31 ms·

Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

• phendrenad2 10mo ago
  What's the polymarket on NO videos on the homepage AND THREE ads?
• jaydenmilne 10mo ago
  Satire is dead
• guluarte 10mo ago
  also if you watch 1 single video about a topic, the next day your feed will be full of that
  • SchemaLoad 10mo ago
    I usually don't mind that. Sometimes I'm looking in to a new product or hobby and really do want to see a whole bunch of that content. They also provide you a feed which purely contains channels you subscribe to, though I find it much lower quality than the normal feed.
  • mc3301 10mo ago
    Turning search history off on youtube about a year ago has been one of my best personal "digital life upgrades" in a while.
    • nicce 10mo ago
      I did that and now it shows only polarizing videos on the right from both ends.
      • mc3301 10mo ago
        Oh, mine shows no recommendations at all. Just a blank home screen. So I basically either watch my curated subscriptions or something I specifically searched for.
        • nicce 10mo ago
          Yeah, home screen is empty. But if you open some video, recommendations on right are wild.
    • mvdtnz 10mo ago
      We know. Believe me, we know. Because you guys will tell us, every single time YouTube is mentioned.
      • venturecruelty 10mo ago
        It is, apparently, very difficult for people to conceive of a video service that does what you want it to, and not what you don't want it to.
      • mc3301 10mo ago
        Excellent, now the collective "we" all know about it, and it never needs to be mentioned again[0]. [0]<https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/>
        • remuskaos 10mo ago
          Man, today's xkcd hits hard...
• strickinato 10mo ago
  Actually - BOTH videos in the screenshot are ads - so there are zero videos on the homescreen already
  • crazygringo 10mo ago
    I don't think so? The "I Skied Down Mount Everest" is from the Red Bull channel. It may be a commercial channel, but it's not an ad, i.e. they didn't pay for placement (doesn't say "Sponsored" like the other one).
    • dathinab 10mo ago
      and they are often good videos (if you like watching extreme sports related things), given the partial second video this seems likely for the account who made the screenshot but given that half a video is not a full video this still means we are at one single full video and an AD which is deceptively pretending to be a video I still think regulators should ban deceptive ads and require ads to to clearly different from the main content _on the first take/glance_. They way YT, Google and co handle ads is IMHO deceptive to a point its reasonable to say they try to deceive the user into clicking on the ad when they wouldn't have done so if they new it was an ad. And "systematically deceiving a user/customer to their detriment (wasting time) and your profit" isn't just shitty but on a gray line to outright fraud.
      • amarant 10mo ago
        I dont particularly enjoy red bulls drinks, but their ads are often cool enough to be considered content. It's probably the only company with ads that are more enjoyable than their product.
        • FridayoLeary 10mo ago
          I used to think they were a foundation dedicated to funding extreme sports who also happened to sell an energy drink as well. Their business is basically selling poison but creating such absurd quantities of great free entertainment that everyone forgives them.
• superkuh 10mo ago
  You can use ublock origin browser extension per-site CSS rules to restore an arbitrary number of rows and columns to the youtube frontpage. https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube is a good source for these if you don't know how to write them or don't want to. ! YouTube frontpage - 3 columns per row youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row, #contents.ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;) youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 3 !important;) youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-posts-per-row: 3 !important;) ! Optional: Hide the "Shorts" section to maintain clean 3x3 grid youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer:style(display:none !important;) But also, yikes.
• 7373737373 10mo ago
  Whoever made automatic AI dubs a default and impossible to disable also needs to be fired
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • mitthrowaway2 10mo ago
    I agree. But for the benefit of other people struggling, I haven't found a way to disable them as a user setting, but you can at least turn them off on a per-video basis by changing the video language in the playback settings (the little gear icon).
    • locao 10mo ago
      There's no little great in embedded videos or, at least, my local newspaper actively disables it.
    • 7373737373 10mo ago
      This is not always available for some reason
  • tcfhgj 10mo ago
    ReVanced allows disabling them, and there are extensions for Browsers.
  • ahartmetz 10mo ago
    They could at least try to vaguely match the voice and maybe cadence of the original. AFAIU it's one of these things that would have been too hard ten years ago but is fairly easy now. Too computationally expensive probably.
    • s-lambert 10mo ago
      Yeah ElevenLabs had this over a year ago where you could just upload a 30 second clip of someone's voice in another language and hear what it was like in English and it worked really well.
• levocardia 10mo ago
  Forget the METR curve, this is the real deviation-from-linear-forecast we need to be worried about in 2025.
• kbenson 10mo ago
  What? There's obviously 1.25 non-ad videos on the home screen, which might as well be two, so they're right on schedule! /s
• JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
  I used to pay for YouTube premium. I stopped doing that, uninstalled the apps, and now use it through the browser with adblockers. (Yes, on my phone and iPad.) It works so well I’ve gotten at least half a dozen neighbours to do the same. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a definitive step up in UX.
  • danpalmer 10mo ago
    I do pay for YouTube Premium, I see no ads, and everything works pretty conveniently. What's your point, that with a bit of extra effort you can pirate content?
    • ahartmetz 10mo ago
      It's not piracy.
    • tcfhgj 10mo ago
      Blocking ads is hardly "pirating" content
      • crazygringo 10mo ago
        I don't really see what the difference is. They're not getting the payment for the video either way. Morally I don't see how they aren't equivalent. I'm not going to stand on a high horse saying you shouldn't do either, but I don't really see how you can pretend one is less harmful to creators than the other, in terms of the basic principles involved.
        • akersten 10mo ago
          > the payment for the video either way. "the payment for the video" as if it's a given that my ad impression is required for me to watch some video that they made available to me on their website for free. Morally, YouTube shows the most heinous and scummy ads 24/7 on their platform and fails to take them down when reported. Gambling, AI sex games, "cure what doctors miss" ads for human use of Ivermectin - it's your moral duty to block them.
• notanormalnerd 10mo ago
  You know who has great information density? Pornhub. If you open Pornhub on a 4K screen, you will absolutely see none of the thumbnails. I think YouTube is overdoing it, but it is really a thing of: people are either using really small screens or 1080p. 4K is still not around much.
  • Nextgrid 10mo ago
    Because unlike YouTube, porn is an actually competitive industry with plenty of “tube” sites to choose from. So they have to compete on UX.
    • throwaway984393 10mo ago
      [dead]
    • komali2 10mo ago
      Google "Ethical Capital Partners." Operates: Pornhub RedTube YouPorn Brazzers Digital Playground Men.com Reality Kings SpankWire
      • theideaofcoffee 10mo ago
        Not sure what this comment is getting at. Those may be the collection of sites owned by a single company, but there are still -oceans- of porn of every conceivable niche, on hundreds of thousands of sites, some still bigger than those. Whereas there’s pretty much a single, monopolized provider for mainstream video: youtube. And a porn conglomerate is the problem? GP is still correct, there’s still real competition in the space, unlike youtube.
      • chrneu 10mo ago
        Very US centric take here. Ya know there are other countries, languages, etc out there, right?
        • deleted 10mo ago
          [deleted]
• sys32768 10mo ago
  To YouTube's credit, at least the remaining videos aren't vertical.
  • troupo 10mo ago
    Not for long: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45872870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45872870
• PaulHoule 10mo ago
  They’re catching up with the recommendation technology China had 5 years ago.
  • Nextgrid 10mo ago
    #shorts
    • PaulHoule 10mo ago
      Was just talking with my son about how some YouTubers who made short videos long ago started making longer and less succinct videos because they thought the algorithm favored long videos and then TikTok happens.
  • cloudflare728 10mo ago
    HN typically use the word "steal" when Chinese companies do the same thing from American or European companies. It's taking them 5 years stealing Chinese algorithms.
• MBCook 10mo ago
  I noticed this morning there was a new version of the YouTube app on my Apple TV. I can’t wait to find out how they screwed this one up. My personal long-term complaint is the length of video titles. Lots of people like to make really long video titles. So right now there is one on my screen titled “The Best Decisions Every Video Game Console Developer Made”. Now if you didn’t know, that is not the whole title. But there’s absolutely no indication of that. The only way you actually know that is either by checking or if the stuff on the screen is clearly not the end of a sentence. So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in the title. In this case you also see “(Part”. Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that. The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video. Obnoxious.
  • jazzyjackson 10mo ago
    Google News has this same truncation problem. I thought it would be an obvious thing to, I don't know, use the `title` attribute so mouseover reveals the rest of the snews...
  • thaumasiotes 10mo ago
    > Now if you didn’t know, that is not the whole title. But there’s absolutely no indication of that. The only way you actually know that is either by checking or if the stuff on the screen is clearly not the end of a sentence. > So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in the title. In this case you also see “(Part”. > Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that. > The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video. I'm looking at youtube right now. There's a video displayed with the title "Word Differences Between 11 Countries! | Europe, Africa, Asia , ..." That "..." is the indicator that the title has been truncated. If you hover the title with your mouse, you can see the entire thing: "Word Differences Between 11 Countries! | Europe, Africa, Asia , America | Why Are They Similar?" Not far away, there's "Alex Honnold Answers Rock Climbing Questions | Tech Support...", which expands to "Alex Honnold Answers Rock Climbing Questions | Tech Support | WIRED". Am I using Apple TV? No. Is it really true that they removed the truncation indicator?
• striking 10mo ago
  For me this change was reverted quite quickly, I think within the week. On my Apple TV at least it is back to 3 (and a quarter) videos displayed at a time. I like to think that it was the feedback I submitted that pushed them to change it. However, it was more likely a change in viewership that would cause them to revert it back. I know my viewing habits definitely changed, I found myself spending more time looking through the thumbnails and then giving up to go watch content on other platforms. 4.51.08/web_20251117_11_RC00
  • Nextgrid 10mo ago
    It’s not a revert, merely A/B testing to see which version leads to more “engagement”. They’re also testing the same on the web, half the time I get the normal sidebar, half the time I get a 300% zoomed one where I can only see like 3 video thumbnails before having to scroll (jokes on them, I don’t - but then again I block ads so I don’t count either way).
    • striking 10mo ago
      If it happens to me again, I will have to find my content elsewhere. It's not even a conscious decision, I just got genuinely fatigued from the experience. On the bright side, maybe I'd be better off. There are probably better things I could be doing with my time.
  • nozzlegear 10mo ago
    How do you submit feedback?
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
• orphea 10mo ago
  Not really related but... have anyone else noticed that suggestions on the home page became much worse recently? I'm getting a lot of unrelated videos which are often very old, like published up to 18 years ago. OTOH, videos from subscriptions are not getting suggested, I often have to check individual channels to see if they posted anything new. What's happening?
  • nicbou 10mo ago
    Use the subscriptions page for the channels you follow. I use Unhooked to make it my home page.
  • chrneu 10mo ago
    If you pay attention, this happens every few months. This is youtube tweaking the algorithm. Every time they tweak the algorithm, content creators scramble to figure out what changes they made so they can exploit it. That's why every few months all the major channels change their styles to all be the same. Gotta exploit that algo!
    • orphea 10mo ago
      > this happens every few months Well, maybe, yeah, but I do think it was never this bad.
• 1a527dd5 10mo ago
  Ahh, I thought this was just happening to me. I used to watch a fair bit of YT on my PS4, but a few months ago my home screen was basically empty save a few ad videos. It was pushing me heavily to sign in; which I do _not_ want to do. End result was I just stopped watching YT.
• jonny_eh 10mo ago
  On desktop, press command/ctrl and minus to zoom out and increase the home page's density. It will make text on watch page harder to read, but with theatre mode, the video playback size should be unaffected.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• Aeglaecia 10mo ago
  i feel like modern youtube just does not scratch the itch that youtube once scratched , it now feels like methadone replacement therapy. available viewing options have been reduced to either short form content or long form content , there is nothing between. i dont enjoy frying my brain with short form content and i dont have the attention span to watch bloviation with the express intent of stretching out video times to maximise revenue. honestly i feel like this applies to the internet as a whole , a facsimile of its former self being puppeted to achieve control. someone probably predicted this , right ?
• mrandish 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  • holografix 10mo ago
    [flagged]
• polarphi 10mo ago
  YouTube has become so bad that I had to resort to Tampermonkey scripts to become bearable. First was the disgusting pink tones in the progress bar. Then the oversized thumbnails / less videos per page. Then the horrible over sized player controls. And now the oversized suggestions on the side bar. Not to mention the obnoxious amount and duration of ads. It's getting worse and worse. These are all symptoms that something is very wrong.
  • chrneu 10mo ago
    you can do all this with one extension and no scripts: Enhancer for Youtube. Also recommend DeArrow and SponsorBlock. But also flip content creators a $5 every once in a while. That's more revenue than they'll ever get from you watchin their videos.
• thaumasiotes 10mo ago
  > Unfortunately the YouTube PM org’s myopia is accelerating: with this data I now project that there will be zero videos on the homescreen around May of 2026 now, up from September. There are already zero videos if you visit with no youtube history. That seems... fine?
  • qilo 10mo ago
    > There are already zero videos if you visit with no youtube history [...] since August 2023 [0] [0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/139222780?hl=en&msgid=229405279 https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/139222780?hl=en&ms...
• delichon 10mo ago
  > maybe our mandatory NeuraLinks are coming sooner than I thought. The founder of NeuraLink has recently proposed to deploy sentient robots to watch criminals, removing the need for incarceration. There is a lot of synergy possible here with mandatory neural links. The bot could not only watch us but also press our buttons. "Criminal", being such a flexible concept, should pose little problem to globalizing this paradigm. For one thing, it will make it possible to harvest any number of clicks necessary, so advertising becomes obsolete, and so does content. God, I hope I'm not a prophet.
  • tonyhart7 10mo ago
    I can see this mandatory in a country like north korea where government would gladly use this tech to control citizens from defecting etc but after recent EU balooney request like chat control etc, I cant be so sure anymore
  • JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
    > sentient robots to watch criminals, removing the need for incarceration These are slap drones [1] from Banks’s The Player of Games [2]. [1] https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Slap-drone https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Slap-drone [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_of_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_of_Games
  • Nextgrid 10mo ago
    > it will make it possible to harvest any number of clicks necessary, so advertising becomes unnecessary and obsolete But then again, this is already possible, and has the advertising industry shit-scared, thus all the interest in blocking AI-related scrapers since they circumvent the whole “wasting human time” element.
  • daemonologist 10mo ago
    Ah yes, the Culture solution (https://groups.google.com/g/alt.books.iain-banks/c/nbW7GxRQ6eU https://groups.google.com/g/alt.books.iain-banks/c/nbW7GxRQ6...). (Always seemed rather cruel to the drone, to me.)
  • 10mo ago
• danpalmer 10mo ago
  What's the point being made in this article? That TVs have lower information density than desktop browsers? Like, yeah, obviously. That if you don't sign in to YouTube and don't pay to remove the ads, that you'll get prompted to sign in and you'll see ads? That doesn't seem particularly problematic. Sure it's mildly funny that a funny projection is true in a very contrived way, but it doesn't really stand up to any criticism. I use YouTube almost exclusively through the Apple TV app, and it's fine, I'd even say it has improved a little over the last few years. I like the low information density because I sit approximately 3m from the screen and navigate with a TV remote.
  • jaydenmilne 10mo ago
    Unfortunately I don't have pictures from before this change, but you used to get 5-6 videos I believe. Now you get two (and maybe one is an ad). The point is that I made a joke projection in my last post in April that by next May there would be only one video on the homepage, because obviously that would be ridiculous, right? Then I turned on my TV and it happened. See the previous blog post: https://jayd.ml/2025/04/30/someone-at-youtube-needs-glasses.html https://jayd.ml/2025/04/30/someone-at-youtube-needs-glasses....
    • danpalmer 10mo ago
      On my Apple TV I get 2.5 thumbnails per row and 2 rows. I honestly think that's appropriate for a TV interface and I basically like the UI. I find YouTube's Apple TV app to be the least clunky of all the carousel-of-videos apps that I use.
  • crazygringo 10mo ago
    > Sure it's mildly funny that a funny projection is true in a very contrived way I think you got it -- that's the point right there, nothing more...
  • spartanatreyu 10mo ago
    Compare the 1.25 video thumbnails shown on the apple tv app to the thumbnails on Steam's big picture mode (designed for people sitting on a couch far away from a tv): 1. https://emilio-gomez.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/steamos-vs-bp2.jpg https://emilio-gomez.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/steamos-... 2. https://preview.redd.it/new-big-picture-mode-is-finally-public-v0-dha7saosqmfa1.png?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=7e366f76723de9c9ee1923d88cd3e78c3444fc01 https://preview.redd.it/new-big-picture-mode-is-finally-publ...
• yk 10mo ago
  I already have 0 videos on youtube home screen, some combination of not being logged in, firefox privacy settings and ad blocker causes youtube to post a passive aggressive message and a search bar. I kinda like that Ui.
• dav43 10mo ago
  It’s crazy you can pay for premium, which is not cheap, and you can’t disable shorts. The number of times I clicked “show less” and it has zero effect on the number of shorts.
  • com2kid 10mo ago
    Shorts are up to 3 minutes long now. At this point they are just vertical videos. I fully expect the supported length to keep increasing!
    • mcmoor 10mo ago
      Vertical videos with much shitter UI. Inability to skip ahead or turn back may be understandable for <30 second videos, but not more.
      • joe_guy 10mo ago
        And auto repeat, sadly.
        • jtokoph 10mo ago
          And no captions
        • gwd 10mo ago
          Auto-repeat is the thing that most mystifies me about shorts. I understand the idea behind auto-play, although I disable it; but who on earth wants to watch the exact thing they just watched by default? Given the success of TikTok, the answer is apparently, "billions of people", but I just don't get it.
          • wrxd 10mo ago
            My theory is that it is a way of forcefully grabbing people’s attention. Without autoplay there is no engagement once the video is over. With autoplay there is the risk someone leaves the player on the background and ignores it. With looping videos people get annoyed and (if they’re like me) close the tab or skip to the next video just to get something different
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• schmuckonwheels 10mo ago
  It's difficult to capture into words how much contempt I hold for Google and Amazon, two companies which lost their way long ago and are now actively user-hostile. YouTube has gotten worse with every release. Endless, pointless UI changes. Sneaky resolution downgrades. When your video says "Auto 1080p" it's like 480p quality, manually choose 1080p and watch it change. Amazon has been working overtime to make your experience worse. The latest innovation is to eliminate invoices for US customers. This wasn't a mistake, as it was rolled out gradually over a few months, with workarounds quickly plugged as users become aware of them. Oh, there still is a "view invoice" button but it's just a redirect to order summary now. Dark patterns galore since cancelling Prime. Every checkout flow I'm hit with a minimum of two clicks where I have to decline or change something. Ordering a packet of laundry soap feels like buying a used car. The employees that implement this stuff dare to call themselves "engineers" yet their entire energy is devoted to making their customer's lives more miserable, which they are somehow paid a disgusting amount of money to go do. Real engineers solve problems. These people invent new problems to then go solve, likely because they are chasing their next promotion. There's a lot of folx who got into this business for all the wrong reasons and we're now seeing the results of that on a massive scale.
  • biff1 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    • schmuckonwheels 10mo ago
      I don't think you know what that word means.
      • biff1 10mo ago
        Tell me what it means. Maybe you are right.
        • chrneu 10mo ago
          xenophobia is a fear of foreigners. What about their comment expresses this? because they said "folx" ? lol wtf?
• haunter 10mo ago
  Funnily porn sites do 100x better UX than Youtube. Both on web and mobile. Probably because there is no monopoly but actual competition among them.
  • pessimizer 10mo ago
    Yes, Manwin competes with Mindgeek competes with Aylo competes with Ethical Capital Partners.
• binarymax 10mo ago
  Why. Why are they doing this. It’s the same with Netflix. I don’t understand. What is the metric that goes up when they show a couple giant videos.
  • unsnap_biceps 10mo ago
    I would presume the conversion rate for those specific three videos are much higher then if they're just three of twenty
  • charcircuit 10mo ago
    It may reduce decision paralysis and they are hoping their recommendation is good enough.
    • tavavex 10mo ago
      I honestly think that at some point, there will be no recommendations page. You'll open YouTube and it'll start autoplaying the video that they (or the advertisers) think you should see. You'll be able to skip to other videos from there, like on short-form content platforms. Likes and subscriptions will dictate how likely it'll be that you'll see a video by that creator in the future. Search and other "outdated" features will be tucked away and purposefully made even more useless than they already are.
      • binarymax 10mo ago
        Madness
      • ares623 10mo ago
        "Video surfing" does have a nice ring to it. You should be a Youtube PM.
      • estimator7292 10mo ago
        Isn't this just Shorts already?
• 29athrowaway 10mo ago
  Neuralink was mentioned, and it immediately made me remember the sad stories of the rhesus macaques that were used as Neuralink animal test subjects for brain implants. The quality of the work was poor and they were able to pull the implants out and then the implants got loose, causing bacterial and fungal infections and swelling and the macaques had to be euthanized. But not before banging their heads against everything, picking on the holes in their skulls and going insane as their brains got increasingly infected. Reading that kind of disgusting inhumane crap makes me ashamed of being a member of the same species. If you want to read more the search keywords are: "Animal 20" "Neuralink" > Animal 20 was seen "pulling on port connector which is now dislodged (no longer secured)". The next day, Animal 20 was "picking at incision and occasionally pulling on implant". Soon, infections developed. On Dec. 20, UC Davis staff found antibiotic resistant E. coli and Candida glabrata, a fungal infection, at the surgical site. They discussed a "necropsy next week", meaning they planned to euthanize Animal 20. Fucking cowards.
  • chrneu 10mo ago
    This is normal in the meat industry. It sucks it happens to test subjects, or any living creature, but this is nothing compared to the daily cruelty inflicted upon innocent animals that we deem "food".
    • 29athrowaway 10mo ago
      So then because it's happens in the meat industry then it's least concern then. Whataboutism.
• FridayoLeary 10mo ago
  That's not even the main problem. Youtube is basically unwatchable with all the ads. Maybe it's just me but it often feels like it's badly broken. I found skipvids a while back. I find the videos on YT and watch them there. I don't watch yt often so that's the path of least resistance for me.
• drivers99 10mo ago
  There are 0 videos on my YouTube homepage, just a screen asking me to turn on history. Just the way I like it. Here’s what I did: Go into the YouTube app, settings, manage all history, under the history tab hit Delete -> delete all time. Then go to controls (still in the manage all history dialog box under settings), under YouTube history hit Turn off. It says “pausing…” Hit Pause, and Got it. It’s been exactly 3 months since I did that. I still watch stuff from my subscriptions and when I search for something I want to watch. There are still recommended videos when you’re watching a video but they are a lot less enticing since they are not personally targeted. I curated my subscriptions so it’s more what I would want to spend time watching instead of reaction videos for instance. My actual time watching YouTube has dropped a lot.
  • postalrat 10mo ago
    I see the same screen and wonder why they don't suggest videos based on subscriptions. I assume they figure no suggestions will nag people into enabling history.
  • ilikehurdles 10mo ago
    I thoroughly love this experience. I open subscriptions as needed to catch up on things I care about. Otherwise I use the homepage to search for something. No distractions. No infinitely scrolling feed of slop and ads.
  • wrxd 10mo ago
    I did that as well and also removed all the subscriptions form YouTube itself and instead have all the channels I like in my RSS reader
    • jstanley 10mo ago
      I tried to make a custom Subscriptions view for YouTube but they kept blocking me for trying to scrape hundreds of RSS feeds.
      • pbalau 10mo ago
• insin 10mo ago
  Low _usable_ information density is one of the main things I made Control Panel for YouTube [^0] to tackle, especially in Subscriptions. On a 1080p monitor, my unmodified Subscriptions page currently has 6 fully-visible thumbnails, consisting of 3 livestreams from people I only subscribe to for videos, 1 watched video, 1 stream VOD (which I'll never watch), and 1 unwatched video, so that's a score of 1/6. Scroll down and you start getting into more watched videos, stream VODs, the unwanted Shorts shelf, thumbnails for Upcoming videos (i.e. videos which can't be watched), and videos from people I don't even subscribe to (via YouTube's recently-added Collaborations feature). With everything in Control Panel for YouTube enabled and a minium of 5 videos per row configured, I have 15 unwatched or partially watched (up to a configurable %) videos every time. Same thing for Home, in which other things I don't want such as Mixes and Playlists can also be hidden. It also tends to have fixes for the other things people rightfully complain about when YouTube comes up in these threads, such as (reads down the page) blocking ads and hiding promoted content, hiding Shorts everywhere, automatically switching to the original audio for auto-dubbed videos, hiding Related videos when they appear below the video pushing comments even further down, fixing the new oversized video controls and huge videos in the Related sidebar, etc. etc. [^0] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
  • 1over137 10mo ago
    > On a 1080p monitor… There’s your problem. You have normal hardware. The rich SV folks at google are probably all using 6k monitors. (only half joking)
    • Orygin 10mo ago
      It's the same issue on big screens. I have a ultra wide 2k, and in full screen I only have 3 videos on the homepage.
    • kuschku 10mo ago
      Even on expensive, high-res screens, the homepage looks like this: https://i.k8r.eu/YOHPqQ.png https://i.k8r.eu/YOHPqQ.png
    • 10mo ago
• rubyfan 10mo ago
  They have also gotten more aggressive on trying to get you to sign in. I have appreciated the shitty UX changes they have made which has resulted in me using it less. It’s just filler and I need less of that in life, so thanks for chasing me away.
  • conductr 10mo ago
    On my work PC, they all but forced me to create an account just to watch videos. I could not find a way around it (I didn’t try super hard). I don’t use my personal accounts on that device so I just created a throwaway.
    • aeyes 10mo ago
      When did you create the throwaway? The last time I tried they directly asked for a phone number.
      • rubyfan 10mo ago
        Yeah the phone number thing across services is out of hand and we need a hide my email type solution for it now. I checked in at a restaurant recently and they asked for my number to text me when our table was ready. As soon as the number finished they had my name and all sorts of info I never gave them. It’s totally out of control.
• bryanhogan 10mo ago
  I can highly recommend using YouTube through Firefox with extensions or ReVanced that try to fix these hostile and anti user decisions. Although I do sometimes wonder why I do spend so much time on a platform that hates me so much.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• duxup 10mo ago
  I miss when I could search youtube for "cats" and I'd get just raw cat footage. Now I get cat influencers and influencers selling me on them ... while they tell me how to pick a cat. Maybe I find kinda raw cat footage, with a title that is misleading, annoying music, text bubbles popping all over it :( I just want what I searched for ... youtube doesn't give me that. It's not that unlike when I open the home page, I've no control and so much of that isn't what I'm looking for...
  • lan321 10mo ago
    For me it's 3 videos of what I searched for and then it just goes to my normal recommended. One of the issues I still haven't fixed with an extension so I just search videos via normal web search.
  • neop1x 10mo ago
    Sometimes it helps to use intitle:cats and other advanced search operators https://granwehr.com/blog/youtube-search-operators https://granwehr.com/blog/youtube-search-operators
• ChrisArchitect 10mo ago
  Similar over at Netflix with the UI layout update they introduced in May. Oversized, limiting carousel items. https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/netflix-new-homepage-layout-user-guide https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/netflix-new-homepage-...
• everyone 10mo ago
  ublock origin \ my filters youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 5 !important) Ive had that for a couple years.
• yearolinuxdsktp 10mo ago
  YouTube app on Apple TV is inexcusable garbage, likely intentionally so. Google doesn’t want you to have a good experience on an Apple product.
• throwaway173738 10mo ago
  As a workaround just disable the watch history. Then there are no videos on the home screen.
• 827a 10mo ago
  One of the things I dislike about the Youtube app on Apple TV is how it appears to maintain an entirely separate list of recommended videos, specific to the kinds of videos I tend to watch on TV, versus the phone and desktop (which might themselves also each have their own recommendation algorithm, but my behavior there is closer so as to not notice). The difference is stark. I use YouTube on the Apple TV to play mostly background videos; 8 hour AI generated lofi mixes, burning fireplaces, things like that. Ambiance. Its all that gets recommended now when I pull up the app; but only on the TV. This behavior is somewhat desirable: but the issue is, the youtube apple TV app is an abhorrent experience that feels deeply tailored to stop you from getting to any content that is not expressly recommended. And these videos are all that get recommended. A new Linus Tech Tips video might be in my feed on desktop/mobile; but finding that video on the TV literally requires me to search "Linus Tech Tips" and go to their channel -> all videos. I certainly don't mind the platform raising the prominence of videos I tend to watch on that platform; but to me it feels like I should be able to at least scroll down on the home page a bit to get a more "centralized" view into everything my account watches and would be recommended.
  • hombre_fatal 10mo ago
    Yeah, I wish the UI could let me browse the various silos of videos I like to watch instead of trying to be clever with one feed. And it’s like Youtube thinks I only want to watch the last three genres at any moment. If I branch out, then it pops another favorite genre from the set. Sometimes I’ll go months or even years forgetting about video genres I love until I randomly remember it. Feels like a wasted opportunity, and it should have more in common with music apps.
• noisy_boy 10mo ago
  I hate the forced AI generated English translation of the non-english shorts with the passion of a million suns. It should never have been the default. If you are the person who made that decision, fuck you. If you know that person, please pass on my sentiments.
• month13 10mo ago
  My latest favorite is now that the Subscriptions panel adds a bonus "Recommended" row at the top, and then two rows down, a "Recommended Shorts"
• gyulai 10mo ago
  Reminds me of a comment I wrote just recently: » I think that anyone who is technically sufficiently well-versed, is going to avoid that hellscape like the plague. So then, who is the actual audience for this stuff? My guess would be: the old folks' home around the corner, which, sooner or later, will be forced to upgrade those TVs to smart-TVs. And once those old folks put in their credit card numbers or log in with their Amazon accounts, there goes a lot of people's inheritance. My own elderly father is wise to the scam, but not confident in his ability to navigate the dark patterns. So now, he is afraid to input his credit card information into anything digital, essentially excluding him from cultural participation in the digital age. « [1] With that frame (the target audience for smart TVs is old people), "needing glasses" is not all that far-fetched. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45462816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45462816
  • recursivecaveat 10mo ago
    I was going to disagree by saying that the menus are extremely confusing to the elderly. However if the goal is to extract money from them by generating confusion about what is an on-demand vs a streaming piece of media; you could not design a better software system. Reminds me of the theory that micro-transaction revenue in video games has driven menu UI in the direction of confusing and disorientating the player.
• mdavid626 10mo ago
  As with many other similar sites, it’s time to get off YouTube as well. The times when one could watch good content not made for money, are over. It’s about watching as much content as you can, the more addictive the better.
• zombot 10mo ago
  Total enshittification has won and reality is indistinguishable from satire. And still we continue to empower the enshittifiers while complaining loudly about the self-inflicted wounds.
• globular-toast 10mo ago
  I just opened the YouTube app on my Android phone and there is similarly one video on the home page!
• kalaksi 10mo ago
  Recently noticed that YouTube had also removed the button for disabling autoplay if you're not logged in. The enshittification continues.
• Havoc 10mo ago
  It is rapidly becoming unusual. Already needs a bunch of extensions to make things bearable. At some point it’ll become so shit people will look at trying to sidestep their frontend entirely. In other news YouTube is clamping down on ability to download videos…what a coincidence
• ivanjermakov 10mo ago
  On a sidenote, there is surprisingly no universal agreement on a default font size and "scaling" of a website. Common recommendation is font-size: 14px on html element, but I often encounter websites that are way off in scaling.
  • dvh 10mo ago
    Sorry pal but font size is not something you decide. Font size is something I decide!
    • ivanjermakov 10mo ago
      Absolutely. Would be great to have a consistent starting point.
  • ruszki 10mo ago
    Isn’t the recommendation to not use px at all? Or just “Pepperidge farm remembers”?
    • globular-toast 10mo ago
      Sigh... You'd think people would know this by now. What does it even mean to be a "web developer" if you don't know the difference between pixels and text size? It seems like such a fundamental thing, like a decorator knowing how to calculate how much paint is needed for a job. But no... now we have web browsers where a pixel isn't even a pixel, it's 4 pixels, on a "HiDPI" display...
  • kevincox 10mo ago
    This is unfortunately true. It feels like "1rem" should be the ideal body don't size. But on desktop browsers this is often quite small. Personally I configure my browser's default font size (1rem) to something nice and readable, but I'm sure that the number of people who do this is <10%. Probably closer to 1%. But either way I would recommend against hardcoding a size in px.
• rcarmo 10mo ago
  Ironically, most people I know are now using alternative YouTube front-ends not for the ad blocking, but just for tracking their subscriptions in a proper list and skipping the junk in the home page.
• guillevg 10mo ago
  Yes, YT UX is awful, specially on TV. I found about SmartTube and it is great, I recommend it. You can choose the grid size, among many other things (most importantly, no ads!).
• blurr123 10mo ago
  that "i skied down mount everest" promotion by redbull is out of control. its the epitome of 'look at me' syndrome
• alex1138 10mo ago
  I used to lurk the Google forums (they even changed the goddamn format of the forums now to where clicking things is tedious and I'm sure it's 100% intentional) and going back years with Google and also I suspect Youtube it was full of users complaining about "You're ignoring all our advice/wants in this thread". I don't remember all of it, but it was product managers being incredibly selective The tyranny of distance (you can do x where x is usually 'ignore feedback' and you can get away with it separated by hundreds of miles, where otherwise you might get punched in the face) kills me with companies like this. You can't just ignore all of us (the customer isn't always right but it wouldn't kill you to listen every once and a while and if you don't, we'll gradually stop using your product). But you can, because listening to The People isn't where the product managers decide it should be or isn't where the ad dollars are or whatever It's an emperor has no clothes situation. They know it we know it everybody knows it but we're all (corporate, anyway) just going to ignore it and plug our ears
• sarreph 10mo ago
  > I now project that there will be zero videos on the homescreen around May of 2026 now This is already true. If you sign out of YouTube or turn your "Watch History" off you see zero videos on the home screen.
• somat 10mo ago
  On desktop it has already hit zero. Clear all your tokens and go to home page, no videos. I am being a bit obtuse of course, if you have any sort of identifying tokens it does show videos, but the irony was too good to waste on mere facts.
• podgorniy 10mo ago
  What could users do with this quazimonopoly? YT PMs can keep being discunnected from user's needs as long and far as their personal worldview limitations allow and bare no consequences.
  • reddalo 10mo ago
    YouTube is a monopoly, and with huge barriers to entry. Nobody else has the money, the infrastructure and the content to build a YouTube alternative.
    • OrangeMusic 10mo ago
      The money or infrastructure: factually false. The content: well I guess that's the network effect. To be honest I don't understand content creators who bitch about YouTube constantly (about "the algorithm", demonetization, strikes and more), but DON'T put their content somewhere else at least as an alternative. You don't have to _move_ but at least also publish your videos to a podcast platform or something?
      • haspok 10mo ago
        Ever heard of Nebula?
• kotaKat 10mo ago
  I'd also like to scream at Youtube for the "experiencing interruptions? find out why!" bullshit that enforces a five second wait before videos will load. I only put 2+2 together when I was running yt-dlp and realizing there was a "Sleeping 5.00 seconds as required by the site..." before downloads would kick in and... wellp. It all makes sense now. As an ISP representative, I am getting absolutely pissmad that YouTube is gaslighting our users and making them think that our service is "terrible" because of perceived buffering on every video load because YouTube wants to play a shitty cat and mouse game against adblockers for all.
• mooktakim 10mo ago
  Can someone write about how terrible the YouTube Android app is, so that some PM can actually fix it? Its an app i use constantly and hate using it all the time. I accidently click to another video and lose the position of where i was. It used to confirm the play of another video, but now it doesn't. The offline feature is terrible; you can't play something and make it go offline. It used to cast really well, with a "casting queue". When i disconnect from my TV, its still logged in. Adding/removing/changing the watch queue is so bad that I have to use my laptop to make changes. When browsing, you can't tell whether a video is already on your watch list; it's not always accurate. Sometimes you click add, and it removes it from the watch list because it's also in the list. Many more things.. can't think of them right now.
• LucavagoHellman 10mo ago
  [flagged]
• sph 10mo ago
  Good timing, now that the inept PMs at YouTube have decided to move the Subscription and Watch Later buttons on my desktop UI and make them more cumbersome to reach. What the hell are they even doing? Like a sibling commenter mentioned, I used to happily pay for Premium, but I'd rather put up with the misery (and ad-block) than give them a single cent ever again. Why should I reward pervasive enshittification? Sort yourselves out, Youtube.
• Sammi 10mo ago
  I use the Stylus[0] extension with this style in order to fix it: ytd-rich-item-renderer { max-width: 265px; } /* Show full length title instead of ellipsis cutoff at two lines. */ a.yt-lockup-metadata-view-model__title { display: inline !important; } [0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpeebahjckkjfobafhncgmne?hl=en&pli=1 https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpee...
  • aembleton 10mo ago
    If you've already got uBlockOrigin then you can add this to it instead of another extension. Add these filters: youtube.com##.ytd-rich-item-renderer:style(max-width:265px; !important;) youtube.com##.yt-lockup-metadata-view-model__title:style(display:inline; !important;)
    • Sammi 10mo ago
      Thanks. That let me remove an extension from my browser, which was great. But the filters actually need to be like this: youtube.com##ytd-rich-item-renderer{max-width:265px; !important;} youtube.com##yt-lockup-metadata-view-model__title{display:inline; !important;}
• whichquestion 10mo ago
  If you have history turned off and you’re not signed in, the number of videos they show on the home screen is already zero
• bentt 10mo ago
  I really don't understand why there are not sites that curate Youtube videos? Like, present basically the same recommendation UI, but just hand pick cool videos around different topics? Hell, it could even be like Reddit with voting... but the algorithmic recommendation engine that Youtube uses is NOT aligned with my interests. It's aligned ONLY with my behavior. I want to learn! I want to explore! I do NOT want to get corralled into the same videos as everyone else just because they are engaging. I'll give you an example. I'm super into game development. I also love the NBA. NBA videos are posted nearly every day and I click on them. Gamedev videos, not so often. So what do I get? Tons of NBA content because that's what I click on in my recommended. What I want, though, is for the recommendations to think about what I would _like_ to watch and not just what I _do_ watch. I think a curation site would help alleviate this problem, especially if I could steer it more than Youtube's.
  • swah 10mo ago
    API limits? I've been testing RSS + NetNewsWire for this.
  • ssl-3 10mo ago
    You could just... make a subreddit for it, right? Youtube videos still have URLs that can be linked to from anywhere. On your personalized level: Don't let the algorithm work against you; instead, help it work for you. If you're being inundated with NBA videos and want fewer of them, then pick one or more of them and declare that you're "Not interested." This slows the flood of any over-abundant topic.
    • bentt 10mo ago
      Thanks yeah thats a fair point. I just get a sense that incentives are misaligned. I pay $30/mo for family premium primarily to keep my kids away from ads, but Youtube still finds more ways to squeeze us by steering us around for retention instead of to what we actually want.
  • daliusd 10mo ago
    Maybe there are subreddits for that?
• mzajc 10mo ago
  People here might be interested in Invidious[0], a FOSS web frontend for YouTube. By default it shows 4 videos per row, but that can be trivially adjusted with CSS. It's a little light on features, but otherwise very customizable. [0]: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
• user____name 10mo ago
  It's one video and it's titled "Why the Third Reich CURED CANCER but your GOVERNMENT does't want you to know." And has twelve ads on protein powder and dishwasher tablets in some foreign language.
• S0y 10mo ago
  If you use Ublock you can add this to your filters to restore a sane number of videos per row: --- ! YouTube 7 Videos Per Row Fix (Home and Channel Pages) youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;) youtube.com###contents.ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;) youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 7 !important;) ! YouTube 7 Videos Per Row Fix (Channel Page margin fix) youtube.com##ytd-rich-item-renderer:style(margin-right: calc(var(--ytd-rich-grid-item-margin)/2) !important; margin-left: calc(var(--ytd-rich-grid-item-margin)/2) !important;) ! YouTube 7 Videos Per Row Fix (Font Size fix) youtube.com###video-title.ytd-rich-grid-media:style(font-size: 1.4rem !important; line-height: 2rem !important;) youtube.com###metadata-line.ytd-video-meta-block:style(font-size: 1.2rem !important; line-height: 1.8rem !important;) youtube.com###video-title.ytd-rich-grid-slim-media:style(font-size: 1.4rem !important; line-height: 2rem !important;)
• flipgimble 10mo ago
  The content on YouTube should qualify it to be preserved as a treasure of humanity. Think of all the college lectures, conference proceedings, sporting events, citizen journalism, podcasts that are the backbone of new communities and cultural revolutions. It is the modern version of public access TV and expresses a close to compelte spectrum of human interests. At the same time Google Product Managers (or whatever euphemism for middle management they use at Google) are dumbfoundingly short shighted and myopic. They canibalize and destroy the value of the website to make some engagement or ad numbers go up, persumably in a short term play for promotion. When the consequences of their efforts to enshittify become apparent, they are long gone to another FAANG or moved up to executive level where severance packages mean they suffer no consequences. Its a shame there is no incentive to make the best product for the long term usefullness. and I've paid full subscription price for a couple of years now to avoid the ads, and I can barely stand what it has evolved into. My screen is 80% games, shorts, "ads" and categories I didn't ask for.
• OhMeadhbh 10mo ago
  For the last year I've mostly only been dropping into YouTube just to see how bad it's become. Invidious isn't my favourite bit of software, but it is better than the stock youtube interface. Also, on my ChromeCast (yes, I know it's not supported anymore) the YouTube app will play an ad in the middle of a video and never return to the original video. Most of what I do is look around to find videos that look interesting then download them with yt-dlp so I can watch complete videos. There's probably a market out there for video hosting that doesn't suck. I think a video search / discovery platform on top of Vimeo might be useful.
• lacoolj 10mo ago
  "...I fired up YouTube on an Apple TV..." I thought Apple TV was a subscription service? Does Apple make TVs now?
  • kulshan 10mo ago
    https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-4k/ https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-4k/
• matt3D 10mo ago
  I have a slightly similar frustration; Netflix, Disney et al requiring me to figure out the name of the film by deciphering the poster. I don’t know how this passes any kind of accessibility testing.
• behole 10mo ago
  I am dreaming of the day a YT killer shows up. I enjoy the content enough to pay for premium but the laundry list of problems is GROWING. I feel like "TV" is on the precipice of a paradigm shift. I wish YT was not going to be our substrate for that moment but it looks inevitable.
• copperx 10mo ago
  Tangential: My eyesight is bad in the dark, and the tendency of darkening the video to show the controls that started with the YouTube player enrages me to no end!!! There is no need to make the video disappear!
• 66yatman 10mo ago
  Just sign in for better recommendations, it's clearly written there, you don't need glasses to see it.