3 ms·

Thank you for writing this post! I opened youtube a few days ago to this as well. On a 24" 1440p monitor its ridiculous. It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX t

by InMice 1y ago

Thank you for writing this post! I opened youtube a few days ago to this as well. On a 24" 1440p monitor its ridiculous. It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this. Thank you again for writing this post. After searching it seems like they've been "testing" this in segments for a while now. As a result I installed the "Control Panel for Youtube" chrome plugin and Im able to fix it back to 6 videos per row. I also found I could make shorts play in the traditional youtube player by default - which is an added relief.

jeffbee 1y ago
[flagged]
- hackeman300 1y ago
  Perhaps the incentives of said UX team don't align with those of the user. They might be optimizing for maximal time spent on the site, for instance.
  - jaydenmilne 1y ago
    Yup, and that's what I meant by them turning the pain dial all the way towards money. Presumably they can run A/B tests and will no doubt be able to prove that this change makes them $X more money (since it's 1/6 a full screen ad after all). At the cost of being a miserable tasteless change. The YouTube team has been blindly chasing monetization at the expense of their website being useful and pleasant for a while now. Unfortunately it seems they can get away with it. I wrote this post to just shake my fist at the cloud
- mystified5016 1y ago
  Microsoft's adware and spyware was designed by one of the wealthiest companies in the world, so it's good for you. Google's ad business is the most sophisticated on the planet, so their spying and tracking and reporting your location to the government is good for you, you're just too dumb to understand. The USA, one of the most powerful and advanced countries in the world has suspended FDA testing of dairy. Since you can't possibly know better, this must be a good thing. This is called "appeal to authority" and it's a pretty unintelligent logical fallacy. Do better next time. Maybe read a book or two?
  - ziddoap 1y ago
    >This is called "appeal to authority" and it's a pretty unintelligent logical fallacy. Do better next time. Maybe read a book or two? This is called ad hominem, and has no place here.
    - miningape 1y ago
      It's only ad hominem when the argument is an insult. In this case there's an insult inside the argument, but importantly the insult is not the argument being made. Therefore it is not ad hominem.
      - ziddoap 1y ago
        The overall point, as you obviously understand, is that one should avoid personal insults when making a comment here.
- Angostura 1y ago
  I’m going to take up smoking because Philip Morris says I should.
- dang 1y ago
  Could I implore you to please stop breaking the site guidelines? I don't have the energy to even list all the times we've asked you already. I don't want to ban you, but you're making it increasingly difficult not to. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - jeffbee 1y ago
    Ah yes, but front-paging a headline that implies colleagues at YouTube are blind, that establishes a tone of reasoned civil discourse?
    - dang 1y ago
      Pointing the finger at others isn't helpful. You have a history of abusing HN and we need you to stop doing that. You also have a history of posting good things, which is why I'd prefer not to ban you.
drewbeck 1y ago
"It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this." Unfortunately UX teams aren't actually paid to make great UX, especially at large corps and any place ad-driven. They're paid to move the metrics and move the revenue line.
- chii 1y ago
  the question then becomes why do these bad UX/UI design makes higher revenue (and what makes them game the metrics too)?
pwg 1y ago
Most likely what happened is some MBA ran a short A/B test of smaller vs. bigger video thumbnails, and the A/B results showed more "engagement" with the larger size thumbs, and so, of course, to meet his/her performance goals, the MBA had the page altered to the version that showed "more engagement".
- cowsup 1y ago
  I think it also helps them figure out which videos keep people on YouTube longer. If I scroll to a section of the page that has 6 videos, and I stare at them for 10 seconds, then scroll down, they'll know that one or two of those videos must have been somewhat interesting. But if I stare at 6 videos, then scroll away 2 seconds later, it knows that nothing in that batch was worthwhile. The fewer videos they have in focus at a time, the more accurate their algorithms can be.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
htx80nerd 1y ago
>It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this. this is the story of the big company web sites - huge budget - best programmers - terrible design - terrible usability - doesnt make sense - gets worse over time it's unreal. seen on many major sites.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- amelius 1y ago
  Yes, but they have the largest amount of video content, so they have us by the balls.
  - imbnwa 1y ago
    And yet they make searching that library as painful as it can be so they can funnel you into an engagement pit
- InMice 1y ago
  Yes, this my experience all the time. it's insane.
gorbachev 1y ago
You assume the UX team has any say in any of this. Some of the revelations from the various lawsuits against Google by the US and other governments over the years have been about this. The company replaced leaders who cared about users with leaders who cared about revenue optimization and those leaders changed the direction of the company to what we all see in all of their products these days.
- MyFedora 1y ago
  I think this change came from the UX team. Relevant articles: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/simplicity-vs-choice/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/simplicity-vs-choice/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/short-term-memory-and-web-usability/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/short-term-memory-and-web-u... https://www.nngroup.com/articles/working-memory-external-memory/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/working-memory-external-mem...
- Zanfa 1y ago
  Their design/UX team 100% had a hand in it. Just look at Google's design blog, it's complete dogshit.
Root_Denied 1y ago
It's infuriating that a plugin/extension is needed to bring back what should be the a setting, if not the default, in the UI for this.
- gtowey 1y ago
  This is inevitable when a company has a revenue model where they claim to serve both users and advertisers. The wants of each will always be diametrically opposed. The customer with the deepest pockets always wins, which are the advertisers. I'm also starting to think that no large company will ever act in the best interest of their customers unless required to do so by regulation. As long as those customers are individuals. Maybe the regulation we need is that companies like Google can't have "ad supported" products that are simultaneously sold as products to users. Either you're selling a product to users, or really running an advertising platform. It can't be both.
p3rls 1y ago
It's not enough to have hindustantimes.com articles for local American news on google-- even YouTube must be sacrificed. The rivers of enshittification must flow.

by InMice 1y ago

jeffbee 1y ago

[flagged]

hackeman300 1y ago
Perhaps the incentives of said UX team don't align with those of the user. They might be optimizing for maximal time spent on the site, for instance.
- jaydenmilne 1y ago
  Yup, and that's what I meant by them turning the pain dial all the way towards money. Presumably they can run A/B tests and will no doubt be able to prove that this change makes them $X more money (since it's 1/6 a full screen ad after all). At the cost of being a miserable tasteless change. The YouTube team has been blindly chasing monetization at the expense of their website being useful and pleasant for a while now. Unfortunately it seems they can get away with it. I wrote this post to just shake my fist at the cloud
mystified5016 1y ago
Microsoft's adware and spyware was designed by one of the wealthiest companies in the world, so it's good for you. Google's ad business is the most sophisticated on the planet, so their spying and tracking and reporting your location to the government is good for you, you're just too dumb to understand. The USA, one of the most powerful and advanced countries in the world has suspended FDA testing of dairy. Since you can't possibly know better, this must be a good thing. This is called "appeal to authority" and it's a pretty unintelligent logical fallacy. Do better next time. Maybe read a book or two?
- ziddoap 1y ago
  >This is called "appeal to authority" and it's a pretty unintelligent logical fallacy. Do better next time. Maybe read a book or two? This is called ad hominem, and has no place here.
  - miningape 1y ago
    It's only ad hominem when the argument is an insult. In this case there's an insult inside the argument, but importantly the insult is not the argument being made. Therefore it is not ad hominem.
    - ziddoap 1y ago
      The overall point, as you obviously understand, is that one should avoid personal insults when making a comment here.
Angostura 1y ago
I’m going to take up smoking because Philip Morris says I should.
dang 1y ago
Could I implore you to please stop breaking the site guidelines? I don't have the energy to even list all the times we've asked you already. I don't want to ban you, but you're making it increasingly difficult not to. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jeffbee 1y ago
  Ah yes, but front-paging a headline that implies colleagues at YouTube are blind, that establishes a tone of reasoned civil discourse?
  - dang 1y ago
    Pointing the finger at others isn't helpful. You have a history of abusing HN and we need you to stop doing that. You also have a history of posting good things, which is why I'd prefer not to ban you.

drewbeck 1y ago

"It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this." Unfortunately UX teams aren't actually paid to make great UX, especially at large corps and any place ad-driven. They're paid to move the metrics and move the revenue line.

chii 1y ago
the question then becomes why do these bad UX/UI design makes higher revenue (and what makes them game the metrics too)?

pwg 1y ago

Most likely what happened is some MBA ran a short A/B test of smaller vs. bigger video thumbnails, and the A/B results showed more "engagement" with the larger size thumbs, and so, of course, to meet his/her performance goals, the MBA had the page altered to the version that showed "more engagement".

cowsup 1y ago
I think it also helps them figure out which videos keep people on YouTube longer. If I scroll to a section of the page that has 6 videos, and I stare at them for 10 seconds, then scroll down, they'll know that one or two of those videos must have been somewhat interesting. But if I stare at 6 videos, then scroll away 2 seconds later, it knows that nothing in that batch was worthwhile. The fewer videos they have in focus at a time, the more accurate their algorithms can be.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

htx80nerd 1y ago

>It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this. this is the story of the big company web sites - huge budget - best programmers - terrible design - terrible usability - doesnt make sense - gets worse over time it's unreal. seen on many major sites.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
amelius 1y ago
Yes, but they have the largest amount of video content, so they have us by the balls.
- imbnwa 1y ago
  And yet they make searching that library as painful as it can be so they can funnel you into an engagement pit
InMice 1y ago
Yes, this my experience all the time. it's insane.

gorbachev 1y ago

You assume the UX team has any say in any of this. Some of the revelations from the various lawsuits against Google by the US and other governments over the years have been about this. The company replaced leaders who cared about users with leaders who cared about revenue optimization and those leaders changed the direction of the company to what we all see in all of their products these days.

MyFedora 1y ago
I think this change came from the UX team. Relevant articles: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/simplicity-vs-choice/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/simplicity-vs-choice/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/short-term-memory-and-web-usability/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/short-term-memory-and-web-u... https://www.nngroup.com/articles/working-memory-external-memory/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/working-memory-external-mem...
Zanfa 1y ago
Their design/UX team 100% had a hand in it. Just look at Google's design blog, it's complete dogshit.

Root_Denied 1y ago

It's infuriating that a plugin/extension is needed to bring back what should be the a setting, if not the default, in the UI for this.

gtowey 1y ago
This is inevitable when a company has a revenue model where they claim to serve both users and advertisers. The wants of each will always be diametrically opposed. The customer with the deepest pockets always wins, which are the advertisers. I'm also starting to think that no large company will ever act in the best interest of their customers unless required to do so by regulation. As long as those customers are individuals. Maybe the regulation we need is that companies like Google can't have "ad supported" products that are simultaneously sold as products to users. Either you're selling a product to users, or really running an advertising platform. It can't be both.

p3rls 1y ago

It's not enough to have hindustantimes.com articles for local American news on google-- even YouTube must be sacrificed. The rivers of enshittification must flow.