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
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.
I call these features "dead birds" because they remind me of gifts that an outdoor cat will leave on your doorstep. They took quite the effort to do and were made with good intention, but ultimately I don't want them.
I highly recommend uninstalling the YouTube app and just using the browser. It has all the same features and it actually works reliability. And at least Firefox lets you keep paying a video without keeping the screen up
YMMV. If I trigger autoplay, it's almost always on purpose, and I tend to read the subtitles. Jumping into the video right where I was works well for me! Losing my position would be very annoying.
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.
Autoplay has been broken since major browsers have silently added autoplay permissions. The fundamental problem with autoplay is that the getAutoplayPolicy() query is still a draft and only experimentally implemented in Firefox.
There is no way to handle autoplay correctly. It's simply been broken for the past few years. There is also no way to detect autoplay using workarounds. I.e. autoplaying a silent audio, because you can only prove the existence of autoplay, but never its absence, since autoplay could be delayed for whatever reason and happen outside of your timeout based hack.
> 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.
As a counterpoint I love that feature on desktop and use it all the time.
Often I don't even click videos but just watch them with the preview autoplay (with sound enabled). I also zoom in on my mousepad so that it covers the whole screen and I only need to click through to like the video or for the comments. Much more seemless experience for me.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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, then uncheck "Video previews". It resets itself every 15 days or so, but at least one can have some peace in the meantime.
That setting can be fairly sticky. Mine has stayed off since I initially disabled it, shortly after they added the "feature". I have no idea why it's not sticky for you. Maybe they fuck with me less because I have premium?
This is unacceptable to me. I've turned this setting off more times than I care to count. I've submitted feedback a couple times as well. I don't remember doing it lately, which is good. But I should have only ever had to do it once. I have a Google account, there is no reason this setting shouldn't be saved with my accounts, synced to all my devices, and only set once. I pay for YouTube Premium; I shouldn't be subjected to all these tactics which I assume are there to increase engagement and watch time. The price I pay is fixed and they don't earn ad revenue off me... why the games?
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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)
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.
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
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:
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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)
Conway's law is expressed as "communication structure -> program structure" but it's actually even stronger than that; the arrow is bidirectional. If either the organization wants to break up the homepage into different teams, or if the organization has to have multiple teams work on their homepage for whatever reason, the homepage will reflect the organizational structure. YouTube falls into the second branch, which is that their home page is so complicated it has to be broken up between teams due to sheer organizational size. At YouTube's size you'll even have organizational distinctions you can't even see on the homepage like dedicated reliability engineering teams. At their scale I see at least six teams most likely, the "normal" video team, the shorts team, the sidebar menu, the hamburger menu, the search team, and the team responsible for the top-level all-Google interaction, plus multiple invisible ones like recommendation algorithm, reliability, possibly a dedicated performance team, etc.
You can, organizationally, try to put these all under one manager, but even when you do that it is a surprisingly uphill battle to maintain coherence, even when it is a goal, which it often isn't particularly. There's a lot of reasons few companies have the visual and design coherence of a ~2010 Apple, including arguably even 2025 Apple.
> 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.
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
> 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.
It used to be 12 videos until about a year ago. If you zoom in and out the thumbnails don't change size!
The worst casualty of the current design is the search. You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations. No? Fuck off? Do what I tell you to do!
Maybe a good opportunity to remember that you watching the videos you want to watch is actually just a workaround Google suffers through in the YouTube product.
They have to do it so that you come to the site, but it costs them money and makes it harder for them to optimize the revenue they get from your eyeballs.
Strycturally, their goal is to push the line as far as they can, and they spend a lot of product design and engineering effort to do so. They're only going to get better at it as time goes by.
And of course this principle doesn't just apply to YouTube, but at pretty much all media sites once they get large enough to pivot from growing their audience to optimizing its profitability.
> is actually just a workaround Google suffers through in the YouTube product.
It used to be a Google mantra that "focus on the user and all else will follow." They are so far beyond that they've wrapped around. They actively hate users now.
All Google really cares about is making advertisers happy. Literally nothing else registers as a priority.
> You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations
This has become increasingly annoying for me. Sometimes I want to find a reference I saw a few years ago on some topic. Even if I know the speaker, the topic, sometimes even the title, I can't find the video. I get a handful of results vaguely related to the search terms and then a never ending list of garbage not even slightly related to my search terms.
I really want my own memory augmentation. A personal tracker for all of the content I have ever consumed in any form, indexed and searchable (like in a personal Elastic Search cluster). The trouble is, I only want it for like 1% of the content I have consumed. The modern web is so hostile in general that aggregating any kind of data about my own usage is so onerous that it might as well be impossible. The friction they have purposefully created worked exactly as they intended.
Zooming out actually makes the thumbnails bigger, because they grow to fill the space ceded by the rest of the UI. Just incredible design all the way through.
The homepage of YT has become a disaster area, it has almost zero customizability or exploration value. Can't remove vertical video shorts, can't control the topics displayed at the top. It maximizes engagement and time waste, not what I need.
But you can use Gemini for better search, recommendations and you can play videos right in the chat window. At the very least replace search and recommendations with the model. You can explain what you want to explore and guide the recommender much better than on YT. There are no ads in Gemini itself.
I just wish they'd fix the "sort by date" bug in search. I search for something, it gives me endless results. If I then choose to sort by upload date, whoopsie, no results found!
> You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations
Worst part about this is you search for food recipes and after the first 5 results there are gross out videos, "popping" videos, kids dying in an elevator video.
I'm about to eat dinner here... I know Neal Mohan REAAAALLLLY wants people to watch the video about the kids dying in the elevator because he keeps putting it in the trio of videos that show up when you search unrelated to your search but can he not wait till I'm doing a search that isn't food related to try and make me watch gross out content if he's so desperate to make me watch it.
Report it every time, makes no difference it all has millions of views so they'll keep doing it.
They think that people are idiots and unable to deal with more that 3 search results. Or maybe they think their search is so good that the wanted video is always within those 3.
well if you are still gonna browse on chrome don't settle for the ublock originless experience.
* download a release zip: https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/releases (expand Assets).
* go to chrome://extensions, toggle developer mode on
* click load unpacked and select the file you unzipped the release
then you also have to watch out because chrome will, still time later, disable ublock origin. You have to go to your extensions page and find the option for 'Keep it for now' or something. Then you can continue to browse the internet like a real gee! Thanks ublock origin!
The following CSS equivalent worked for me, using the "Custom CSS by Denis" Chrome extension[1]:
ytd-rich-grid-renderer div#contents {
/* number of video thumbnails per row */
--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 5 !important;
/* number of Shorts per row in its dedicated section */
--ytd-rich-grid-slim-items-per-row: 6 !important;
}
I first tried it with the "User JavaScript and CSS" extension, but somehow it didn't seem able to inject CSS on YouTube. Even a simple `html { border: 5px solid red; }` would not show anything, while I could see it being applied immediately with the "Denis" CSS extension.
If someone can recommend a better alternative for custom CSS, I'd be interested to hear it. I guess Tampermonkey could work, if you have that.
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.
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.
"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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
In the past several months, I've moved to using an RSS Reader + Watch Later Playlist + DF Tube extension (you could use whatever to nuke parts of the UI you dislike). This has greatly improved how I use YouTube. This method allows me to be significantly more intentional with what I'm watching and how much time I'm spending. The only frustrating part is that YT shorts still come through RSS, but they are much easier to avoid in a reader than YT's UI.
The excellent “Play”⁽¹⁾ app (available for iOS, macOS, Apple TV and Vision Pro) can also use these feeds, plus give you the ability to conveniently save other videos to “watch later”. Highly recommended!
In addition to the main purchase price, this app charges 3.99/month for:
-following channels
-following playlists
-removing shorts
and many more features on top of those.
Can also use google sheet + app scripts + youtube api to add new videos from channels in playlists. Sheet can trigger every few hours to keep things up to date.
It does get more complicated if monitoring too many channels since execution will timeout due to sheets limit. But can make it to pickup where previously timedout.
Bonus using API gets you video info so you can filter by length (shorts), keywords etc. Limitation is ~150 videos added per day due to API limits.
I used this to make a Youtube viewer "application" that lists my subscriptions most recent videos, and i can watch them when i get a chance. Just a list. no thumbnails, no click bait, no random algorithm recommendations, just stuff i want to watch.
Genuine question. I’m assuming that, since YouTube is owned by one of the largest tech companies in the world that they’ve optimized their delivered JS to only what is necessary to run the page.
What on the YouTube home page could possibly require 12MB of JS alone? Assuming 60 characters per line, that’s 200k lines of code? Obviously ballpark and LoC != complexity, but that seems absurd to me.
Meanwhile, loading up a channel page with Invidious pulls in about 700k and half of that is the banner. JavaScript was not mandatory (on public instances) but it is now due to AI scrapers.
The perfect oppurtunity for more AI, image upscaling! /s
Or maybe the next step will be automated AI-generated thumbnails based on the video and the user itself, so each user will be grouped into a different category and gets served a different thumbnail accordingly.
The worst thing about YouTube in 2025 is auto-translation. Whoever is behind this doesn’t seem to understand that many people outside the US actually understand two languages rather well.
In my case: German and English. I don’t want either to be translated to the other, but no chance. If you switch languages in the UI, you will get the garbage translated titles.
Google is institutionally incapable of accepting that people can speak more than one idiom.
I need to open a private window to have proper Portuguese search results. No matter what language preferences I set, I cannot get what seems to be most reasonable: show results matching the language of your query.
I am BEGGING someone, anyone at Google/YouTube to let me permanently disable YouTube Shorts.
I HATE Short form video content and no matter how many times I select "show me less of this" I still get them front and center when I open the app or website.
The annoying bit is similar to reels, shorts are good for engagement.
It’s similar to why I don’t buy Oreos. I like Oreos, everyone likes Oreos - they’re engineered to be liked, but they’re bad for you. The best way to not eat them is to not have them in the house.
Short form videos are the heroin of media consumption - meta having to pivot instagram to it is because they’re facing competitive pressure. Same with YouTube. You can’t only have vegetables when your competitors are dealing heroin and your revenue is engagement based.
It seems the revealed preference of addicting consumption for engagement is tv with with a novelty button. TikTok and short form videos are that distilled to its purest form.
These companies can’t turn them off - they’re trapped by market incentives, it’s moloch. A few years back when Facebook had a more dominant market position Zuck said they were intentionally going to focus on human connections and friends despite the revenue cost that would cause because it was the ideal he wanted. In battle against TikTok you can’t hold those kinds of ideals unfortunately.
So you don't buy Oreos, and think the best way to eat them is not to have them in the house. I agree. That's why I don't have TikTok on my phone. So why can't I keep YouTube Shorts disabled? I'm telling them I don't want it. If I'm the kind of person who doesn't keep Oreos in the house to avoid eating them, why would I go to a grocery store that insists on slipping a pack of Oreos into every third bag of carrots?
The Oreo analogy is perfect. I don't buy Oreos because I can't help myself from eating the whole container in a few sittings.
I don't even touch short form video because I'll get sucked in and suddenly hours go by. Short form video on YouTube makes me want to never open YouTube because I know how easily I can get sucked in.
They are fucking up the product that they are dominating a market with in order to be an also-ran in another market that's hot. It's Windows 8 all over again.
and no wonder they write papers about "negative sampling" because they don't collect clean data. I made the mistake once of clicking on a video where a Chinese lady transforms into a fox on America's Got Talent and oh my god I am suddenly scheduled for thousands of AI slop videos where some Chinese girl transforms into something on that show with the same music and with the same reaction shots.
There is an answer to the coldest cold start problem and that is have a hand curated collection of about 100 or so content pieces that are of broad interest and stupendously high quality. Instagram will show you videos that are amazing (like somebody cooking a fine meal under rustic conditions) if you're cold and Stumbleupon did the same back in the day. Now Instagram 2025 and Stumbleupon 2012 are not "cold" from the viewpoint of content the way YT Shorts is, but Google has the money to pay professionals to make something -- but their ideology is against it.
Here's a more comprehensive BYO Shorts-hiding extension which uses CSS instead of running JavaScript every time an element is added or removed anywhere in the DOM, and also supports the mobile version (CSS selectors are extracted from the https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube Hide Shorts feature)
I go to Pinterest, no shorts because it only plays 1 video per screen, but on mobile the screen is smaller so, shorts.
I go to Reddit, shorts.
I go to Bluesky, shorts.
I don't go to Twitter.
Tumblr is probably the only social media that isn't filled with vertical videos and that has an algorithmic feed. I go to Explore and I get dandelions. A static photo of them, not a video. I'm crossing my fingers it stays that way.
I guess the likes of Youtube and Facebook are trying unsuccessfully to replicate TikTok. This is effort #2 for Facebook, which is/was also trying unsuccessfully to replicate Youtube with their take on some-attention-span-needed videos.
(Seriously though... Facebook's video playback UI. What the fuck is that? Why is it so bad?)
I guess they don't get that there's going to be only one winner in each niche, unless TikTok goes down for political/national security reasons. Why do I need Youtube shorts if I have TikTok? Why do I need Google+ if I have Facebook? Why do I want Facebook videos if I have Youtube? Unsolved puzzle.
Are you still using YouTube despite this frustration?
If yes, then they don't care. Sorry. If you'll tolerate it and some other cohort of users will engage with the site for 0.1 seconds more than they would otherwise, it stays. YouTube is an optimization machine.
The button to hide shorts now says something like "Show less" instead of the 30 days it had previously, and clicking it does absolutely nothing. It disappears from the current page but comes straight back after a reload.
Yes, and I also want to permanently disable hover to autoplay on desktop / 'video previews' on mobile browser. It's stored locally in the browser and is forgotten about every four days for me.
I use invidious, and if I can't because it's down or something, I use a FF extension called "unhook". I hadn't been on to youtube proper in a good few years, but with unhook, I can block everything (suggested videos of all kinds, comments, etc). I can re-enable comments by clicking on the extension in the toolbar and unchecking comments. Easy peasy.
You get almost a complete blank page and a search bar when you go to "youtube.com", and then when you search, you get the results. Just simple, really.
Yes please!!! I too hate Shorts. I hate that I get sucked into them in a downward doom scroll even more. I'd love nothing more than to completely disable it. But, i think this is also why they will never let me.
I also hate that the first one or two short may be relevant to whatever I'm consuming, researching, then it quickly turns into me watching Kill Tony comedians, girls basically naked in the gym, etc. they know my brain basically just turns off and enters the void
I notice that many short videos seem to be simply cuts from longer videos posted to promote them. So they were not made for short video section and just try to misuse short videos to increase long video visibility.
Not a chance. YouTube needs shorts so that they can compete with TikTok. They HAVE to put it in front of everybody so that they can leverage their existing, vast userbase to quickly bootstrap such a product. It's a fight for market relevance for them. You will most likely not see them let that go.
and you might think, "I have (say) N=250,000 people playing game A and I can get them playing game B" you are probably going to be disappointed and very lucky if you get somewhere between 250 and 2500 of them playing your new game.
The two-sided market that makes YouTube impossible to dethrone makes it just as hard to change direction. For one thing you have to change the behavior of the viewers, but you also have to change the behavior of the creators, who know how to make videos, who know how to monetize them, all of that.
Myself I find I don't have a big attention span for short videos. I mean, Chinese girls doing the robot turn on my mirror neurons as much as anything. I can watch a 30 second video and get 30 seconds of fun but I don't want to watch another and another and another. However I cannot get enough of Techmoan talking about tape decks and such
Someone may believe this, but it’s utter nonsense. The users who don’t want to see shorts aren’t using TikTok.
This would be like Starbucks randomly serving tea to 20% of customers who order coffee because they want to compete more effectively with Lipton. That’s not how competition works.
They've increased shorts length to >60s so now it's blending in with 2-3 minute long videos which overlaps with the sweet spot of no nonsense videos. Some shorts are improving, but the shorts UI on desktop is trash.
What I don't understand is why YouTube penalizes creators for creating short "traditional" videos yet also penalizes them if they aren't creating shorts.
I mean, I do know, it's ads and the attention economy, but still. Pick a lane. This is why I pay for Nebula.
Atleast let me disable shorts on the TV app. I can't scroll thru my subscribed channels feed without being spammed with all the shorts, this makes content discovery awful and im just not using the app as much.
I love short form video content, but I don't want it from YouTube. And if YouTube feels they need to have it to be competitive then don't put it on my desktop.
EDIT: I said "do put it on my desktop" -- I meant to write "DON"T put it on my desktop".
Not the OP, but I have given up on trusting low-audience browser extensions. Too many stories of the author selling out and injecting analytics/malware into the product.
Not the OP, but I want to turn off Shorts too. I do most of my youtube access via Apple TV -- where Shorts are particularly annoying when scrolling through Subscriptions -- so this wouldn't be an option.
I want Shorts to format properly on my 1440x2560 screen. All the interaction controls on hidden off the side of the screen. Still have black bars on the left and right of the video too.
And also yes, I want long form and short form videos to be separated, when I'm scrolling through results 6 at a time(minus 1-2 ads) to queue the shorts really mess up the flow.
Same. Shorts are actually a great product in terms of capturing attention, but I don't want them on youtube. I hear someone from the back shouting, "you're not the customer, you're the product!" but I pay for youtube premium... that makes me the customer; and I pay for the long-form content without ads! But 50% of Youtube shorts are just ads or product marketing. I never feel good after going on a youtube shorts binge. Please, youtube, let me turn it off.
You're still the product. Paying to remove ads doesn't change this. You're still being tracked. Unless something has changed recently, you're still being recommended videos.
I have seen an article somewhere they are not even good for marketing.
The do grab your attention, but they have no lasting effect, it is so short and there is so much of it that you quickly forget everything you have watched, including the ads.
They are good for the platforms though, because effective or not, they get paid good money for these ads.
Not sure what you mean with "completely disables it". I have watch history disabled and still see shorts in search results or subscriptions results https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
Readit News
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
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.
Most useless message ever, placed exactly where you do not want it to be.
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.
There is no way to handle autoplay correctly. It's simply been broken for the past few years. There is also no way to detect autoplay using workarounds. I.e. autoplaying a silent audio, because you can only prove the existence of autoplay, but never its absence, since autoplay could be delayed for whatever reason and happen outside of your timeout based hack.
As a counterpoint I love that feature on desktop and use it all the time.
Often I don't even click videos but just watch them with the preview autoplay (with sound enabled). I also zoom in on my mousepad so that it covers the whole screen and I only need to click through to like the video or for the comments. Much more seemless experience for me.
They're making slot machines, effectively.
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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.
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.
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.
You can disable autoplay at 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.
Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?
Absolutely no sites, including YouTube, honour the parameter. But you can at least tell the site that you'd prefer it another way.
This is unacceptable to me. I've turned this setting off more times than I care to count. I've submitted feedback a couple times as well. I don't remember doing it lately, which is good. But I should have only ever had to do it once. I have a Google account, there is no reason this setting shouldn't be saved with my accounts, synced to all my devices, and only set once. I pay for YouTube Premium; I shouldn't be subjected to all these tactics which I assume are there to increase engagement and watch time. The price I pay is fixed and they don't earn ad revenue off me... why the games?
It's also just stored in a cookie/session, so you have to do it in each client and every time you wipe your cookies. Very frustrating.
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.
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.
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.
Or your theory and its view fraud for ad or metric purposes.
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43848061
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!
Me too! So I turned them all off:
Kind of forgot how horrible they were until I saw your comment.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.
If anything, I feel like that this is by design to hyperstimulate their core audience seeking instant gratification.
Irritating, but the quality is fine for most things and I save a few minutes not watching ads.
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)
Conway's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
Conway's law is expressed as "communication structure -> program structure" but it's actually even stronger than that; the arrow is bidirectional. If either the organization wants to break up the homepage into different teams, or if the organization has to have multiple teams work on their homepage for whatever reason, the homepage will reflect the organizational structure. YouTube falls into the second branch, which is that their home page is so complicated it has to be broken up between teams due to sheer organizational size. At YouTube's size you'll even have organizational distinctions you can't even see on the homepage like dedicated reliability engineering teams. At their scale I see at least six teams most likely, the "normal" video team, the shorts team, the sidebar menu, the hamburger menu, the search team, and the team responsible for the top-level all-Google interaction, plus multiple invisible ones like recommendation algorithm, reliability, possibly a dedicated performance team, etc.
You can, organizationally, try to put these all under one manager, but even when you do that it is a surprisingly uphill battle to maintain coherence, even when it is a goal, which it often isn't particularly. There's a lot of reasons few companies have the visual and design coherence of a ~2010 Apple, including arguably even 2025 Apple.
Are we just going to gloss over this like the list of videos is random? haha
It's buried in the settings but it's there.
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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.
Wait what? Thumbnails are useless. DeArrow has been god sent.
The worst casualty of the current design is the search. You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations. No? Fuck off? Do what I tell you to do!
Maybe a good opportunity to remember that you watching the videos you want to watch is actually just a workaround Google suffers through in the YouTube product.
They have to do it so that you come to the site, but it costs them money and makes it harder for them to optimize the revenue they get from your eyeballs.
Strycturally, their goal is to push the line as far as they can, and they spend a lot of product design and engineering effort to do so. They're only going to get better at it as time goes by.
And of course this principle doesn't just apply to YouTube, but at pretty much all media sites once they get large enough to pivot from growing their audience to optimizing its profitability.
It used to be a Google mantra that "focus on the user and all else will follow." They are so far beyond that they've wrapped around. They actively hate users now.
All Google really cares about is making advertisers happy. Literally nothing else registers as a priority.
This has become increasingly annoying for me. Sometimes I want to find a reference I saw a few years ago on some topic. Even if I know the speaker, the topic, sometimes even the title, I can't find the video. I get a handful of results vaguely related to the search terms and then a never ending list of garbage not even slightly related to my search terms.
I really want my own memory augmentation. A personal tracker for all of the content I have ever consumed in any form, indexed and searchable (like in a personal Elastic Search cluster). The trouble is, I only want it for like 1% of the content I have consumed. The modern web is so hostile in general that aggregating any kind of data about my own usage is so onerous that it might as well be impossible. The friction they have purposefully created worked exactly as they intended.
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But you can use Gemini for better search, recommendations and you can play videos right in the chat window. At the very least replace search and recommendations with the model. You can explain what you want to explore and guide the recommender much better than on YT. There are no ads in Gemini itself.
Worst part about this is you search for food recipes and after the first 5 results there are gross out videos, "popping" videos, kids dying in an elevator video.
I'm about to eat dinner here... I know Neal Mohan REAAAALLLLY wants people to watch the video about the kids dying in the elevator because he keeps putting it in the trio of videos that show up when you search unrelated to your search but can he not wait till I'm doing a search that isn't food related to try and make me watch gross out content if he's so desperate to make me watch it.
Report it every time, makes no difference it all has millions of views so they'll keep doing it.
https://github.com/Harren06/ublock-yt-shorts
* download a release zip: https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/releases (expand Assets). * go to chrome://extensions, toggle developer mode on * click load unpacked and select the file you unzipped the release
then you also have to watch out because chrome will, still time later, disable ublock origin. You have to go to your extensions page and find the option for 'Keep it for now' or something. Then you can continue to browse the internet like a real gee! Thanks ublock origin!
If someone can recommend a better alternative for custom CSS, I'd be interested to hear it. I guess Tampermonkey could work, if you have that.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/custom-css-by-denis...
You can put the relevant CSS into a custom YouTube stylesheet if you like.
(I re-skin many sites, including HN, see my profile page for links to recent-ish CSS.)
youtube.com##ytm-paid-content-overlay-renderer
The `this video includes sponsored content` that covers and takes over the click into a video.
Whoever designed that, implemented that, approved that, needs to be fired and blacklisted from doing user-facing code changes.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
Relevant articles:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/simplicity-vs-choice/
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/short-term-memory-and-web-u...
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/working-memory-external-mem...
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.
The fewer videos they have in focus at a time, the more accurate their algorithms can be.
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.
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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.
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Seriously, though, w/o RSS feeds Youtube would be completely useless to me. I keep waiting for Google to kill them.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71192605/how-do-i-get-yo...
This extension is no longer available because it doesn't follow best practices for Chrome extensions.
:(
⁽¹⁾ https://marcosatanaka.com/
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It does get more complicated if monitoring too many channels since execution will timeout due to sheets limit. But can make it to pickup where previously timedout.
Bonus using API gets you video info so you can filter by length (shorts), keywords etc. Limitation is ~150 videos added per day due to API limits.
https://shorts.aviparshan.com/rss-feed
The preview is 530x300px on a 1920x1080 screen vs the image shown being 336x188px
How this passed any sort of QA is beyond me
What on the YouTube home page could possibly require 12MB of JS alone? Assuming 60 characters per line, that’s 200k lines of code? Obviously ballpark and LoC != complexity, but that seems absurd to me.
Or maybe the next step will be automated AI-generated thumbnails based on the video and the user itself, so each user will be grouped into a different category and gets served a different thumbnail accordingly.
In my case: German and English. I don’t want either to be translated to the other, but no chance. If you switch languages in the UI, you will get the garbage translated titles.
I need to open a private window to have proper Portuguese search results. No matter what language preferences I set, I cannot get what seems to be most reasonable: show results matching the language of your query.
I HATE Short form video content and no matter how many times I select "show me less of this" I still get them front and center when I open the app or website.
It’s similar to why I don’t buy Oreos. I like Oreos, everyone likes Oreos - they’re engineered to be liked, but they’re bad for you. The best way to not eat them is to not have them in the house.
Short form videos are the heroin of media consumption - meta having to pivot instagram to it is because they’re facing competitive pressure. Same with YouTube. You can’t only have vegetables when your competitors are dealing heroin and your revenue is engagement based.
It seems the revealed preference of addicting consumption for engagement is tv with with a novelty button. TikTok and short form videos are that distilled to its purest form.
These companies can’t turn them off - they’re trapped by market incentives, it’s moloch. A few years back when Facebook had a more dominant market position Zuck said they were intentionally going to focus on human connections and friends despite the revenue cost that would cause because it was the ideal he wanted. In battle against TikTok you can’t hold those kinds of ideals unfortunately.
I don't even touch short form video because I'll get sucked in and suddenly hours go by. Short form video on YouTube makes me want to never open YouTube because I know how easily I can get sucked in.
Long form content (i.e. Veritasium) are nice for sure, but some of it suffers from fluff too.
They previously had a whitelist feature where parents could curate channels and videos for their kids.
That has been silently broken and all related features are disabled or non-functional.
Whoever is pushing Shorts is the equivalent of a drug dealer waiting outside a junior school to sell heroin to kids.
Sociopaths do this kind of thing.
-Enhancer for YouTube extension (Firefox) — mopsi
-Unhook extension (Chrome/Firefox) — jabroni_salad, kelvinjps10
-YouTube-shorts block add-on — timbit42
-ReVanced for mobile — kelvinjps10
-Shorts filter list in Brave browser (works on mobile) — my personal favorite
Luckily Google hasn't "manifest away" this type of extensions (yet).
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I HATE youtube shorts. Not their content (I've never watched one) but how they've infected the whole youtube experience.
You search for something and half the results are irrelevant... which includes a ton of shorts.
http://www.sebastianmihai.com/idiocracy.html
and no wonder they write papers about "negative sampling" because they don't collect clean data. I made the mistake once of clicking on a video where a Chinese lady transforms into a fox on America's Got Talent and oh my god I am suddenly scheduled for thousands of AI slop videos where some Chinese girl transforms into something on that show with the same music and with the same reaction shots.
There is an answer to the coldest cold start problem and that is have a hand curated collection of about 100 or so content pieces that are of broad interest and stupendously high quality. Instagram will show you videos that are amazing (like somebody cooking a fine meal under rustic conditions) if you're cold and Stumbleupon did the same back in the day. Now Instagram 2025 and Stumbleupon 2012 are not "cold" from the viewpoint of content the way YT Shorts is, but Google has the money to pay professionals to make something -- but their ideology is against it.
Better than the results on google these days, so YT is at least doing better.
This guys posts only shorts: https://www.youtube.com/@hydronyc and he's got the best/funniest plumbing video you YouTube.
The bad shorts are when you scroll to the next short after watching one - never do that, only watch shorts from subscriptions.
manifest.json
containing: { "manifest_version": 3, "name": "Hide YouTube Shorts", "version": "1.0", "description": "Hides YouTube Shorts", "content_scripts": [ { "matches": ["://www.youtube.com/"], "js": ["content.js"] } ] }
and a file named content.js
containing:
function hideShorts() { const shorts = document.querySelectorAll('ytd-rich-shelf-renderer[is-shorts]'); shorts.forEach(short => { short.style.display = 'none'; }); } hideShorts(); const observer = new MutationObserver(hideShorts); observer.observe(document.body, { childList: true, subtree: true });
add the contents of this folder as a chrome extension
https://gist.github.com/insin/ef93c7d87b1f97f1c9411e6128d520...
Absolutely this! I was looking to see if it was an option yesterday. Annoyingly not :/
I go to Youtube, shorts.
I go to Instagram, shorts.
I go to Facebook, shorts.
I go to Imgur, shorts.
I go to Pinterest, no shorts because it only plays 1 video per screen, but on mobile the screen is smaller so, shorts.
I go to Reddit, shorts.
I go to Bluesky, shorts.
I don't go to Twitter.
Tumblr is probably the only social media that isn't filled with vertical videos and that has an algorithmic feed. I go to Explore and I get dandelions. A static photo of them, not a video. I'm crossing my fingers it stays that way.
Hallelujah.
(Seriously though... Facebook's video playback UI. What the fuck is that? Why is it so bad?)
I guess they don't get that there's going to be only one winner in each niche, unless TikTok goes down for political/national security reasons. Why do I need Youtube shorts if I have TikTok? Why do I need Google+ if I have Facebook? Why do I want Facebook videos if I have Youtube? Unsolved puzzle.
I also hate shorts, however, if this is to believed, we're for sure stuck with it: https://www.zebracat.ai/post/youtube-shorts-statistics
If yes, then they don't care. Sorry. If you'll tolerate it and some other cohort of users will engage with the site for 0.1 seconds more than they would otherwise, it stays. YouTube is an optimization machine.
Not your software, not your control.
I hate that 'feature' so much.
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It also gets rid of that nonsense they did to the search page.
You get almost a complete blank page and a search bar when you go to "youtube.com", and then when you search, you get the results. Just simple, really.
I also hate that the first one or two short may be relevant to whatever I'm consuming, researching, then it quickly turns into me watching Kill Tony comedians, girls basically naked in the gym, etc. they know my brain basically just turns off and enters the void
Remember, with normal videos you (primarily) decide what to watch, but in shorts, you decide what not to watch.
https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/the-flywheel.html
and you might think, "I have (say) N=250,000 people playing game A and I can get them playing game B" you are probably going to be disappointed and very lucky if you get somewhere between 250 and 2500 of them playing your new game.
The two-sided market that makes YouTube impossible to dethrone makes it just as hard to change direction. For one thing you have to change the behavior of the viewers, but you also have to change the behavior of the creators, who know how to make videos, who know how to monetize them, all of that.
Myself I find I don't have a big attention span for short videos. I mean, Chinese girls doing the robot turn on my mirror neurons as much as anything. I can watch a 30 second video and get 30 seconds of fun but I don't want to watch another and another and another. However I cannot get enough of Techmoan talking about tape decks and such
https://www.youtube.com/user/techmoan
This would be like Starbucks randomly serving tea to 20% of customers who order coffee because they want to compete more effectively with Lipton. That’s not how competition works.
I mean, I do know, it's ads and the attention economy, but still. Pick a lane. This is why I pay for Nebula.
More guidelines available at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
EDIT: I said "do put it on my desktop" -- I meant to write "DON"T put it on my desktop".
It just needs to be a preference!
And for fucks sake give me an option to disable the AI translation trash everywhere, and show the title of shorts on a creator's feed page...
facebook works the exact same way
billion dollar companies forcing you to look at stuff you dont want and gaslighting you into thinking you have a choice
And also yes, I want long form and short form videos to be separated, when I'm scrolling through results 6 at a time(minus 1-2 ads) to queue the shorts really mess up the flow.
This filter list is the most up-to-date that I've found to hide shorts with uBlock Origin:
https://github.com/Harren06/ublock-yt-shorts
The do grab your attention, but they have no lasting effect, it is so short and there is so much of it that you quickly forget everything you have watched, including the ads.
They are good for the platforms though, because effective or not, they get paid good money for these ads.
I found your error.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795204