- cross-posted to:
- google@lemdro.id
- cross-posted to:
- google@lemdro.id
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The change is so they can now implement the 38 hour ad before every 30 second video. And then another 21 hour ad every 7 seconds while watching the video. The ad can’t be stopped, skipped or muted and automatically plays full screen on all your devices and monitors at the same time.
Black Mirror Episode
Is it really a decade old? Feels like they redesign it every three years.
Redesigning familiar UIs is a great way to give elderly, neurodivergent, and/or computer illiterate people a hard time.
neuroatypical
I propose we start calling normies “neuroadivergent.”
haha. My bad, sorry. I think people used to say this but the language changed. I’ll fix it.
I hate to be that guy, but it’s neurodivergent. :) neurodiverse is another thing. Everyone is diverse but not everyone is divergent.
Ah! Thank you again! Honestly in my mind I was thinking that “neurodiverse” didn’t make any sense. Okay now I’m interested to see what the next ‘that guy’ is going to say :)
I speak with authority, but I learnt about it this very day. :)
You’re right, I never knew there was a difference. Fixed!
deleted by creator
The heck is this title?
YouTube says goodbye to decade-old video player UI, but users hate the new design
Meanwhile, the article itself just cites a few tiny aesthetic changes and like four random Reddit comments. Doesn’t seem like they even tried it themself… That’s justifications for 460 upvotes?
That’s always the case.
I mean, they could stop messing with things that aren’t broken for once…
Eh, it’s a fine line tbh. Not that I enjoy defending Google.
You get both “this UI hasn’t changed in a decade” and “this UI is perfect never change it” in relatively equal amounts. The rest honestly don’t care either way.
Imagine if they actually brought back “options” and let you choose between changes rather than force them on you.
That would turn into spaghetti code and unmaintainable tech debt really fast. Now every time you make a change you have to make sure it doesn’t break previous stylesheets, or you need to run different versions of the same codebase for each stylesheet that will need updating for security vulnerabilities and stakeholder whims.
Not really. At least if you plan to have it customizable in the first place.
Then it becomes harder to change when you want to add in new features still. There needs to be a fine balance between giving options and having a clean single-option code, and offering 2 different video players is not it (it sounds like some shortcuts got broken so it’s not just a CSS that got applied)
You are right. I forgot we were talking about a web front end, and I was think of an application. I take it back.
I am just so used to watching you tube with applications on desktop and mobile I forgot we were talking about you tubes new web front end.
Because the seek bar overlaps the video as it is playing, and because the drag button is huge whenever you mouseover it, it is much harder to locate chapter marker visually.
Change for the sake of change is not good.
I’m sure someone will release an addon or some custom CSS to fix it.
Which shouldn’t be needed
It’s already needed for the current UI. ImproveYoutube is a godsend.
That's *always* the case.Maybe there’s a reason for that. The word “enshitification” doesn’t exist in a void.
In their defense, I’m not sure I have ever seen a major UI redesign of some piece of software that the users of that software actually liked, at least at first. Inertia and muscle memory are powerful things.
exactly one comes to mind: blender
People hate two things the most: things changing and things staying the same.
The adverts on youtube have become so unbearable so no amount of UI change will convince me to use it as intended. If there’s a long video I want to watch, I download the video first and watch it using VLC
My ad blocker stops all the ads except for the sponsorships that are in the video… Y’all watching YouTube without blockers?
Try adding SponsorBlock.
It’s more difficult to block ads if you’re casting to a television so downloading is better for my use case
Use smart tube for TV
Sponsorblock usually helps with that.
Chrome user? No ad blocker?
I’m not defending google here, but I’m sure a decent chunk of the complaints are just bitching because “change bad!”
I haven’t seen the change yet and I’m sure there are legitimate complaints as well, but us online folk tend to detest even the smallest changes and go a bit overboard in our complaining sometimes.
“you can no longer hover on the volume slider and scroll or even use the up/down keys to adjust the audio”
That, for sure, is one of the most garbage changes imaginable.
Someone conciously had to go out of their way to remove functionality there.
Maybe there’s a reason for it, but I still think it’s a shit change.
Speaking as a software dev, that’s probably not the case. They probably started completely from scratch and so the inclusion of features depends on reimplementing them on the new platform. It could be as simple as not being ready yet or maybe stats show them that so few people use the feature that they don’t find it worth reimplementing it.
I’m not a software dev, but that’s what I was thinking when I said maybe there’s a reason for it. I still feel like it’s a shit change, but that’s because I use the function.
You could do that before?
The only legitimate complaint I have is I use a 4k monitor at 150% scaling. YouTube, in its design genius, decided that it should show me three videos per row, at like half the screen.
Thankfully with Google I was able to find something that helps
Honestly thank you for posting that link. I thought i had gone crazy thinking that i had only now just noticed the shit UX of 3 videos per row
The article has pics if you want a preview
As long as I can still use the J/K/L keys to play/pause and scrub, I see no issues here. People bitching just to bitch.
That said, I do not enjoy the new “everything is bigger” view on YouTube’s home page that was clearly designed for mobile. But that can be fixed easily, so it’s a non-issue.
What’s wrong with it?
It looks quite nice actually
Thanks, but it won’t really affect me. I only use
Freetubewhen I want to access YoutubeI use Freetube, but it’s currently not playing any videos for me.
Always use the up-to-date version.
Whenever there’s consistent playback issues there’s usually an update on the horizon. Just have to be patient.
ETA: I’m watching videos on
Freetuberight now. It’s working just fine.I have 3 PCs running endeavouros, the other 2 updated freetube fine, but my main one has issues, even after uninstalling/reinstalling/updating to beta. I can open videos externally with mpv, but nothing will play on freetube itself.
Wish I could help you figure that out, but I’m a total linux noob. The EndeavourOS forums would be a good place to start though.
ugh, this is so much worse. takes up more space, is more distracting.
I want to be able to skip around in videos and not have the screen covered by ugly pill buttons
At least it’s not covered by a dark shade now. 👍 I’m initially for this change. Good to see an iteration. Let’s see how it goes.
Yeah. It also looks like the buttons might light up on hover, but they already basically do that so that’s only a very small plus. I too remember being annoyed about not seeing content behind the shade properly.
Apart from the key bind loss, which would be asinine to remove permanently, this looks like a straight upgrade. Better readability and more in line with the rest of the UI design.
People literally always hate changes to ui. It’s to the point that this article could have been written and just archived somewhere to pull out whenever something changes.
YouTube can do whatever they want, you think that give a damn about the people? Noooopppppeeeee
And you think people will do anything more than just bitch about it? Noooopppppeeeee
With recent events, yeeeeeeep. More and more people are protesting with their wallets. Either google getting told to break off companies and/or sell them (e.g. Chrome), they’re going to make some crazy moves for your dollar and that will trigger the peak of the outcry and you’ll see it happen. It’s not a noppppe or yepppp situation, it’s “when”. Better now than later.
You’re not wrong. But it won’t happen because of this change, and it’s not going to happen tomorrow. So, as of now, they’re just complaining. I say ‘they’, because I left yt when they started video ads. I didn’t mind the banners, but the unskippable video disruptions were what broke my camel’s back (some of the early ones, if you recall, controlled your volume levels and turned themselves up). You’re right, eventually, everyone will hit a breaking point, but if the 60-120s unskippable video ads weren’t that point, this simple UI change won’t be that for the vast majority of users.
Oh, I just block those.
And while that’s possible for now, it won’t be for much longer, based on the A/B testing yt has been doing. We’re giving them too much power and relying on tools to bypass the stuff we don’t like, but those tools have their days numbered, regrettably.
Using the tools is fine IMO because the moment those tools stop working, people will move their time to Twitch/Instagram/Bluesky/TikTok/etc. 60-120 second ads will push away all, except for iPad toddlers.
Makes me wonder if Google knows this, and is deliberately adding these ridiculous ads, but not patching those tools, so they can keep their user metrics up while pushing the uninformed/indifferent into YouTube Premium subscriptions…
The day I can’t avoid advertisements is the day I drop the service. You want my money? Provide a product that isn’t trying to wring me and my data dry.
Video is expensive to host, I get that. I’d happily give a few bucks a month (which is way more than my ad views would be worth) but their asking price is laughable.
Viewers can’t do shit but watch where the creators are. Up to creators to organize. I see tubers bitching about payment and copyright. Can cry me a river, if they only offer videos on a single platform.
I was perfectly fine with YouTube before monetization.
Yes we can. Third party front ends exist for yt and there are other (admittedly not as polished) alternatives for the entire platform. When enough viewers use them, it will force the hands of the posters to use other, less abusive avenues (maybe in addition to yt). I’m fine with monetization, but not when it degrades my experience. There are better ways. Yt isn’t the only one, nor is it the first. It’s just the most popular currently.
Youtube 3rd party apps do nothing but deal with privacy issues and still rely on YouTube infra which means also dealing with the censorship and copyright systems. Meanwhile you’re just seen as a leech, including by creators since they get no ad rev from you watching. I adblock too, so that includes myself.
What are the viewers watching on alternative platforms with no video creators besides crypto bros and political extremists too edgy for YouTube?
Realistically I don’t see anything happening besides the usual tried and true method now:
They self own their own website so hard with repeat scandals until an exodus happens and hope it’s your new decentralized platform instead of another corpo centralized platform… which is most likely because the way I see it done is with big bags of money and contracts with creators.
YouTube has a pretty strong hold because video hosting and streaming is extremely expensive. That’s why most platforms have strict file limits for them. In the pre-Google days of YouTube, most accounts could only upload <15 minute videos, and that limitation is still in place if you have an unverified account.
I don’t see how we’ll get any alternative to YouTube unless it comes from another large corporation, though I’d love to be proven wrong in that.
I don’t think yt-dlp+mpv changed much…
That’s a lot of effort when you can just freetube.
Everyone has their preferred way, innit.
Neat, didn’t notice since they perma banned me for watching without ads via freetube I believe.
Ive just been downloading videos direct with yt-dlp, but I think I’m going to extend it into a bash script which fetches the RSS of the channels I want, downloads them if they haven’t been downloaded, and then deletes them after they have been watched and after a certain amount of time has passed, or if I have marked them for deletion.
I’m using Pinchflat to do that as well. It can download vídeos from Youtube channels I follow using yt-dlp and checks automatically fpr new videos. Check it out, it might be similar to what you want to do
Wonderful, not surprised it exists already, Thanks!
It’s your IPv6. If you change to IPv4-only they do not ban. You can check with
ip addrif it shows v6 addresses. You then can disable them by various means. Had to do the same to reeable freetube and yt-dlp.Ive just been downloading videos direct with yt-dlp, but I think I’m going to extend it into a bash script which fetches the RSS of the channels I want, downloads them if they haven’t been downloaded, and then deletes them after they have been watched and after a certain amount of time has passed, or if I have marked them for deletion.
I wrote something a while back in bash that pulls down a channel with yt-dlp, remembers already-downloaded stuff, and doesn’t redownload. Has a menu interface showing a list of “subscribed” channels to pull from. If you want, I’ll throw you a copy.
I’d do stuff like this with caution, as YouTube temp-IP-banned me from anonymous use for something like a month after I sucked down the contents of an enormous channel in a relatively-short time. At the very least, I’d suggest having it put a cap on how much it downloads by default so that you don’t inadvertently pull down way more than expected and run into trouble with YouTube. My own script doesn’t presently have such a cap.
I’m currently yanking everything over a VPN connection from a provider that I trust and I’m not collecting anything as enormous as entire channels. With this considered along with the fact that this is outside the bounds of a user account (I don’t believe EULA can come into play as a result), I don’t think I could get in much trouble with them outside of having to change VPN endpoints occasionally if they decide to block out some IP (On one or two occasions I have gotten a message back from yt-dlp noting to sign in to prove I am not a bot).
I appreciate the offer on the script, however I think I will build my own as it is not an urgent matter for me and I consider it a good exercise in practicing my skills with programming. I’ve been looking to build my own RSS reader for a while, and I think this is probably a good use case for this as well.
Thanks!
The huge Thumb nails on the home page are ridiculous. Makes it harder to find content I want to watch. If you zoom out it will only show 4 horizontal thumbnails, Max.
Agreed. It feels like a UI designed for little children or senior citizens.
There’s an Extension for chrome that fixes this luckily.
What is it called?
I hate that at normal zoom it gives 3 and at 4 it gets slightly too small to read quickly.
as always with corporate shit
