remember).
        bigstrat2003 1y ago
        People do, but they shouldn't have to purchase a case to have their phone correctly. I have never purchased a case for a phone and have no intention to start, myself.
        encrypted_bird 1y ago
        That is a really stupid design decision. I am so sorry for users who have to deal with that.
- s3p 1y ago
  This may be a dumb question, but when you have video doing autoplay (as in the video starts playing while you're scrolling looking at multiple videos - you haven't clicked on one), does it show up in your watch history?
  - magackame 1y ago
    Just tested. If you hover for 10s+ then it does get added to your watch history. EDIT: or did you mean on autoplay as in part of a playlist playing in the small player in the corner while you are on the home page?
- jaymzcampbell 1y ago
  This drives me absolutely nuts on Netflix too, perhaps more so.
- jeffhuys 1y ago
  You can just... turn it off: https://www.youtube.com/account_playback https://www.youtube.com/account_playback I have it turned on, but leave my mouse to the right of the screen if I don't want autoplay. It's habit now.
  - SupremumLimit 1y ago
    It just turns itself back on in a couple of weeks. Dark patterns ahoy.
  - socalgal2 1y ago
    It's not sticky. On iOS Chrome at least, I go pick that, within a few days it's set back to autoplay. And yes, I'm paying for premium
- saratogacx 1y ago
  Put your mouse up in the header on or near the scrollbar, scrolling will flow below to the video list.
- furrydoge 1y ago
  Because of excessive things like this, I often point at my screen with a pen now and leave the mouse alone. Or take notes on a different laptop to avoid this stuff.
tambourine_man 1y ago
> This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over You can disable autoplay at https://www.youtube.com/account_playback https://www.youtube.com/account_playback, then uncheck "Video previews". It resets itself every 15 days or so, but at least one can have some peace in the meantime.
- Levitating 1y ago
  > It resets itself every 15 days or so Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    It seems to do that all the time. Try hiding YouTube shorts and they just come back.
    - nobodywasishere 1y ago
      If you turn off watch history it completely disables shorts as a whole (with no recommendations on the homepage as a side effect, but one I'm willing to live with). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795204
      - nullc 1y ago
        The no recommendations at all sure feels like malicious compliance with California privacy law. Even while pretending they've not recorded your viewing history they could still make recommendations from your subscriptions or give you the same glurg that they give viewers they know nothing about... but instead they break the site. It's still better than having shorts on the screen.
        OJFord 1y ago
        Yup yup yup. If you actually care about recommending things I'll want to watch, my subscriptions list is the strongest signal there is anyway, surely!
xnzakg 1y ago
Hmm, on one hand I agree that autoplaying videos should be illegal but on the other hand the clickbaitiness of YouTube thumbnails has reached a point where it's almost better. (cue deArrow comment)
- tuetuopay 1y ago
  Why I do agree, the autoplay is a distraction preventing me from reading the video title and which channel posted it. Also, the clickbaitiness ends up being a feature for me: they have a specific "style" that's recognizable almost immediatly. A bit like AI-generated images, that have some eerie feeling to them. This way, I know I don't want to watch them.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
zootboy 1y ago
I know this is just a weird workaround, but you can put your mouse cursor on top of the scroll bar. The scroll wheel still works like normal there (at least in my tests on Linux / Firefox).
karmakaze 1y ago
I never noticed that weird space between videos not stopping autoplay--I always just kept moving my mouse around until it stopped. You can start by entering the thumbnail space, but to stop it you have to enter another thumbnail space or get very close to it--the main spacing between won't stop autoplay. There's hysteresis between the start/stop edges.
tuetuopay 1y ago
This bugged me so much and yet I ended up noticing a simple workaround: keep the mouse in the top bar where the search box is. By all UI logic this should not scroll as this element is not scrollable (it's the top bar above the scrollable content), but YouTube and Google in their infinite UX wisdom kept the scroll mouse events go behind the hovered element. I won't complain about this one too.
matsemann 1y ago
What kills me with the autoplay (at least on mobile), is that the video continues from where it was when you click it. But the autoplay had no sound, and I probably didn't watch it closely. So I always have to scroll back to the beginning, as I've just now been put in the middle of a sentence a bit into the video. Especially for channels which actually gets straight to the point (like Numberphile) it's annoying. Such a stupid design. Additionally there's a bug on the Android app that it sometimes doesn't show video titles (or the worlds worst A/B test?), so scrolling through I just see talking heads (since it autoplays instead of showing the video thumb) and have to force restart it to actually understand what's going on.
- AlfredBarnes 1y ago
  Also if you do watch shorts, they are ALL added to your liked Videos.
  - toxik 1y ago
    Uh no they're not It's easy to like them by accident though
    - WillPostForFood 1y ago
      Triggering autoplay by accidentally hovering does add videos to your history though, which is annoying.
- princevegeta89 1y ago
  Mobile? There's also another sneaky piece of crap Google pulls - even if you're a Premium user and set your video preferences to high quality, they only play videos for you at 480p, even though higher resolutions up to 4k are all available. If you manually increase the quality on that video, it will only apply for that video, and whatever videos you play next, will still be limited to 480p. All this is just to save costs..A truly fucking shady tactic to fuck over paying users. Fuck Google for what they do and how they cheat naive users.
mrighele 1y ago
Why do you even need _different teams_ for the homepage ? The home page is made up of: a search bar with some extra buttons that link to different pages, a sidebar with some more buttons and a list of videos. What are the multiple teams for ? And even assuming it is necessary, there is really no single person responsible for the page so that issues like this can be seen and fixed ? And since we are talking about pet peeves, on my laptop when you open the homepage you get a placeholder with 4 videos per row, and then you get 3 videos per row (or 5 shorts per row)
- stavros 1y ago
  Because everyone always runs A/B tests to decide whether to add a feature, but never runs them to decide whether to remove one.
- OJFord 1y ago
  To be fair you've started to answer it yourself: I'd bet 'search' is at least one team.
- afiori 1y ago
  The homepage has many similarities to a landing page / marketing funnel.
- wijwp 1y ago
  > and a list of videos Are we just going to gloss over this like the list of videos is random? haha
  - robertoandred 1y ago
    Generating a list of video IDs is different from rendering them on the page.
    - wijwp 1y ago
      Well at least now I've got you up to 2 teams being acceptable :)
alpaca128 1y ago
I'm glad I'm not the only one who gets annoyed by these details.
tedunangst 1y ago
I always open videos in new tabs and they start from the beginning.
Traubenfuchs 1y ago
> This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over. Nobody cares about coherent UI/UX anymore. They certainly don‘t care about your fringe usages. Do new stuff. Do good enough. Expensive designers with a clear vision and attention to detail? Sounds slow. And expensive. The move towards forced autoplay and infinite scroll will continue in any media app. AB tests show it is what humans crave. I tend to select some text in long textblocks to keep a point of reference while reading. Medium and other new generation slop loves to open an obtrusive menu above my selection.
xattt 1y ago
> I find the autoplay so annoying because it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage. If anything, I feel like that this is by design to hyperstimulate their core audience seeking instant gratification.
n2d4 1y ago
Which ones are misaligned? At least the ones shown to me are perfectly aligned on my computer (both Safari and Chrome on a Mac). Is it maybe caused by an adblocker? (I have YouTube premium, so no ads.) Edit: Actually, the picture in the article shows a misalignment in the "Breaking News" section. It's odd, because the sections align perfectly for me on various screen sizes
- insin 1y ago
  It's probably an adblocker, I explained why they get misaligned ([is-in-first-column] attribute adding extra margin) if a video gets hidden and the rest flow to fill in its place here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43848061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43848061
  - mmmmmbop 1y ago
    This bit of information makes the entire thread hilarious to read. Bunch of hackers using adblockers that modify the client-side UI to cheat Google out of money and then complaining loudly about a minor UI convenience. How dare Google not optimize for them! I say this as someone who uses an adblocker myself. But come on.
    - insin 1y ago
      Hehe, you need to be a big enough nerd to know to do this when you see it's misaligned: https://github.com/insin/control-panel-for-youtube/blob/cf18a38992eee5e243041898cdcd694350cdf0fb/content.js#L1106-L1120 https://github.com/insin/control-panel-for-youtube/blob/cf18...
graynk 1y ago
You can disable autoplay. Both on desktop and on mobile (not sure about TVs) It's buried in the settings but it's there.
- stephen_g 1y ago
  It's stored in a cookie or the browser local storage and "conveniently" forgotten every few days for me.
  - graynk 1y ago
    it had never reset for me even once, so I'm not sure what's that about
efitz 1y ago
If you didn’t look away fast enough then they want to count it as a view so they can profit.
burnte 1y ago
The video grid is mind boggling now, they keep making the thumbnails bigger, and now they don't even show two rows of 3, it's a row of 3 then a row of 3 but with only 2 links! There's a giant blank box for no reason! They added fuchsia to the timeline bar so that it now clashes in an ugly way with everything else on the page. Don't like Shorts? TOO BAD!
- lolinder 1y ago
  Do you have an ad blocker? I've always seen blank boxes in the spots where ads would have gone.
  - burnte 1y ago
    It's worse, I pay for Premium so there should be no place set aside for ads.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
curiousgal 1y ago
> it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage. Wait what? Thumbnails are useless. DeArrow has been god sent.
mvieira38 1y ago
NewPipe is the better app by far in terms of usability, despite having no budget in comparison. It's impressive how far you can get by just not adding bs
parsimo2010 1y ago
> you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over This might be intentional. Depending on how they calculate a view, this means they can pump up their stats they use to sell ads by making you "view" more videos than you actually click on. I like the previews TBH. If you turn on sound in the preview, you can watch part of a video without seeing an ad. It only shows me an ad when I actually click the video to watch it, so I can spend the first minute or two watching the thumbnail to decide if the video is going to get into meaningful content and be worth watching the ad. Without previews, you click on a video, watch an ad, then watch the video for a minute or two before deciding you don't want to finish.
- cco 1y ago
  100% what I was going to say. Some team's dashboard somewhere has "number of auto plays" and it's an important metric for them. Or your theory and its view fraud for ad or metric purposes.
ardit33 1y ago
I personally love the autoplay (on hovering), as often I just want to see some part of the video without having to click on it and see a bunch of ads before any playback.
michaelsalim 1y ago
I thought i was the only one! I did realize at some point that you can avoid it if you hover on the left or right of the main grid. Still very annoying though
ttctciyf 1y ago
> I find the autoplay so annoying Me too! So I turned them all off: Youtube Settings -> Playback and performance -> Browsing -> video previews (off) Kind of forgot how horrible they were until I saw your comment.
- stephen_g 1y ago
  In the browsers I use it switches itself back on about every four to five days on each of the four or so devices I use YouTube on. Not sure if this is a limitation of the browser local storage policies or if YouTube are 'helpfully' trying to convince me to like this 'feature' that I absolutely hate.
bgro 1y ago
A sea of perfectly crafted misleading YouTuber pog faces isn’t necessarily better than autoplaying previews. The automatically generated thumbnails were often the best at conveying what the video actual is in combination with a title and description that is currently overlooked in place of thumbnails. These went away when people started gaming the system with a thumbnail frame right in the middle to intentionally misrepresent the content of the video. Same problem with the current YouTuber pog faces. The next step is to automatically generate multiple random frames to preview. The garbage stock footage doesn’t work well here because it’s not great content to begin with. It’s lazy filler often used to hit the bare minimum arbitrary adsense time limit which wastes countless amounts of user hours.
rogerrogerr 1y ago
I have to admit I like autoplay… because the entire video will play, and it will never show ads. I often watch YouTube videos from the homepage entirely in autoplay and just zoom the browser in. Irritating, but the quality is fine for most things and I save a few minutes not watching ads.
snvzz 1y ago
>I find the autoplay so annoying Fortunately, there's an actual setting to get rid of that. Found out yesterday, when trying to fix the OP problem (which youtube sadly forced on me). That's extremely depressing on 27" 4k screen. Give me a density setting! I want compact thumbnails and to glance at a pack of vids at once.

by rozab 1y ago

kotaKat 1y ago

THIS. THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS. This has been one of the most frustrating things I run into with Youtube scrolling the page. Can’t leave your cursor on the page while scrolling without managing to have the spacing shift the thumbnails just so slightly so that your cursor lands back into a thumbnail for an autoplay to start and add to the metrics.

gwbas1c 1y ago
It's even worse on mobile. You don't even need to hover for an autoplay video to show in your history.
jtbayly 1y ago
I can’t think of other examples, but this exact problem is a constant frustration for me on multiple sites. I can’t scroll with my cursor on the page without crap happening that I don’t want to happen. As to the reason, at least with Youtube and Facebook, the answer is obvious: they want to increase their ad revenue by claiming additional “plays” or “interactions” or whatever they want to call it today. I remember realizing several times over the years that I had been conned when I paid for ads. The top-level numbers looked good, but when I dug in, I realized they were all faked.
- krisoft 1y ago
  > I can’t scroll with my cursor on the page without crap happening that I don’t want to happen. Same stuff with the mobile youtube app. If you so much as graze the screen anywhere while watching a video the replay speed doubles. This is so sensitive that even a tiny unintentional finger touch, or a water droplet landing on the screen triggers it. Whoever thought that is a good idea as a feature, i can’t comprehend. Plus they have no data to see how badly their feature annoys me. From a metrics perspective “the user wanted to fast forward for 5s” looks the same as “a careless finger cradling the phone triggered the fast forward and it took the user 5s to realise what is going on and adjust their hold, now they are annoyed at how fragile this app is”. Someone might have even used the statistics of all the inadvertent activations in their promo package to show what a popular feature they made!
  - eastbound 1y ago
    Couple this with the no-bezel iPhones, and there is no way to hold your phone without touching the screen and accelerating the video (or clicking on ads).
    - encrypted_bird 1y ago
      Serious question as I use an Android device, but do people not purchase cases for iphones? I use an Otterbox case for my phone and it gives it a bezel (though the phone might have had one to begin with—I don't remember).
      - bigstrat2003 1y ago
        People do, but they shouldn't have to purchase a case to have their phone correctly. I have never purchased a case for a phone and have no intention to start, myself.
        encrypted_bird 1y ago
        That is a really stupid design decision. I am so sorry for users who have to deal with that.
s3p 1y ago
This may be a dumb question, but when you have video doing autoplay (as in the video starts playing while you're scrolling looking at multiple videos - you haven't clicked on one), does it show up in your watch history?
- magackame 1y ago
  Just tested. If you hover for 10s+ then it does get added to your watch history. EDIT: or did you mean on autoplay as in part of a playlist playing in the small player in the corner while you are on the home page?
jaymzcampbell 1y ago
This drives me absolutely nuts on Netflix too, perhaps more so.
jeffhuys 1y ago
You can just... turn it off: https://www.youtube.com/account_playback https://www.youtube.com/account_playback I have it turned on, but leave my mouse to the right of the screen if I don't want autoplay. It's habit now.
- SupremumLimit 1y ago
  It just turns itself back on in a couple of weeks. Dark patterns ahoy.
- socalgal2 1y ago
  It's not sticky. On iOS Chrome at least, I go pick that, within a few days it's set back to autoplay. And yes, I'm paying for premium
saratogacx 1y ago
Put your mouse up in the header on or near the scrollbar, scrolling will flow below to the video list.
furrydoge 1y ago
Because of excessive things like this, I often point at my screen with a pen now and leave the mouse alone. Or take notes on a different laptop to avoid this stuff.

tambourine_man 1y ago

> This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over You can disable autoplay at https://www.youtube.com/account_playback https://www.youtube.com/account_playback, then uncheck "Video previews". It resets itself every 15 days or so, but at least one can have some peace in the meantime.

Levitating 1y ago
> It resets itself every 15 days or so Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  It seems to do that all the time. Try hiding YouTube shorts and they just come back.
  - nobodywasishere 1y ago
    If you turn off watch history it completely disables shorts as a whole (with no recommendations on the homepage as a side effect, but one I'm willing to live with). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795204
    - nullc 1y ago
      The no recommendations at all sure feels like malicious compliance with California privacy law. Even while pretending they've not recorded your viewing history they could still make recommendations from your subscriptions or give you the same glurg that they give viewers they know nothing about... but instead they break the site. It's still better than having shorts on the screen.
      - OJFord 1y ago
        Yup yup yup. If you actually care about recommending things I'll want to watch, my subscriptions list is the strongest signal there is anyway, surely!

xnzakg 1y ago

Hmm, on one hand I agree that autoplaying videos should be illegal but on the other hand the clickbaitiness of YouTube thumbnails has reached a point where it's almost better. (cue deArrow comment)

tuetuopay 1y ago
Why I do agree, the autoplay is a distraction preventing me from reading the video title and which channel posted it. Also, the clickbaitiness ends up being a feature for me: they have a specific "style" that's recognizable almost immediatly. A bit like AI-generated images, that have some eerie feeling to them. This way, I know I don't want to watch them.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

zootboy 1y ago

I know this is just a weird workaround, but you can put your mouse cursor on top of the scroll bar. The scroll wheel still works like normal there (at least in my tests on Linux / Firefox).

karmakaze 1y ago

I never noticed that weird space between videos not stopping autoplay--I always just kept moving my mouse around until it stopped. You can start by entering the thumbnail space, but to stop it you have to enter another thumbnail space or get very close to it--the main spacing between won't stop autoplay. There's hysteresis between the start/stop edges.

tuetuopay 1y ago

This bugged me so much and yet I ended up noticing a simple workaround: keep the mouse in the top bar where the search box is. By all UI logic this should not scroll as this element is not scrollable (it's the top bar above the scrollable content), but YouTube and Google in their infinite UX wisdom kept the scroll mouse events go behind the hovered element. I won't complain about this one too.

matsemann 1y ago

What kills me with the autoplay (at least on mobile), is that the video continues from where it was when you click it. But the autoplay had no sound, and I probably didn't watch it closely. So I always have to scroll back to the beginning, as I've just now been put in the middle of a sentence a bit into the video. Especially for channels which actually gets straight to the point (like Numberphile) it's annoying. Such a stupid design. Additionally there's a bug on the Android app that it sometimes doesn't show video titles (or the worlds worst A/B test?), so scrolling through I just see talking heads (since it autoplays instead of showing the video thumb) and have to force restart it to actually understand what's going on.

AlfredBarnes 1y ago
Also if you do watch shorts, they are ALL added to your liked Videos.
- toxik 1y ago
  Uh no they're not It's easy to like them by accident though
  - WillPostForFood 1y ago
    Triggering autoplay by accidentally hovering does add videos to your history though, which is annoying.
princevegeta89 1y ago
Mobile? There's also another sneaky piece of crap Google pulls - even if you're a Premium user and set your video preferences to high quality, they only play videos for you at 480p, even though higher resolutions up to 4k are all available. If you manually increase the quality on that video, it will only apply for that video, and whatever videos you play next, will still be limited to 480p. All this is just to save costs..A truly fucking shady tactic to fuck over paying users. Fuck Google for what they do and how they cheat naive users.

mrighele 1y ago

Why do you even need _different teams_ for the homepage ? The home page is made up of: a search bar with some extra buttons that link to different pages, a sidebar with some more buttons and a list of videos. What are the multiple teams for ? And even assuming it is necessary, there is really no single person responsible for the page so that issues like this can be seen and fixed ? And since we are talking about pet peeves, on my laptop when you open the homepage you get a placeholder with 4 videos per row, and then you get 3 videos per row (or 5 shorts per row)

stavros 1y ago
Because everyone always runs A/B tests to decide whether to add a feature, but never runs them to decide whether to remove one.
OJFord 1y ago
To be fair you've started to answer it yourself: I'd bet 'search' is at least one team.
afiori 1y ago
The homepage has many similarities to a landing page / marketing funnel.
wijwp 1y ago
> and a list of videos Are we just going to gloss over this like the list of videos is random? haha
- robertoandred 1y ago
  Generating a list of video IDs is different from rendering them on the page.
  - wijwp 1y ago
    Well at least now I've got you up to 2 teams being acceptable :)

alpaca128 1y ago

I'm glad I'm not the only one who gets annoyed by these details.

tedunangst 1y ago

I always open videos in new tabs and they start from the beginning.

Traubenfuchs 1y ago

> This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over. Nobody cares about coherent UI/UX anymore. They certainly don‘t care about your fringe usages. Do new stuff. Do good enough. Expensive designers with a clear vision and attention to detail? Sounds slow. And expensive. The move towards forced autoplay and infinite scroll will continue in any media app. AB tests show it is what humans crave. I tend to select some text in long textblocks to keep a point of reference while reading. Medium and other new generation slop loves to open an obtrusive menu above my selection.

xattt 1y ago

> I find the autoplay so annoying because it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage. If anything, I feel like that this is by design to hyperstimulate their core audience seeking instant gratification.

n2d4 1y ago

Which ones are misaligned? At least the ones shown to me are perfectly aligned on my computer (both Safari and Chrome on a Mac). Is it maybe caused by an adblocker? (I have YouTube premium, so no ads.) Edit: Actually, the picture in the article shows a misalignment in the "Breaking News" section. It's odd, because the sections align perfectly for me on various screen sizes

insin 1y ago
It's probably an adblocker, I explained why they get misaligned ([is-in-first-column] attribute adding extra margin) if a video gets hidden and the rest flow to fill in its place here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43848061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43848061
- mmmmmbop 1y ago
  This bit of information makes the entire thread hilarious to read. Bunch of hackers using adblockers that modify the client-side UI to cheat Google out of money and then complaining loudly about a minor UI convenience. How dare Google not optimize for them! I say this as someone who uses an adblocker myself. But come on.
  - insin 1y ago
    Hehe, you need to be a big enough nerd to know to do this when you see it's misaligned: https://github.com/insin/control-panel-for-youtube/blob/cf18a38992eee5e243041898cdcd694350cdf0fb/content.js#L1106-L1120 https://github.com/insin/control-panel-for-youtube/blob/cf18...

graynk 1y ago

You can disable autoplay. Both on desktop and on mobile (not sure about TVs) It's buried in the settings but it's there.

stephen_g 1y ago
It's stored in a cookie or the browser local storage and "conveniently" forgotten every few days for me.
- graynk 1y ago
  it had never reset for me even once, so I'm not sure what's that about

efitz 1y ago

If you didn’t look away fast enough then they want to count it as a view so they can profit.

burnte 1y ago

The video grid is mind boggling now, they keep making the thumbnails bigger, and now they don't even show two rows of 3, it's a row of 3 then a row of 3 but with only 2 links! There's a giant blank box for no reason! They added fuchsia to the timeline bar so that it now clashes in an ugly way with everything else on the page. Don't like Shorts? TOO BAD!

lolinder 1y ago
Do you have an ad blocker? I've always seen blank boxes in the spots where ads would have gone.
- burnte 1y ago
  It's worse, I pay for Premium so there should be no place set aside for ads.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

curiousgal 1y ago

> it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage. Wait what? Thumbnails are useless. DeArrow has been god sent.

mvieira38 1y ago

NewPipe is the better app by far in terms of usability, despite having no budget in comparison. It's impressive how far you can get by just not adding bs

parsimo2010 1y ago

> you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over This might be intentional. Depending on how they calculate a view, this means they can pump up their stats they use to sell ads by making you "view" more videos than you actually click on. I like the previews TBH. If you turn on sound in the preview, you can watch part of a video without seeing an ad. It only shows me an ad when I actually click the video to watch it, so I can spend the first minute or two watching the thumbnail to decide if the video is going to get into meaningful content and be worth watching the ad. Without previews, you click on a video, watch an ad, then watch the video for a minute or two before deciding you don't want to finish.

cco 1y ago
100% what I was going to say. Some team's dashboard somewhere has "number of auto plays" and it's an important metric for them. Or your theory and its view fraud for ad or metric purposes.

ardit33 1y ago

I personally love the autoplay (on hovering), as often I just want to see some part of the video without having to click on it and see a bunch of ads before any playback.

michaelsalim 1y ago

I thought i was the only one! I did realize at some point that you can avoid it if you hover on the left or right of the main grid. Still very annoying though

ttctciyf 1y ago

> I find the autoplay so annoying Me too! So I turned them all off: Youtube Settings -> Playback and performance -> Browsing -> video previews (off) Kind of forgot how horrible they were until I saw your comment.

stephen_g 1y ago
In the browsers I use it switches itself back on about every four to five days on each of the four or so devices I use YouTube on. Not sure if this is a limitation of the browser local storage policies or if YouTube are 'helpfully' trying to convince me to like this 'feature' that I absolutely hate.

bgro 1y ago

A sea of perfectly crafted misleading YouTuber pog faces isn’t necessarily better than autoplaying previews. The automatically generated thumbnails were often the best at conveying what the video actual is in combination with a title and description that is currently overlooked in place of thumbnails. These went away when people started gaming the system with a thumbnail frame right in the middle to intentionally misrepresent the content of the video. Same problem with the current YouTuber pog faces. The next step is to automatically generate multiple random frames to preview. The garbage stock footage doesn’t work well here because it’s not great content to begin with. It’s lazy filler often used to hit the bare minimum arbitrary adsense time limit which wastes countless amounts of user hours.

rogerrogerr 1y ago

I have to admit I like autoplay… because the entire video will play, and it will never show ads. I often watch YouTube videos from the homepage entirely in autoplay and just zoom the browser in. Irritating, but the quality is fine for most things and I save a few minutes not watching ads.

snvzz 1y ago

>I find the autoplay so annoying Fortunately, there's an actual setting to get rid of that. Found out yesterday, when trying to fix the OP problem (which youtube sadly forced on me). That's extremely depressing on 27" 4k screen. Give me a density setting! I want compact thumbnails and to glance at a pack of vids at once.