YouTube A/B testing removing playback speed controls

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45868987

by dotancohen • 9 months ago

10 13 9 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

I've been able to deal with most of the enshitification of Youtube, but now playback speed controls are no longer available in some of my Youtube playbacks. Refreshing the page sometimes makes them available. And there's a button to enable them by subscribing to Youtube Premium.

I'm going to write to the channels that I subscribe to, to let them know why I'm leaving Youtube. Time to settle on an alternative service.

josephcsible• 9 months ago

Does this bookmarklet work to give you 2x speed anyway?

    javascript:for(v of document.getElementsByTagName('video'))v.playbackRate=2;void(0)

dotancohen2• 8 months ago

Interestingly, it doesn't. I'll later spend some time checking the tag name. Thanks for the idea, I might code that into an extension.

al_borland• 9 months ago

I’m already a Premium user, so I suspect I won’t see a change. That said, I’m against turning formerly free features into paid ones. Especially something as useful as playback speed, which has been around forever. Whoever is making the decisions at YouTube is seems to be making one bad decision after another.

The biggest issue with going to an alternative is that one doesn’t really exist. Yes, there are other video sharing sites, but they have a tiny sliver of the content YouTube has, as a viewer. As a creator, they have only a tiny sliver of the viewers, which hurts monetization efforts.

ungreased0675• 9 months ago

Product management at YouTube baffles me.

What is being improved by removing speed controls? Certainly nothing on the user side of the equation.

Elfener• 9 months ago

I've switched to watching youtube videos using mpv. yt-dlp thankfully works, and this way, I can watch the video any way I want.

biglyburrito• 9 months ago

Never heard of mpv until you mentioned it just now. Very interesting.

gethly2• 9 months ago

No worries. The speed is built into the web browser. YouTube cannot disable it. Meaning, even if they remove the option from the player UI, the functionality cannot be removed. A simple browser extension will therefore always be available to supplement it.

pants2• 8 months ago

Don't be so sure - the company that owns YouTube also probably owns your web browser.

sayamqazi• 8 months ago

What if they start rendering video in js on canvas with a fully custom solution.

gethly2• 8 months ago

From what I rememebr it is a very inefficient way of doing it, FPS will be a problem and I think properly syncing sound, at least over longer than few seconds, might be even impossible. Either way, it makes very little sense on too many levels to do that.

extraduder_ire• 8 months ago

They can set it back to 1 using javascript any time it is increased though.

wazoox• 8 months ago

There are several extensions to manage playback speed, most allow faster speeds. Do they work for you?

dotancohen2• 8 months ago

Not anymore

YouTube A/B testing removing playback speed controls

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