The only two possible filters on the list of videos of a channel now are most recent and most popular.
I know it's a small thing but somehow this hits me really hard.
Also, there's less videos on a single row now. Because we can't read more than that without our attention span going poof.
This bothers me because I like to know how long a video is before I commit the time to sitting down and watching it. This feels like an attempt at a dark pattern with the intent to improve metrics - surely watch time is a metric youtube cares about.
Between the ads and the poor content, I feel like Youtube is pushing hard to become the new public TV.
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/research/library/user-cont...
Edit: looks like the dots are 40x40px on desktop
Though it probably is some bug or... rapid A/B testing thing Google has going on.
When you're watching a video and you go back, the url updates but the page doesn't refresh/redirect, the video just ends up restarting. Very annoying.
Oh well even HN will always mess up your scroll position when hitting back so it goes
Overall YouTube makes for a nice example of how modern design often makes the experience worse
But yeah the new design is pretty awful. No idea what they were thinking.
Edit: this happens on Firefox on Windows. I haven't tried Chrome.
But press Cmd+K to reach the address bar, or Cmd+W to close the tab: Nothing happens because Jira hijacks the keyboard.
It’s the big site challenge: Wreck the user experience and watch people who keep using it because they have to.
One of the things we discovered is that Youtube actually runs from three content delivery networks who all have to agree on what data is to be displayed. The user data, such as your profile, watch history, and subscriptions, are in the first CDN. The video description, title, and comments attached to the video are in the second. The video itself and related data such as ad placement, categorization, and closed captions, are on a third CDN.
If the CDNs don't agree or one doesn't get updated in time before the page draws itself, you get mismatched descriptions/titles, mismatched comments, or some of the strangeness people have noticed where the timeline "watched" preview in the thumbnail is wrong by showing the user stopped watching earlier in the video than they actually did.
Isn't that all there's ever been? Just chronological and popularity? This post isn't very helpful unless you say what you think has been removed. (I, for one, have always wished for most popular over the last 30 days, but oh well.)
> Also, there's less videos on a single row now.
You're going to have to tell us how many there were before and how many there are now. I'm not seeing any difference. It also depends -- are you talking about the home page? Channel home page? Channel videos tab? Because they all act differently.
Are you sure you just haven't changed your zoom settings or something? Or your window width?
Youtube old UI "SORT BY" option had "Date added (oldest)" : https://imgur.com/a/9czAAiv
Youtube new UI removed "oldest" option and only has "Recently uploaded" : https://imgur.com/a/aSAhxLC
(Apparently, the new javascript for Youtube hasn't propagated to all worldwide servers yet which is why I was able to get screenshots of both the old & new UI by using different computers.)
This redesign is being A/B tested (with high percentages of users it's rolled out to). It comes in different parts, so if you clear your cookies and reload you can be reassigned a bucket and therefore see slightly different interfaces.
Bonus: I think the redesign is called called Amsterdam, don't quote me on that though...
https://github.com/sw-yx/youtube-browser-extension
Most Popular Date added (oldest) Date added (newest)
* Only go on the Subscriptions page; I've never once visited the "Home" page
* Blocked the Recommended Videos sidebar using uBlock
* Use SponsorBlock
* Use uBO filters to remove Shorts from Subscriptions page
I come to watch what I want, not get all the clickbait on the side.
My typical usage is:
* Go to Home page * Add highly relevant videos to my Watch Later playlist * View the videos from Watch Later, like/dislike as appropriate * Rinse and repeat
I'm trying to give Shorts a shot. I particularly like them for viewing podcast shorts, but I've noticed the suggestions are taking a longer time to give me 'relevant' videos. Some of the Shorts are totally random, while others are from my Subscribed channels. I make sure to like/dislike as appropriate, and I've noticed a slight improvement in a week's time.
Youtube power is in its recommendation engine. I discovered amazing content through this engine. You say you come to watch what you want, but how do you initially fill the "subscription" page without exploring first?
There can be various levels of exploring. Maybe visiting the home page only once a month. But the distribution capabilities are what makes Youtube what it is.
I don't think it's necessarily bad to use the automated recommendations but there are certainly other ways to discover new content.
Every once in a while after scrolling for a while it gives me a "Want something new?" link and then the recommendations are fanatic but that feed has no bookmarkable URL or reliable way to get to it.
Did you actually discover it through youtube's algorithms and discovery engine or was it linked to you by friends and you simply watched it on Youtube?
These are completely different things in this context.
> But the distribution capabilities are what makes Youtube what it is.
Hold on, I thought it was the recommendation engine? Which is it? Distribution is about economies of scale and good engineering, recommendation is about putting the user first, rather than monetization.
I say that because, as someone who does not sign into YouTube, I have no idea if it gets more complex.
* Never go to https://youtube.com to find anything. Only go to YouTube when it's a known link you found on another site. I don't need recommendations or ads
* Copy the URL, paste it into yt-dlp
* Wait a few seconds for the video to download and watch it in my viewer of choice with no crap attached.
Combine this with a window manager shortcut to open the clipboard contents in mpv and the experience is pretty slick.
You can also dump the URLs in a .m3u file and watch a bunch in a row with mpv that way.
For me, it basically takes a guess what topics and themes I find interesting and pulls content around them. Automatic notifications are also pretty good.
YouTube figured out that I like interviews on a certain channel and nothing else, or Ukraine war updates from another channel but not their regular content. Probably through simple similar audience trick but solid selection nevertheless.
For whatever reason, it cannot apply this knowledge to shorts which are dreadfully bad.
I mostly watch channels like Aswath Damodaran, mCoding, etc., which are not related to the contents of the mentioned channels at all, yet their recommendation engine still shows me all this stuff.
Speaking of search and YouTube UI… are you talking about that veteran guy who occasionally does coverage on Ukraine but keeps a level head. He will often point out why it is important to think about why your enemy is doing what it is doing. And he uses some open source map to show what is going on?
…and the rest of his content seems to be reviews of military related things, or something else that has nothing to do with Ukraine?
Cause yeah I’m subscribed to that guy, I think… but I totally forget what his channel is and don’t seem to be getting any recommendations for his videos anymore.
This works OK, although it tends to promote the same things over and over, seemingly at random.
I too only do subscriptions, watch everything my subscribed channels put out by placing them in my playlists (custom watch later lists for attention spans/activies), and only find other channels through my current channels. If you don't watch everything from specific channels (some big ones really pump them out), I recommend PocketTube's Subscription manger (and playlist manager).
Youtube hates us. It takes away tools for us to watch how you and I want, and refuses to add basic tools to playlists like "removed all watched" and "sort by length". I'm subscribed "watch later" still exists. They want you to just watch "recommended" videos one after the other like tik-tok-television.
...all of which serve to remind me what a pit of suck the service is, and ensure I never subscribe.
And the cycle of life is complete.
I don't think I could use YT without SponsorBlock and uBO. The SponsorBlock outage of the last few days really made me aware how much time is wasted on those sponsored segments, intro reels, and interaction reminders.
I love it when videos have a SB "skip to highlight" timestamp -that 10 minute video of the creator rambling on and on is now a 10 second video of the slow-motion moneyshot.
I recognize that people value YouTube for it's recommendation engine. That was never the draw for me; I just want a place to watch videos from creators I like. Overall, I found the recommendations to not work for me; they were overall noisy and distracting. Someone asked me once "well how do you find new content?", which I found hilarious.
https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts
Linus' channel is particularly horrible without this.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...
I'd like to figure out how to filter Shorts from my RSS feeds, but my preferred channels almost never use them so it hasn't been a big deal. The only other annoyance is live streams, which seem to debut on my RSS feed several hours before they're actually live (with no clear information about the "live-iness" of the video).
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This popup always shows up in my account no matter how many times I dismiss it. Very annoying.
Any way to remove this with uBO? I tried a few ways but it ended up not working well
I use YouTube like this! Definitely going to implement some of your suggestions.
[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distractio...
But getting the clean google-videos layout which was just a video player and a search bar can be done entirely with ublock :D
definitely not. there are very few bots in YouTube comments these days, though there certainly are some.
there is a LOT of brown-nosing, though.
I don't watch ultra-popular stuff, so what I see is different from what you will see, necessarily.
In gameplay and game streaming videos you'll find useful tidbits and hints on how to play a game.
etc.
Pages are amazingly clean now.
When I mouseover a video with an interesting title, the preview appears.
- search duckduckgo, go to the "videos" tab, then I end up on youtube if that's where the video is.
- go to youtube.com, use the search, pick the video.
- I don't ever like/subscribe/comment on anything.
The easiest way for me not to get consumed by trash is to proactively hide it. I leaned that I have low self control when it comes to data consumption, so I block everything I identify as dangerous.
site:youtube.com <your_searchterm>
YouTube is so much better when you remove all the little overlays and dark-patterns meant to get you to watch something else at all times.
For this I just use the web feeds. Creators are free to hop platforms and my workflow won’t need to change.
It's a pattern of 'don't restrict, just make it less convenient to use'.
They carry such a small cognitive load and are of immense value to many, many use cases.
Who decides these things?
From an engagement standpoint, the ideal Youtube is one where you can't actually view a list of videos from a specific channel at all. Or search for videos. Or anything really that isn't just watching whatever set of videos the algorithm thinks will maximize your engagement at that time.
The web in general is moving in this direction at a fast pace and the cause for all of this is one thing: phones. That's it. There's an increasingly massive number of people that spend hours a day staring at their phones mindlessly scrolling through tiktok, twitter, etc. to waste their time away when they have nothing better to do, simply consuming whatever content is fed to them, giving absolutely no thought to what they're seeing beyond how much it entertains them in that moment. They don't want to look for specific videos, they don't want to watch a specific channel, they just want to be kept busy by an algorithm. These people are insanely easy to please and will consume for hours at a time, watching plenty of ads. The more people start behaving like this, the more money these platforms make.
True, with an exception of Mastodon, PeerTube, Matrix and other distributed networks based on free software.
I can imagine a "Watch Later" product owner thinking that if he removes a certain control, he can game the stats and say the feature is seeing more use - securing his promotion.
We see this in public administration all the time, no reason to think private enterprise would be any different.
Having written that, I realize my YT usage is fairly low on search and I feel myself being forced towards it more and more in recent months/years.
Apple started the minimalist, option hiding, functionality axing, 1984-ish control freak movement. They even got away with selling phones without chargers, making $40 billion on lightning cables sales.
Just blame Apple.
I don’t know a single person in my bubble who needs more lightning cables. I have a dozen unused lightning cables already laying around.
I threw away every pair of headphones that came with an iPhone I have ever bought. Most of mini/micro usb cables that come with small electronics go into trash - I do not need more cables!
Someone commented this yesterday but the calculation was crap. What source do you have?
Are there books on how to play the game?
At the same time, there is some pipe dream that the app can just give the user a 100% ideal experience with virtually no input on the user's part. What this really means is less optionality for users who want it.
Lastly, in any company there are going to be people fighting against complexity to keep things maintainable, scalable etc. The product gets sacrificed for the organization.
On that hand: Google never cares about feedback, you can't submit it, if you can it gets ignored.
Personally, I hardly use YouTube unless I follow a direct link. I have also disabled all feeds, comments, and suggestions using uBlock Origin.
<funny videos> <cats> <harry styles new gf> <steroid cycle> <apple or pc>
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search has also become ... rather stupid? it shows a few results and then some irrelevant "recommendations"
Also would be nice if they stopped pushing shorts so hard. Why does youtube want to become tiktok, that is offensive to both users and creators, becayse YT has a distinct use case
But I'm not sure where Youtube is actually going with this. There's now "normal Youtube", "Shorts" and "Live" coexisting on the same platform, along with Premium exclusives and Youtube Music. All of them integrated somewhat awkwardly.
Also agree with the sibling comment that youtube was _full_ of fun short videos, but they are Not for some reasons counted as shorts, and now there is this situation of channels with yers-old catalogues of short videos, except the newest ones are “shorts” and the oldest ones in exactly the same style are “just videos”.
???
Some things are missing, like searching and queuing videos while watching one (I guess adding this feature could be a weekend project), but there's no ads, you can listen to video without downloading the video part, it does not stop after a while, and is quite lightweight. You can subscribe to channels and there's no magic happening in the videos you actually see, nor any need for a Google account. The information density is correct. You don't wait before a skeleton while the interface loads, because it's instant. SponsorBlock works with it too.
I can recommend. It might not be very sexy, but its interface design is not driven by commercial reasons and does not follow the oversimplification trend.