YouTube quietly made some of its web embeds worse, including ours

https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/12/24318124/youtube-player-cant-click-title-sigh

by Amorymeltzer • 2 years ago

96 50 2 years ago

even without embeds, youtube keeps loading video but not the rest of UI (or sometimes the opposite) from time to time for me

and simple refresh doesn't help - I have to ctrl+f5 to fix it

Hendrikto2• 2 years ago

In which browser? I have the feeling that Google degrades the experience in everything but Chrome.

mschuster91• 2 years ago

Chrome has mysterious issues particularly relating to shorts for me as well.

ChrisMarshallNY• 2 years ago

Ugh.

Any reason that they couldn't add a basic text link, below the video, with "Open In YouTube" as the text?

feraloink• 2 years ago

Yes, my thought too, especially since the basic embed allows you to click on the YouTube logo to be able to view the video on the YouTube website.

Unless YouTube is deliberately not allowing high traffic publishing "partners" (?) like the Verge and Vox to get the benefit of their preferred advertising?!

mongol• 2 years ago

Of course they can. So can every other site that is affected. But seems not optimal.

rcarmo• 2 years ago

Visual clutter, for starters. And having to then consider the usability implications of having a separate link, how to lay it out across devices, etc. Just having the embed do that saves _a lot_ of hassle in a CMS.

jbaber• 2 years ago

This explains a mystery I only recently noticed.

If a site has preferred ads they'd like to show anyway, maybe it's time for them to pay for hosting the video elsewhere.

Hendrikto2• 2 years ago

There is a revenue share, so they are already paying for the video hosting.

spwa4• 2 years ago

Paying means giving the entity delivering the service what they want for it. Not "giving something". If I steal your car, and leave a $100 bill, it's definitely still stealing.

mabedan• 2 years ago

Makes sense from YouTube side. Why they would associate themselves with ads that has nothing to do with them?

bspammer• 2 years ago

Who is this hypothetical person who gets outraged at YouTube for having one of their videos embedded on a page with objectionable adverts? I’m sorry but their stated reason is crazy, I can put any site in an iframe on my website, that doesn’t mean they’re associated with me.

snowwrestler• 2 years ago

YouTube has only the most minimal standards for which ads they won’t run, and those standards apply to PfP as well. “Association” is not the issue.

n144q2• 2 years ago

This. I would say publishers generally have much better taste than YouTube.

sunaookami• 2 years ago

Come on, the YouTube player is so popular, everyone already knows this is just a YouTube embed.

ChrisArchitect2• 2 years ago

You can't have it both ways or at least YouTube tried to help publishers out with the special player.

What's the actual problem here: that Verge doesn't like entitled ppl complaining to them about lack of links. Verge is trying to be one of those very publishers going independent etc, so support them, expect to 'stay on site', can't have it both ways. (Unless Verge does the extra work for the users and adds a quick link under every vid)

n144q2• 2 years ago

Yeah, asking for links is a entitled thing to do.

wruza2• 2 years ago

You can simply install uBO (and its dependencies) and the question who’s gonna profit from ads will resolve naturally.

Incipient2• 2 years ago

Isn't all that going to eventually go away with in-stream advertising?

wruza2• 2 years ago

Then we'll community mark key p-hashes to black-rectangle it, leaving them holding the encoding costs bag. Then they will try to double down and e.g. use gen-ai to create fully dynamic unique ads, then we'll use ML to detect these ads. Not watching ads doesn't go away in the foreseeable future, but ads do.

The more people try it, the closer we are to the critical mass of realization that their ads are just bs, and there's no going back. They could stop bs-ing people a while ago and live forever, but they chose death by their own hands - the more annoying they are, the more "product" they lose to ad blocking, the less money they generate, the less they can do about it. They are already choking hard, it's apparent from convulsions like subj, mv3, anti-block attempts, etc.

meiraleal2• 2 years ago

The day it becomes impossible (or too difficult) to not watch ads, youtube will start to die. And it will be fast. There is no reason to not use bittorrent for videos and music, it is just that using youtube with ad block is a little bit more convenient.

But their recommendation algorithm is so terrible that I'm wondering about stopping using by myself. Not worth it.

ChrisArchitect2• 2 years ago

Would it have killed him to put an example YouTube embed in the article so we could see the effect?

codetrotter• 2 years ago

Preferably screenshots, since the embedded player could change again or even appear differently for different people.

xbmcuser• 2 years ago

Is it not normal web etiquette to link back to what you are using. I am not sure YouTube is in the wrong.

croes• 2 years ago

Wasn‘t that the case before the change?

You clicked the title and went to YouTube.

FollowingTheDao3• 2 years ago

Monopolistic greed! Thee companies have captured all of us and they have the ability not to not care about customer service anymore! Break them up!

rglullis2• 2 years ago

companies have captured all of us

No, they didn't. They baited the large majority with convenience and promises of free services, who got into the trap happily.

Those of us who were warning about the importance of not giving up our self-sovereignty are free. All it requires is just a little bit of effort to self-host things.

Stop being lazy and crying for regulation, when the people themselves can take action.

FollowingTheDao3• 2 years ago

Stop being lazy and crying for regulation, when the people themselves can take action.

Currently using a $200 laptop with linux, browsing with Firefox, watch any videos through redirect and invideous, have a host file block and using Mullvad. My phone is a $120 android with no google account getting apps though software using f-droid and auroa. I back up nothing to the cloud. I use signal for all messaging and I pay for a private and green email service.

Please don't assume what I am doing and what I am warning about. When I say "Us" I include myself because I am part of the community. When others are trapped I am also trapped because other use these services and I have to communicate through them.

I am trapped because I have to constantly use effort to get out of these traps. Asking people to "self host" when they can barely use an iPhone is just ridiculous.

gruez4• 2 years ago

How is this "greed"? What does youtube have to gain from removing a link back to them?

FollowingTheDao3• 2 years ago

If you read the article you would not have made this comment:

"..why on earth wouldn’t YouTube want people to click over to its app?

The short answer is money. Somewhat straightforwardly, YouTube has chosen to degrade the user experience of the embedded player publishers like Vox Media use, and the only way to get that link back is by using a slightly different player that pays us less and YouTube more."

mrweasel• 2 years ago

Where YouTube is making a mistake is in showing ads on embedded videos, for YouTube Premium customers and you can no longer click on the embed to go to YouTube and see the video without the ads.

I'm not sure if this is something each site can control using the embed code, but I noticed more and more that embedded videos will no longer allow you to jump youtube.com.

Zealotux• 2 years ago

Is anyone else experiencing huge issues with Youtube on Firefox (MacOS) lately? The UI completely hangs for a few seconds, a restart of the browser helps, but I've disabled all extensions and it still hangs. Using the devtools it seems there's a huge GC happening periodically blocking the JS thread, no idea why.

6510• 2 years ago

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/

ravenstine• 2 years ago

I recently experienced an issue with YouTube + Firefox + macOS where not only did parts of the UI lag bug the queue wouldn't advance at the end of a video unless I refreshed the page. It resolved when I allowed google.com and a few others in NoScript. I wonder why your disabling of extensions didn't resolve your issue. I haven't had any more problems in the last few weeks. Also, I'm on an M3 CPU.

perryizgr8• 2 years ago

Just today a video became extremely choppy and then stopped. A refresh fixed it. Same setup as yours.

tushar-r• 2 years ago

I'm seeing this suddenly with Firefox on Windows. Persists even after reboots.

davidivadavid• 2 years ago

Was reading the comments to see if anyone experienced just that. Youtube sometimes becomes absolutely unusable with Firefox. Google Flights too. Would hate to switch back to Chrome but I keep having to switch back and forth.

tomatotomato37• 2 years ago

That sounds similar to issues I've been having recently with my Firefox uMatrix setup, which only seems to resolve when I blanket-allow everything (which kinda defeats the whole point of having it)

everfrustrated• 2 years ago

Same with Firefox on Windows

meiraleal2• 2 years ago

Linux too.

encody• 2 years ago

Wait, so the Verge is upset that the PfP player removed a link that would take the user to the video on YouTube. But if they use the normal YouTube player that has the link, the Verge gets less ad $. But the users who click the link would be watching on YouTube, where again, the Verge would be earning less ad $.

Am I understanding this correctly? Because it sounds like the Verge is complaining about a change that should net them marginally more(?) ad $ (and is to YouTube's disadvantage) because a few readers complained, and they're just trying to blame YouTube instead.

I'm confused.

ghusto2• 2 years ago

They're not trying to blame YouTube, they are squarely pointing out the absolute truth that YouTube is to blame.

It's YouTube's choice to do whatever they like with their own product, but the reason what they've chosen to do is problematic is:

1. It's yet another bait'n'switch

2. It is shady as fuck to not only make no announcement about the change, but make it difficult to even figure out what's happened

In short; yes it's Google's prerogative to be a bag of dicks, but let's not pretend that's not exactly what they are (continuing to be)

gruez4• 2 years ago

2. It is shady as fuck to not only make no announcement about the change, but make it difficult to even figure out what's happened

Source for this claim? The article doesn't make this accusation, and considering this is a B2B product that requires manual approval to use, I wouldn't be surprised if they sent out this as email rather than something to their blog. Searching for "YouTube Player for Publishers", it looks like their last mention of that product was in 2018, and it was only a passing mention.

xethos• 2 years ago

I honestly don't understand how you came to that conclusion, considering the following from TFA (emphasis mine):

Somewhat straightforwardly, YouTube has chosen to degrade the user experience of the embedded player publishers like Vox Media use, and the only way to get that link back is by using a slightly different player *that pays us less and YouTube more*

YouTube made the B2B product worse, and in order to get that functionality back (for now), the Verge would have to take a pay cut

YouTube quietly made some of its web embeds worse, including ours

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