Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

https://jayd.ml/2025/11/10/someone-at-youtube-needs-glasses-prophecy-fulfilled.html

by jaydenmilne • 8 months ago

1001 647 8 months ago

jayd.ml

Related: Someone at YouTube needs glasses - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43846487 - April 2025 (694 comments)

jaydenmilne3• 8 months ago

Satire is dead

guluarte• 8 months ago

also if you watch 1 single video about a topic, the next day your feed will be full of that

SchemaLoad• 8 months ago

I usually don't mind that. Sometimes I'm looking in to a new product or hobby and really do want to see a whole bunch of that content. They also provide you a feed which purely contains channels you subscribe to, though I find it much lower quality than the normal feed.

mc33013• 8 months ago

Turning search history off on youtube about a year ago has been one of my best personal "digital life upgrades" in a while.

nicce2• 8 months ago

I did that and now it shows only polarizing videos on the right from both ends.

mvdtnz• 8 months ago

We know. Believe me, we know. Because you guys will tell us, every single time YouTube is mentioned.

strickinato• 8 months ago

Actually - BOTH videos in the screenshot are ads - so there are zero videos on the homescreen already

crazygringo3• 8 months ago

I don't think so? The "I Skied Down Mount Everest" is from the Red Bull channel. It may be a commercial channel, but it's not an ad, i.e. they didn't pay for placement (doesn't say "Sponsored" like the other one).

dathinab2• 8 months ago

and they are often good videos (if you like watching extreme sports related things), given the partial second video this seems likely for the account who made the screenshot

but given that half a video is not a full video this still means we are at one single full video

and an AD which is deceptively pretending to be a video

I still think regulators should ban deceptive ads and require ads to to clearly different from the main content _on the first take/glance_. They way YT, Google and co handle ads is IMHO deceptive to a point its reasonable to say they try to deceive the user into clicking on the ad when they wouldn't have done so if they new it was an ad.

And "systematically deceiving a user/customer to their detriment (wasting time) and your profit" isn't just shitty but on a gray line to outright fraud.

jaydenmilne3• 8 months ago

Technically correct, the best kind of correct

superkuh• 8 months ago

You can use ublock origin browser extension per-site CSS rules to restore an arbitrary number of rows and columns to the youtube frontpage. https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube is a good source for these if you don't know how to write them or don't want to.

    ! YouTube frontpage - 3 columns per row
    youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row, #contents.ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;)
    youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 3 !important;)
    youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-posts-per-row: 3 !important;)

    ! Optional: Hide the "Shorts" section to maintain clean 3x3 grid
    youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer:style(display:none !important;)

But also, yikes.

73737373733• 8 months ago

Whoever made automatic AI dubs a default and impossible to disable also needs to be fired

mitthrowaway2• 8 months ago

I agree. But for the benefit of other people struggling, I haven't found a way to disable them as a user setting, but you can at least turn them off on a per-video basis by changing the video language in the playback settings (the little gear icon).

locao• 8 months ago

There's no little great in embedded videos or, at least, my local newspaper actively disables it.

73737373733• 8 months ago

This is not always available for some reason

tcfhgj6• 8 months ago

ReVanced allows disabling them, and there are extensions for Browsers.

ahartmetz2• 8 months ago

They could at least try to vaguely match the voice and maybe cadence of the original. AFAIU it's one of these things that would have been too hard ten years ago but is fairly easy now. Too computationally expensive probably.

s-lambert• 8 months ago

Yeah ElevenLabs had this over a year ago where you could just upload a 30 second clip of someone's voice in another language and hear what it was like in English and it worked really well.

chao-• 8 months ago

That "feature" is so egregiously bad. I regularly consume content in three languages, and hearing the wrong language coming from my speakers is so jarring. It is a uniquely awful experience that I had never encountered before, nor even imagined.

darth_avocado• 8 months ago

While we’re at it can we also fire the guy who made it that we now have to click the channel’s mini thumbnail to open it, EXCEPT, when the channel is live and clicking the thumbnail takes you to the live video where you have to click the thumbnail again.

tavavex4• 8 months ago

Oh, are we talking about bad YouTube UX? How about the "feature" where the right and left arrows seek the video 5s forward and back, while the up and down arrows increase and decrease the volume? That is, unless the last UI element you've touched was the volume bar, in which case the side arrows will also change the volume, and you'll have to use the mouse to clear the focus away from that volume bar to be able to seek the video again. I still wonder how they managed to break this despite it having had a sane, consistent, defined behavior for probably over a decade before that point.

tonyhart75• 8 months ago

"Whoever made automatic AI dubs a default"

well thats the thing, people is so lazy and dumb that whetever new feature is available, they didnt bother to find or turn on that shit

this is the power of "default", you cant test something is working on hyperscale if you didnt make it default like youtube does

karhuton• 8 months ago

Finnish to the rescue:

Change your Youtube language to Finnish, which isn’t supported by auto-dubbing (and probably never will), and all audio will be in original language.

climb_stealth2• 8 months ago

Hold on, there is a setting to switch to original audio. Just click the cog wheel on the video.

The outrage over this seems completely overblown. Do people not see the setting to switch audio?

Nextgrid14• 8 months ago

The setting does not persist, not even within the same session.

73737373733• 8 months ago

Often times there is no setting to disable this

pjio• 8 months ago

Is there a setting to disable it globally or has every video to be switched?

auguzanellato• 8 months ago

Not on web mobile frontend

jacekm• 8 months ago

In the meantime "YouTube No Translation" addon fixes the issue. https://youtube-no-translation.vercel.app/

mpawelski• 8 months ago

It works when you watch video on youtube, when it's embedded on other site I get the automatic translation.

I still cannot believe that Google doesn't understand that a person can speak more than one language.

6510• 8 months ago

I was playing a game with a friend and the chat was increasingly full of angry people complaining about cheaters easily obtaining very hard to get items. He asked what I thought about it....

Well, the game is clearly very important to these people, it is increasingly visible. They are clearly very emotionally engaged. I'd say things are going really well!

Youtube was once a miraculous technical website running circles around Google video. I'm told they used a secret technology called python. Eventually Google threw the towel and didn't want to compete anymore. They were basically on the ground in a pool of bodily liquids then the referee counted all the way to 1.65 billion.

Some time went by and now you can just slap a <video> tag on a html document and call it a day. Your website will run similar circles around the new google video only much much faster.

The only problem is that [even] developers forgot <s>how</s> why to make HTML websites. I'm sure someone remembers the anchor tag and among those some even remember that you can put full paths inthere that point at other website that could [in theory] also have videos on them (if they knew <s>how</s> why)

If this was my homepage I would definitely add a picture of Dark Helmet.

https://www.rickmoranis.com

Looks like he also forgot <s>how</s> why.

76684546548070• 8 months ago

Googlers are obviously mentally challenged by the concept that there might be anybody in the world who has learned English as a second language.

Bet the idea to force outdated TTS whose robotic droning that is the pinnacle of annoyance on every single user who speaks more than one language was worth a nice bonus.

creative_name3• 8 months ago

i can assure you, people working there also absolutely hate it as well and there would be celebrations if the responsible people were fired for it.

Gazoche• 8 months ago

Same for auto-translated titles. It's like they can't fathom the idea of people speaking more than one language. At least give an option to turn it off!

levocardia• 8 months ago

Forget the METR curve, this is the real deviation-from-linear-forecast we need to be worried about in 2025.

kbenson• 8 months ago

What? There's obviously 1.25 non-ad videos on the home screen, which might as well be two, so they're right on schedule! /s

JumpCrisscross4• 8 months ago

I used to pay for YouTube premium. I stopped doing that, uninstalled the apps, and now use it through the browser with adblockers. (Yes, on my phone and iPad.)

It works so well I’ve gotten at least half a dozen neighbours to do the same. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a definitive step up in UX.

brcmthrowaway• 8 months ago

What is a set and forget adblocker for the Apple ecosystem?

Nextgrid14• 8 months ago

AdGuard Pro.

nozzlegear3• 8 months ago

Wipr, Adblock Pro, Ghostery or uBlock Origin Lite. I've used all four and they perform about as well as you need them to for an adblocker. I'm currently using uBlock.

koakuma-chan5• 8 months ago

YouTube hasn't been working for me past two weeks with uBlock Origin. Video doesn't play.

da02• 8 months ago

Have you tried "uBlock Origin Lite"? It is by the same author, Raymond Hill (gorhill). It has been working fine. I use "optimal" level for the filtering mode. (Note: I use Chromium on Linux)

Nextgrid14• 8 months ago

Counterpoint: it works, you just have to wait a bit, since now the server will not actually send you the video until the mandatory (pre-skip) ad’s length has elapsed.

Which is fully in their right, I’m not complaining, it’s not like I’m any worse off (waiting on a black screen vs waiting while some bullshit ad tells me to CoNsUmE PrOduCt!!!)

lamontcg• 8 months ago

Firefox + uBlock Origin + Sponsor Block + YouTube Redux on Mac has been working well for me for quite some time.

misiek08• 8 months ago

Make sure to update and restart Firefox.

rjmorris• 8 months ago

I had the same problem. Updating uBlock Origin fixed it.

reddalo2• 8 months ago

Are you using Firefox? Chrome breaks YouTube if you have an ad-blocker.

adrianpike• 8 months ago

Which adblocker are you currently using? The arms race is getting pretty tiring...

Nextgrid14• 8 months ago

Even on Safari with Apple’s braindead “content blocker” API, AdGuard manages to successfully block YouTube ads.

JumpCrisscross4• 8 months ago

Which adblocker are you currently using?

I’m really shooting myself in the foot right now aren’t I.

1Blocker and Wipr on mobile. Plain old Orion by Kagi on my Mac.

secondcoming• 8 months ago

I use Brave 99% of the time just for Youtube.

JoshTriplett• 8 months ago

uBlock Origin continues to work well, on both desktop and Android.

Hnaomyiph• 8 months ago

Like another poster mentioned, I use Orion on my iPad with ublock origin installed as an extension. It’s a really great browser, only a few bugs here and there.

Evidlo• 8 months ago

Nice try, Google!

deanCommie• 8 months ago

I mean I pay for Youtube Premium because I use Youtube Music instead of Spotify.

I get a very unopinionated but effective music player that has all the music I need, and it doesn't try very hard to "upsell" itself to me unlike Spotify because to Google YouTube is the real money driver.

So to me getting no YouTube ads as well is well worth it.

JAlexoid10• 8 months ago

And I pay for Premium, because each premium view is more valuable to the creators than the ad supported one.

danpalmer9• 8 months ago

I do pay for YouTube Premium, I see no ads, and everything works pretty conveniently. What's your point, that with a bit of extra effort you can pirate content?

ahartmetz2• 8 months ago

It's not piracy.

tcfhgj6• 8 months ago

Blocking ads is hardly "pirating" content

mattacular• 8 months ago

I pay for YouTube Premium too (probably not much longer) but can only 'comfortably' use the site through a series of increasingly hacky extensions for Firefox. On non-web apps, there is no recourse from the UI enshittification.

The general theme is the same as the article: less real estate dedicated to actual videos you might want to watch. There were two rows of completely useless garbage that I had to add to my uBlock Origin filter just now: one for Shorts (which I have blocked in the past) and a new one for some sort of Youtube Games thing (?) that looked like the worst AI generated slop you'd never want to play.

If this is the premium experience then I don't want it.

makeitdouble3• 8 months ago

You still get the autogenerated dubs by default, the comments moved to end of the earth, and many other stuff (shorts etc.) people get pissed about.

At this point ads are just one of the annoyances amoung so many others.

polotics2• 8 months ago

The massive overlays of what-to-watch-next hiding most of the video much too early, ie. before the very end, of the video you were trying to watch until the end but now just ragequit and downloaded instead... are very ugly

chrneu11• 8 months ago

For me, and many people, advertising is a mental health issue. I don't enjoy those ads, they are very disturbing and jarring. It causes me anxiety and I don't like the things that those ads normalize. I don't think most people, especially americans, realize how far off the rails our society is in terms of our normalization of insane shit.

So, for health reasons, I block nearly all advertisements. It is a HUGE mental health win. There is a ton of research behind this, as well.

I'm not going to pay extra money to disable a health concern. I'll block ads instead. I should not have to PAY MORE for a product that doesn't damage my health.

I will always happily directly support content creators. I will not watch ads.

brikym• 8 months ago

As a premium user I'd like to block shorts.

thomassmith65• 8 months ago

If it weren't for piracy, there would be nothing on Youtube except highschool dropouts lobbing accusations at each other, and AI-generated slop.

snicky• 8 months ago

Just here to say thank you to everyone arguing/explaining why ad blockers are not piracy using interesting arguments better than my own.

You will never walk alone.

Brian_K_White• 8 months ago

I also pay for premium, and have for at least 15 years since it was called Red, and the experience is complete garbage.

If you turn off history, you get zero videos on your home screen. This is not because the history is needed to generate the suggestions, because the blank home only started a few years ago.

I used to never subscribe to any channels, I just got reasonable feed of suggestions based off of whatever I happened to search for explicitly or if I got there by clicking a link, or by what I chose to click on even if the list starts out totally random, except of course it never was totally random because they still have ip address and other fingerprnting signals.

After they blaked out the home screen and started showing the "you're not logged in, go here to fix this error", I subscribed to a bunch of channels to provide data for generating a feed. They still don't provide any. You can take extra clicks (which is agonizing on the Roku since it just doesn't react well and misses button presses all the time) to get to the subscriptions page, which will show recent uploads exactly from those channels and no others.

I also still get several other forms of ads in the form of the embedded/native ads and the irrelevant suggestions that come from youtube's interests instead of my own, like shorts. I also still get ads simply because I don't get to use my own account all the time. When you watch youtube anywhere but your own laptop by yourself, you are at the whims of someone else's account and some other platforms app limitations.

And even on your own machine, I absolutely resent having to tie my viewing history to my identity and have someone else log all of that. So there is reason to intentionally use no account even if you otherwise have no problem paying to support not only the content producers but even the delivery system.

Why can't I disable shorts? There is no amount I can pay to hide all shorts, but I can have it for free i=on a pc with a tampermonkey or ublock script. But that only helps on a pc. I watch mostly on a TV and I have no ability to hack the roku app. Maybe if I switch to a google tv I could use newpipe or something.

Paying for premium does not make youtube good. It does not resolve much of anything. It is not remotely the touche this smarmy comment attempts to suggest.

Paying for premium takes youtube from being like pulling out 10 of your fingernails to only pulling out 8 of your fingernails.

That 2of10 fingernals relief and for the sake of the creators, that's the only reason I still pay for premium.

DocTomoe3• 8 months ago

I do pay for YouTube Premium - and I still get ads when someone has YT Videos embedded on their website. YouTube knows who I am, the cookies are set, there is no reason to give me ads.

It is not yet painful enough for me to invest time and energy to research less convenient ways of UX improvement. Not ... yet.

array_key_first8• 8 months ago

The point is that the pirated experience is both easier to access and more convenient.

If I'm paying, I expect the best possible experience, and you just don't get that. It's not just YouTube, many streaming services are objectively inferior to pirating.

joquarky8• 8 months ago

If I go to the bathroom during an ad break, am I "pirating" the content?

nojs• 8 months ago

I also like that there’s no ads in premium. Speaking of premium things, I also really like Brilliant for learning things quickly and Surfshark VPN because it protects my privacy when I’m on the go.

ElectricalTears• 8 months ago

Revanced is the best UX for Android, can remove a lot of things as well (like shorts).

NooneAtAll32• 8 months ago

I never managed to install it

it complains about youtube app being separated into parts or smth like that

nhumrich• 8 months ago

It also contains more ads then you tube itself.

clearleaf• 8 months ago

I stopped using apps like this because they were always getting broken by youtube. Obviously it's intentional sabotage but still. It felt like I had to update those apps every time I used them and sometimes there was no update at that time at all. The mobile site never breaks and you have full access to extensions if you use firefox.

komali24• 8 months ago

I've loved Grayjay as an alternative YouTube client. It can pull in videos from other platforms as well, and it can Cast videos! AdBlock and sponsorblock built in too.

walt_grata2• 8 months ago

I did the same, but I also added in a tamper monkey script to get rid of the picture in picture thing they force on you as part of their "core experience". I wish their ux designers and PMs were less arrogant and realized their preferences are just preferences and gave us back the ability to disable stuff like this in the app.

bronco21016• 8 months ago

Are they the PMs' preferences? Or are they A/B tested "optimizations" to hit their KPIs?

tdeck• 8 months ago

I've been doing this for years, but recently they have nerfed mobile web YouTube and it's limited to 360p (at least it seems to be for me).

aidenn02• 8 months ago

Anyone else notice that most youtube ads are really bad. Seeing a product in a youtube ad now causes me to be more likely to believe it's a ripoff.

Things like a cheap $5 fan being sold for $60 as roughly: "Super efficient A/C that will save you $100s on your electricity bill and can cool a room down in just minutes"

R_D_Olivaw2• 8 months ago

When ai slop makes it cheap to churn out the ads this is what you get. What does YT care, they get the money either way.

Enshittification continues

schmuckonwheels2• 8 months ago

I assume you mean all the snake oil pre-playback ads? Mostly dangerous medical advice, solar scams, or wellness quackery.

This week, an instructional video I was watching on how to repair my water heater was suddenly interrupted by a campy ad for pussy-hair razors.

It was so ill-timed, bizarre, and inappropriate I burst out laughing.

The other one I was seeing a lot of, until very recently, was pornographic static ads that were implemented as an optical illusion. If you viewed it at full scale it was an innocuous image of a closet or chair or something, so it passed all checks, but when scaled into a thumbnail, it turns into a silhouette of a woman giving oral or something else obscene. Not sure what this technique is called or how it's done. (It's not a schooner, it's a sailboat.)

sunaookami3• 8 months ago

That's just... every ad. I mostly avoid products that I see in ads (like TV, radio and internet ads) ironically.

chickensong• 8 months ago

No, why would you allow ads lol.

fransje264• 8 months ago

Anyone else notice that most youtube ads are really bad.

Claiming that (youtube) ads are bad is a tautology at this point. What else can be expected from something competing for what is left of a user's attention at the very lowest end of a market already overflooded with crud?

The question should rather be: why would one voluntarily let one's well-being be polluted by such invasive, parasitic crap.

There is nothing normal about ads everywhere. There is nothing healthy about ads everywhere. Ads are not an inevitability.

Run an ad-blocker, protect your mental sanity.

skydhash2• 8 months ago

The good ads are just normal videos (movies trailer, product announcements, sponsored video)

codedokode6• 8 months ago

Yes, I saw a promoted video with cryptocurrency scam ("earn lot of money trading crypto with ChatGPT") for many months on European Youtube. As I remember, to become rich you just need to put your private keys into their script and run it.

red-iron-pine• 8 months ago

Anyone else notice that most youtube ads are really bad. Seeing a product in a youtube ad now causes me to be more likely to believe it's a ripoff.

YT needs a button to the effect of "I will never, ever, EVER, buy or use this product, stop spending money on this ad"

the obviously-AI created slop or the mobile games that I will never play, etc. is just a waste of time for basically everyone (except YT making that money, I guess)

qingcharles• 8 months ago

There was one that kept popping up for me for about six weeks which was literally just talking you through how to run a script to "make millions with crypto" but which actually just transferred all your funds to the advertiser's wallet.

phendrenad22• 8 months ago

I used to pay for YouTube premium. I stopped doing that, uninstalled the apps, and now use... rumble and tiktok.

alex11386• 8 months ago

Youtube's censorship is one reason I won't pay for it. Rumble is a legitimate site even as people decry its existence (it would be less necessary if Youtube didn't decide on being the world's opinion police)

sreya• 8 months ago

Not being able to play Youtube in the background on your phone is unfortunately one of the main appeals of Premium. There's a lot of good mixes, concerts, etc that I play for the audio while doing something else that I can't do without Premium unless I wanted to leave my phone unlocked (and pray I don't pocket click a link).

R_D_Olivaw2• 8 months ago

I'm fairly certain if you use a browser and the desktop version of the site you can listen with the screen off/locked.

cjameskeller• 8 months ago

Firefox Android can play audio even when the phone is locked, and I use it regularly.

shminge• 8 months ago

If you're on Android, YouTube Revanced does this (+many other premium features)

qwerpy• 8 months ago

My iPhone running Safari and uBlock Origin lite is able to do this. I don't have the youtube app installed. I don't even think the ad blocker is necessary for background audio, but I don't want to see ads.

1. Go to youtube.com in the browser, play the video, switch back to the home screen. Video playback will stop, which is a good default behavior.

2. Swipe down from the top of the screen which brings up "Notification Center" which somewhat strangely contains a playback control for the browser.

3. Press play. Audio resumes. If it's part of a playlist, you don't have to manually advance, it will play automatically.

No ads, no youtube premium subscription, no "desktop mode", no sideloading, no additional apps other than the beloved ad blocker.

MathMonkeyMan• 8 months ago

You can open youtube in the phone's web browser and install an extension that blocks a site's ability to tell when focus has left the page/app. This is how I listen to some music on my phone while working out.

Ad blockers help with the constant nagging about "open in the app!"

alextingle• 8 months ago

NewPipe

EliteGadget6• 8 months ago

I run Brave (Android) on my phone and don't have any ads on Youtube. I think it worked on Brave iOS but I sold my iPhone last year.

I let Brave run in the background and it seems to work fine.

stack_framer• 8 months ago

I also stopped using the YouTube app in favor of the Brave browser on my desktop and my Android phone (no extensions needed). I can't remember the last time I saw an ad on YouTube!

strix_varius• 8 months ago

I also use Brave on all my devices - it also works on Amazon Prime. Prime frequently made me offers to upgrade to an ad-free experience that I didn't understand... surely this is a bug, I already have an ad-free experience. Then I installed the Prime app on my TV and realized the constant barrage of ads that Brave has been protecting me from!

TheCapeGreek2• 8 months ago

There's odd and end features that some people prefer with Premium. E.g. offline downloads to watch when you're out of signal, background play, etc.

And they don't want to go through alternative workarounds to do so.

For me, it's actually just being able to easily share premium with other users in my household, so that I don't have to have my ears blasted with ads when they open YT on the TV. Less effort than playing around with things like pihole and hoping it doesn't break other things.

ksec2• 8 months ago

I used to pay for YouTube premium

It would have been amazing value had Youtube Music, which came with YouTube Premium were half decent. But it is not. We got Spotify which isn't perfect, and then Apple Music, which for years didn't know what they were doing, and then Youtube Music, which is basically a company doesn't give a damn about Music.

We now have three Giant companies over the history of the past 30 - 40 years, once they grow big that make junk.

kevincox3• 8 months ago

Yes, I very happily payed for YouTube Premium when it came with Google Play Music. Them turning that off in favour of the awful YouTube Music was the straw that broke the camels back.

FridgeSeal2• 8 months ago

Apple Music, which for years didn't know what they were doing

You pay them money, they let you stream music and otherwise stay out of your way. I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty much ideal as far as I’m concerned.

jdhwosnhw4• 8 months ago

I would genuinely like to understand this perspective. Ads or paying for premium is how the underlying business makes money. The UX might suck but you have a choice - you can just not watch YouTube. The approach you describe (which i understand is a popular one) is equivalent to justifying robbing a store because their prices are too high.

allarm• 8 months ago

It’s not a robbery if noone is getting robbed. That’s a very bad analogy really.

aembleton2• 8 months ago

The approach is the equivalent of avoiding the end of aisles so that you don't even look at the products that companies are paying to the store to promote.

jiehong• 8 months ago

YouTube is the content, not the box.

You might like the content, but you don’t pay for a shit box anyways.

sys32768• 8 months ago

To YouTube's credit, at least the remaining videos aren't vertical.

troupo• 8 months ago

Not for long: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45872870

PaulHoule2• 8 months ago

They’re catching up with the recommendation technology China had 5 years ago.

Nextgrid14• 8 months ago

#shorts

PaulHoule2• 8 months ago

Was just talking with my son about how some YouTubers who made short videos long ago started making longer and less succinct videos because they thought the algorithm favored long videos and then TikTok happens.

cloudflare728• 8 months ago

HN typically use the word "steal" when Chinese companies do the same thing from American or European companies.

It's taking them 5 years stealing Chinese algorithms.

MBCook6• 8 months ago

I noticed this morning there was a new version of the YouTube app on my Apple TV. I can’t wait to find out how they screwed this one up.

My personal long-term complaint is the length of video titles.

Lots of people like to make really long video titles. So right now there is one on my screen titled “The Best Decisions Every Video Game Console Developer Made”.

Now if you didn’t know, that is not the whole title. But there’s absolutely no indication of that. The only way you actually know that is either by checking or if the stuff on the screen is clearly not the end of a sentence.

So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in the title. In this case you also see “(Part”.

Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that.

The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.

Obnoxious.

jazzyjackson• 8 months ago

Google News has this same truncation problem. I thought it would be an obvious thing to, I don't know, use the `title` attribute so mouseover reveals the rest of the snews...

thaumasiotes3• 8 months ago

Now if you didn’t know, that is not the whole title. But there’s absolutely no indication of that. The only way you actually know that is either by checking or if the stuff on the screen is clearly not the end of a sentence.
So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in the title. In this case you also see “(Part”.
Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that.
The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.

I'm looking at youtube right now. There's a video displayed with the title "Word Differences Between 11 Countries! | Europe, Africa, Asia , ..."

That "..." is the indicator that the title has been truncated. If you hover the title with your mouse, you can see the entire thing: "Word Differences Between 11 Countries! | Europe, Africa, Asia , America | Why Are They Similar?"

Not far away, there's "Alex Honnold Answers Rock Climbing Questions | Tech Support...", which expands to "Alex Honnold Answers Rock Climbing Questions | Tech Support | WIRED".

Am I using Apple TV? No. Is it really true that they removed the truncation indicator?

MBCook6• 8 months ago

It’s different on Apple TV.

thoroughburro4• 8 months ago

Am I using Apple TV? No. Is it really true that they removed the truncation indicator?

Yes.

atombender2• 8 months ago

The YouTube app is easily the worst app on Apple TV.

For example, if you pause the video by clicking the main action button brings up an overlay that takes up almost the whole screen, so you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame. How do you start it again? By clicking the same button, right? No! By clicking up. For some reason up means back and down means to open some additional UI with related videos and what not.

No other app is like this — Plex, Infuse, Apple, Netflix etc. abide by relatively sane UI controls where the action button pauses and unpauses, and up/down don't scroll between weird overlay elements.

The YouTube filled with these incredible non-unintuitive UX choices that drive me crazy. I never use it unless I have a clear idea of something I want to watch.

cmckn• 8 months ago

Agreed the interface is clunky.

you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame

You can press up on the D-pad to dismiss that overlay, if you want to see the full paused frame.

How do you start it again? By clicking the same button, right? No! By clicking up.

Maybe we have different remotes? On the latest model, you play/pause with the same button.

One issue I’ve noticed in the app is there seems to be no way to move the cursor “up” to the channel button when the video is in the last 10% of the playback bar. If you rewind it a bit, then you’re able to move the cursor up there.

Only in the last few days have Shorts appeared at the top of my home page. I fear it may be the end for me.

yearolinuxdsktp2• 8 months ago

This is intentional on Google’s part. It’s anticompetitive behavior, to make YouTube service’s app shitty on Google’s competitor’s ecosystem. But no government seems to care—-and what will you do, stop watching YouTube?

stogot• 8 months ago

The YouTube app is the worst on its own site too. I don’t login to any Google account and I turned off site history, and now the homepage is completely blank. Yup. Google won’t even show me a single video on the homepage because I refuse to turn on history. Which is actually kind of nice for preventin distractions

Y-bar4• 8 months ago

It’s so bad. Last time I tried to use it I was unable to fill in my password for my account because Google had implement some custom input element and custom keyboard which did not contain some of the characters I have in my password. And of course there was no possibility to paste or use keychain.

mrkpdl• 8 months ago

The YouTube app is easily the worst app on Apple TV.

The YouTube app is a walk in the park compared to the app for Hayu which is like torture sometimes it’s so buggy.

Zanfa• 8 months ago

The YouTube app is easily the worst app on Apple TV.

I would've agreed until Netflix did their redesign and started pushing wrestling for whatever braindead reason. Some executives should just quit.

soulofmischief• 8 months ago

I know Prime did this for quite some time, unaware if they still do. The main YouTube web app also suffers from this same issue, though at least the play button disappears.

Everytime YouTube gets an update it gets worse. This has been true for years. It's like their design and product team is run by second-graders.

k4rli2• 8 months ago

Is it a real app anyway on that platform? I doubt it.

Last time I checked, the LG webOS app was just running tv.youtube.com which only expects a TV-specific user agent.

hhh• 8 months ago

You’re meant to use the dedicated pause button on the apple tv remote to pause without any overlay. Anything that uses the apple built in player has ui appear when you hit the center button. Same for Netflix.

nedt• 8 months ago

You'd think they've done it on purpose so you don't watch Youtube on TV. I tried but it's so bad you'd never open it a second time. And that's the platform where there are no ad blockers, so it must be good for them ...

dv_dt• 8 months ago

Perhaps it's a dark pattern to keep you using the youtube app on your phone and casting it

ChrisMarshallNY2• 8 months ago

Apple TV apps, in general, are terrible. Every single one [that I routinely use] (including Apple’s apps) regularly crash or lock up, often leaving it to me, to force-quit.

Amazon has started getting into a state, lately, where it ignores the remote, unless I go back, then go forward again.

This kind of “quality” is considered “acceptable,” in today’s world.

AppleTV has a JavaScript-based development system. It also has a fairly classic native Swift system (which I use). I suspect most apps are JavaScript, though.

[EDIT: Added the “routinely use” qualifier]

FridgeSeal2• 8 months ago

I can genuinely only assume that Google simply refuses to do the sane, normal thing for the platform.

Given that every other app manages to get basic interaction right, I’m not inclined to believe it’s an os/hardware issue.

codedokode6• 8 months ago

so you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame.

It's similar on desktop, if you pause the video, an overlay with recommendations appears, and it prevents you from reading the subtitles, for example.

rgovostes• 8 months ago

Does the search feature work for you? Mine gives me about 2 seconds to enter a search term, but once it has fetched results for the partial input, it keeps reverting the search field as I try to enter more, even if I delete to try again.

I would not be surprised if there is no QA team for the tvOS app.

wooger2• 8 months ago

Oh, and I'll see your youtube and Raise you the Discovery Plus app (Maybe UK only?).

The content they offer is either a big back catalog of reality TV dross, or Live sport. The live sport streams, when left open when the AppleTV is turned off will always crash and go into a frozen state where there's no way out except by force quitting the app.

Reported multiple times to their tech support, no fix in 2 years. This for sports services that cost 30GBP a month, minimum, and with a regional monopoly on coverage.

chrneu11• 8 months ago

There are two apps called "DeArrow" and SponsorBlock that basically everyone should be using.

DeArrow replaces thumbnails and titles with crowd sourced versions. I can't use youtube without it anymore. Usually the titles get replaced with stuff like "How to build a table" instead of "Watch the world explode as I try to make a table!!!!!!!!!!!!". Same with thumbnails. No longer are they over-saturated close up AI generated garbage images, but usually just a screenshot from the video that shows what's really going on.

jason_oster2• 8 months ago

Neither of these are available on Apple TV. Otherwise, you make a good suggestion; install them where available.

herewulf• 8 months ago

Except that those two things are fantastic indicators for videos / channels you should be avoiding. Hiding their foolishness and then watching them anyway rewards their behavior.

blkhawk• 8 months ago

"Watch the world explode as I try to make a table!!!!!!!!!!!!" is unlikely its more like "Watch the world explode as I try to make this thing!!!!!!!!!!!!".

EliteGadget6• 8 months ago

Hey, Only 50% of one of my thumbnails are AI generated Garbage!

I do agree it is annoying. Some people do it quite a lot with car work videos to make the car look in far worse than it is.

ssl-36• 8 months ago

I used to use a browser extension that devolved thumbnails and titles. That seemed nice, but I stopped using it a few years ago because I don't want that kind of content in my life and changing the window dressing didn't fix it.

I do this instead: When a thumbnail and/or title is displayed on my screen feels like some variation of spammy clicky ragebait, I use the 3-dot menu and pick "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel".

Nowadays, that kind of stuff is pretty much just gone.

This has certainly nuked whole channels (and also entire categories) from my youtube feed, and that suits me just fine. I need my life to be encumbered neither by clickbait, nor by the subset of creators that are compelled to generate it in the first place.

There's more good, interesting, non-bait content created every day than any person has time to consume. The herd is plenty big enough to be culled.

I think I'll be OK without watching videos -- at all -- from people who are working to jam the cock of influence as hard as possible into whatever they can.

hapticmonkey• 8 months ago

Remember when the Youtube app overrode the AppleTV screensavers, to show their own screensavers if Youtube was paused.

Any other app, you leave a video paused, the OS screensaver will come on. Those beautiful, aerial screensavers that are better than any screensaver I've ever seen in all my decades of working with computers. So of course the Youtube app had to block them with their own shitty variant. They have no taste and no respect.

paperpunk• 8 months ago

Your comment is past tense - does that mean they’ve stopped doing this? Please, Lord. I had to set my ATV to go to screensaver in a ridiculously short amount of time to preempt the YouTube one.

MBCook6• 8 months ago

YES. That was HORRIBLE. Thankfully that only lasted like a day or two.

The fact that they would ever think that was possibly an OK thing to do though shows you how brain dead they are.

chrismorgan• 8 months ago

Lots of people like to make really long video titles. So right now there is one on my screen titled “The Best Decisions Every Video Game Console Developer Made”.

Even with the missing “ (Part 2!)” added, that’s still only 68 characters. I would probably begrudgingly call this long, but I would definitely not call it “really long”—my threshold for that would be at least 90 characters.

If they’re truncating around 60 characters, I’m content to call it unreasonable.

MBCook6• 8 months ago

It’s only “really long“ because it doesn’t fit on my screen.

I agree in the abstract it’s a perfectly reasonable title. It should absolutely be readable.

But it’s not. Because the app sucks.

synack• 8 months ago

Every time you see an ellipsis "..." you know that the designer put form over function. Hiding data from the user is never the right answer.

They could use their fancy AI to generate shorter titles.

Dylan1680711• 8 months ago

And if someone puts in a 500 character title, it still can't be truncated?

YouTube making up a shorter title would be so much worse...

zimpenfish3• 8 months ago

I noticed this morning there was a new version of the YouTube app on my Apple TV.

Damn it, I still appear to be on 4.51.08/web_20251117_11_RC00 with no indication that there's a new version. Not looking forward to any updates...

The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.

I sometimes wonder if YouTube is a weird kink cult that gets off on people complaining about the ridiculously user-hostile decisions they make. Because it's either that or they're an evil troll cult that aims to make life just that little bit less pleasant for as many people as possible.

mikkupikku• 8 months ago

Long titles that put the important context beyond the fold are a form of clickbaiting, I just refuse to watch those videos entirely. I'm sure most of the videos are fine but I cannot reward bad behavior, and besides, clicking on clickbait will get you even more clickbait in the suggestions.

everdrive3• 8 months ago

I know no one likes hearing this because it's glib, but there's really no reason to use "apps" whatsoever. They're always worse in some baffling way, and until people start abstaining from them we'll be stuck here.

paulryanrogers• 8 months ago

They can use features like GPU, USB, NFC, etc trivially; whereas websites and PWAs may not be able to at all.

MBCook6• 8 months ago

And how should I use a web browser on my Apple TV?

That’s not an option. And if it was? I wouldn’t want to use it.

everdev• 8 months ago

And yet here I am being told by young devs that these kinds of terrible UX decisions don't matter, or I get mocked for bringing them up. They don't have the cognizance of experience to know why these things matter or can, and they struggle to even conceptualize how things like this can be security holes open for spammers and scammers.

If they worked for me, they'd learn fast or wouldn't work for me for long.

westacular• 8 months ago

The latest version of YouTube for Apple TV has broken swiping on the remote's trackpad to select videos. (For the older style black Siri Remote, at least.)

The direction of your swipe no longer matters. All the app does is interpret wherever your finger _lifts up_ as a _directional tap_ on that side of the trackpad. So you can't do nice smooth accelerated swiping like it works _everywhere else in tvOS_; you can only use the remote as a bad D-pad.

striking2• 8 months ago

For me this change was reverted quite quickly, I think within the week. On my Apple TV at least it is back to 3 (and a quarter) videos displayed at a time.

I like to think that it was the feedback I submitted that pushed them to change it. However, it was more likely a change in viewership that would cause them to revert it back. I know my viewing habits definitely changed, I found myself spending more time looking through the thumbnails and then giving up to go watch content on other platforms.

4.51.08/web_20251117_11_RC00

Nextgrid14• 8 months ago

It’s not a revert, merely A/B testing to see which version leads to more “engagement”.

They’re also testing the same on the web, half the time I get the normal sidebar, half the time I get a 300% zoomed one where I can only see like 3 video thumbnails before having to scroll (jokes on them, I don’t - but then again I block ads so I don’t count either way).

striking2• 8 months ago

If it happens to me again, I will have to find my content elsewhere. It's not even a conscious decision, I just got genuinely fatigued from the experience.

On the bright side, maybe I'd be better off. There are probably better things I could be doing with my time.

nozzlegear3• 8 months ago

How do you submit feedback?

orphea2• 8 months ago

Not really related but... have anyone else noticed that suggestions on the home page became much worse recently? I'm getting a lot of unrelated videos which are often very old, like published up to 18 years ago. OTOH, videos from subscriptions are not getting suggested, I often have to check individual channels to see if they posted anything new. What's happening?

nicbou• 8 months ago

Use the subscriptions page for the channels you follow. I use Unhooked to make it my home page.

chrneu11• 8 months ago

If you pay attention, this happens every few months. This is youtube tweaking the algorithm.

Every time they tweak the algorithm, content creators scramble to figure out what changes they made so they can exploit it. That's why every few months all the major channels change their styles to all be the same. Gotta exploit that algo!

orphea2• 8 months ago

  > this happens every few months

Well, maybe, yeah, but I do think it was never this bad.

1a527dd5• 8 months ago

Ahh, I thought this was just happening to me. I used to watch a fair bit of YT on my PS4, but a few months ago my home screen was basically empty save a few ad videos.

It was pushing me heavily to sign in; which I do _not_ want to do.

End result was I just stopped watching YT.

jonny_eh• 8 months ago

On desktop, press command/ctrl and minus to zoom out and increase the home page's density. It will make text on watch page harder to read, but with theatre mode, the video playback size should be unaffected.

Aeglaecia• 8 months ago

i feel like modern youtube just does not scratch the itch that youtube once scratched , it now feels like methadone replacement therapy. available viewing options have been reduced to either short form content or long form content , there is nothing between. i dont enjoy frying my brain with short form content and i dont have the attention span to watch bloviation with the express intent of stretching out video times to maximise revenue. honestly i feel like this applies to the internet as a whole , a facsimile of its former self being puppeted to achieve control. someone probably predicted this , right ?

polarphi• 8 months ago

YouTube has become so bad that I had to resort to Tampermonkey scripts to become bearable.

First was the disgusting pink tones in the progress bar. Then the oversized thumbnails / less videos per page. Then the horrible over sized player controls. And now the oversized suggestions on the side bar.

Not to mention the obnoxious amount and duration of ads.

It's getting worse and worse.

These are all symptoms that something is very wrong.

chrneu11• 8 months ago

you can do all this with one extension and no scripts: Enhancer for Youtube.

Also recommend DeArrow and SponsorBlock.

But also flip content creators a $5 every once in a while. That's more revenue than they'll ever get from you watchin their videos.

notanormalnerd• 8 months ago

You know who has great information density? Pornhub. If you open Pornhub on a 4K screen, you will absolutely see none of the thumbnails. I think YouTube is overdoing it, but it is really a thing of: people are either using really small screens or 1080p. 4K is still not around much.

Nextgrid14• 8 months ago

Because unlike YouTube, porn is an actually competitive industry with plenty of “tube” sites to choose from. So they have to compete on UX.

komali24• 8 months ago

Google "Ethical Capital Partners."

Operates:

Pornhub

RedTube

YouPorn

Brazzers

Digital Playground Men.com

Reality Kings

SpankWire

chrneu11• 8 months ago

There's an old adage that if you follow the tech that porn adopts, you'll generally be ahead the average consumer curve.

I think there's another version that if porn adopts a tech that means that the tech will work. Like, a lot of VR adoption early on was porn. By a lot, I mean most.

podgorniy2• 8 months ago

Aah, the free market quazimonopolies avoid and despise at all costs (usually carried by customers)

1bpp2• 8 months ago

They just need to fix search..

IAmBroom2• 8 months ago

YT or PH? I mean, both, really.

makeitdouble3• 8 months ago

Yes. 1080p screen density is still so popular. Looking around new laptops it's still the bulk in Windows land, including OLED and ultra high refresh rate monitors. Same for TVs.

Even on macs many are using scaling factors that render close to 1080p.

The issue really would be why YouTube can't bother managing more layouts. It still blows my mind there's only one single YouTube experience per platform, when their viewership basically span the world's population.

gessha2• 8 months ago

Because they fired a bunch of engineers, fired/reorged the PMs and whoever is left is working on the AI shlop.

array_key_first8• 8 months ago

On laptops more than 1080p (or an aspect ratio equivalent) is just a waste. Less battery life and everything is too small to see anyway so you have to scale.

thaumasiotes3• 8 months ago

Unfortunately the YouTube PM org’s myopia is accelerating: with this data I now project that there will be zero videos on the homescreen around May of 2026 now, up from September.

There are already zero videos if you visit with no youtube history. That seems... fine?

qilo• 8 months ago

There are already zero videos if you visit with no youtube history [...]

since August 2023 [0]

[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/139222780?hl=en&ms...

delichon• 8 months ago

maybe our mandatory NeuraLinks are coming sooner than I thought.

The founder of NeuraLink has recently proposed to deploy sentient robots to watch criminals, removing the need for incarceration. There is a lot of synergy possible here with mandatory neural links. The bot could not only watch us but also press our buttons. "Criminal", being such a flexible concept, should pose little problem to globalizing this paradigm. For one thing, it will make it possible to harvest any number of clicks necessary, so advertising becomes obsolete, and so does content.

God, I hope I'm not a prophet.

tonyhart75• 8 months ago

I can see this mandatory in a country like north korea where government would gladly use this tech to control citizens from defecting etc

but after recent EU balooney request like chat control etc, I cant be so sure anymore

JumpCrisscross4• 8 months ago

sentient robots to watch criminals, removing the need for incarceration

These are slap drones [1] from Banks’s The Player of Games [2].

[1] https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Slap-drone

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_of_Games

Nextgrid14• 8 months ago

it will make it possible to harvest any number of clicks necessary, so advertising becomes unnecessary and obsolete

But then again, this is already possible, and has the advertising industry shit-scared, thus all the interest in blocking AI-related scrapers since they circumvent the whole “wasting human time” element.

daemonologist• 8 months ago

Ah yes, the Culture solution (https://groups.google.com/g/alt.books.iain-banks/c/nbW7GxRQ6...). (Always seemed rather cruel to the drone, to me.)

bgwalter• 8 months ago

There are lots of proposals. Recently, he retweeted a pundit who said that murderers should be hanged and that Europe achieved its level of civilization by executing 1-2% of its population for eugenic purposes:

https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1992599328897294496#m

tavavex4• 8 months ago

You know the world is heading in a good direction when the world's richest man with nearly half a trillion dollars is starting to muse about whom he wants to start killing off. You know, for the "common good".

danpalmer9• 8 months ago

What's the point being made in this article?

That TVs have lower information density than desktop browsers? Like, yeah, obviously.

That if you don't sign in to YouTube and don't pay to remove the ads, that you'll get prompted to sign in and you'll see ads? That doesn't seem particularly problematic.

Sure it's mildly funny that a funny projection is true in a very contrived way, but it doesn't really stand up to any criticism. I use YouTube almost exclusively through the Apple TV app, and it's fine, I'd even say it has improved a little over the last few years. I like the low information density because I sit approximately 3m from the screen and navigate with a TV remote.

jaydenmilne3• 8 months ago

Unfortunately I don't have pictures from before this change, but you used to get 5-6 videos I believe. Now you get two (and maybe one is an ad).

The point is that I made a joke projection in my last post in April that by next May there would be only one video on the homepage, because obviously that would be ridiculous, right? Then I turned on my TV and it happened.

See the previous blog post: https://jayd.ml/2025/04/30/someone-at-youtube-needs-glasses....

danpalmer9• 8 months ago

On my Apple TV I get 2.5 thumbnails per row and 2 rows. I honestly think that's appropriate for a TV interface and I basically like the UI. I find YouTube's Apple TV app to be the least clunky of all the carousel-of-videos apps that I use.

crazygringo3• 8 months ago

Sure it's mildly funny that a funny projection is true in a very contrived way

I think you got it -- that's the point right there, nothing more...

spartanatreyu• 8 months ago

Compare the 1.25 video thumbnails shown on the apple tv app to the thumbnails on Steam's big picture mode (designed for people sitting on a couch far away from a tv):

1. https://emilio-gomez.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/steamos-...

2. https://preview.redd.it/new-big-picture-mode-is-finally-publ...

yk• 8 months ago

I already have 0 videos on youtube home screen, some combination of not being logged in, firefox privacy settings and ad blocker causes youtube to post a passive aggressive message and a search bar. I kinda like that Ui.

dav43• 8 months ago

It’s crazy you can pay for premium, which is not cheap, and you can’t disable shorts.

The number of times I clicked “show less” and it has zero effect on the number of shorts.

com2kid• 8 months ago

Shorts are up to 3 minutes long now. At this point they are just vertical videos. I fully expect the supported length to keep increasing!

mcmoor• 8 months ago

Vertical videos with much shitter UI. Inability to skip ahead or turn back may be understandable for <30 second videos, but not more.

ares6232• 8 months ago

New prophecy just dropped

k4rli2• 8 months ago

All vertical videos I've uploaded have automatically turned into shorts and there doesn't seem to be a way to toggle this.

left-struck• 8 months ago

Nah shorts have a different culture and style. I don’t mean anything technical. For me I can’t stand the style and I avoid it completely.

gblargg2• 8 months ago

Maybe in the future they will support horizontal shorts as well. /s

preinheimer• 8 months ago

Ive installed a browser extension to remove them on the desktop.

There should absolutely be a better answer here.

sidrag225• 8 months ago

maybe there will be another tier of youtube premium in a few years that removes shorts, and people can try to guilt you for blocking them using browser extensions like they do for ad blocking.

RulerOf• 8 months ago

What's crazy is that I can't turn them off for my children.

I complain about it to Google. They ignore it. They couldn't possibly give a shit.

I should probably complain to my congressman. Who also won't do shit even if they actually give a shit.

typeofhuman• 8 months ago

You could just not let your kids go on YouTube.

There's a long history of people not using it. Most people today don't use it.

JAlexoid10• 8 months ago

I don't even see any shorts, unless I click the shorts tab on the web.

In the Android app it's literally just one line, which I have to scroll down to... like two pages.

tarxvf• 8 months ago

If you disable watch history, youtube tries to "punish" you by disabling nearly the non-subscription recommendations and shorts not from your subscriptions and a number of other things.

Worth a try.

chrneu11• 8 months ago

"Enhancer For Youtube" is a firefox extension that disables much of the nonsense in Youtube's UI. I can't use youtube without it anymore. There might be a chrome version? Idk, using chrome with youtube is dumb af tho so probably don't do that.

pzmarzly• 8 months ago

Using Chromium-based browsers is the only way to play HDR videos, since Mozilla is dragging their feet for years with implementing support for that. I use Firefox for everything except for YouTube because of that.

But if you're in the same boat, at least use something that has an adblocker, like Brave, Vivaldi or Opera.

jbaiter• 8 months ago

It really is. I've been using Revanced to patch out the Shorts feature on my phone, works decently well, but I'm technically violating the ToS with that, despite shelling out 15€/month for it. Obnoxious.

whatamidoingyo• 8 months ago

Brave has a setting to disable YouTube shorts. Both on the mobile app, and desktop version.

Settings -> media -> "Block YouTube Shorts".

There are also other settings related to YouTube. Brave is the only thing I'd use for YouTube on mobile.

theshrike794• 8 months ago

The most worrying bit is that politicians are super concerned about "algorithmic content" for kids, like TikTok or Instagram Reels or Snapchat.

Youtube Shorts? Crickets.

It's IMPOSSIBLE to disable it with parental controls and it has the exact same slop as the other vertical video services.

Which kinda sucks because I'm fine with my kids watching horizontal youtube videos by certain creators, but I'd rather not they have access to the infinite pool of shorts unfiltered.

schmuckonwheels2• 8 months ago

It's difficult to capture into words how much contempt I hold for Google and Amazon, two companies which lost their way long ago and are now actively user-hostile.

YouTube has gotten worse with every release. Endless, pointless UI changes. Sneaky resolution downgrades. When your video says "Auto 1080p" it's like 480p quality, manually choose 1080p and watch it change.

Amazon has been working overtime to make your experience worse. The latest innovation is to eliminate invoices for US customers. This wasn't a mistake, as it was rolled out gradually over a few months, with workarounds quickly plugged as users become aware of them. Oh, there still is a "view invoice" button but it's just a redirect to order summary now.

Dark patterns galore since cancelling Prime. Every checkout flow I'm hit with a minimum of two clicks where I have to decline or change something. Ordering a packet of laundry soap feels like buying a used car.

The employees that implement this stuff dare to call themselves "engineers" yet their entire energy is devoted to making their customer's lives more miserable, which they are somehow paid a disgusting amount of money to go do.

Real engineers solve problems.

These people invent new problems to then go solve, likely because they are chasing their next promotion.

There's a lot of folx who got into this business for all the wrong reasons and we're now seeing the results of that on a massive scale.

charcircuit3• 8 months ago

entire energy is devoted to making their customer's lives more miserable

If these changes are not hurting user metrics are they really making their lives miserable? When you are optimizing an experience for billions of users, numbers are the only thing you can trust.

_vertigo• 8 months ago

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

conductr2• 8 months ago

I’m still using Amazon as much as I was before, it’s just a more miserable experience now which I can feel and the annoyances are compounding. I’ve not yet done anything that would show in their numbers, like cancel my prime or start trying to shop elsewhere or even boycott them altogether, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy as I was and would say they’re pushing me to a point of defection. All to say, they should be smart enough to not just do uninformed numerical analysis. They need to hone a gut feeling for how pleased people are or build metrics around that. They should see satisfaction is waning. In fact, it may be what’s driving this behavior. If satisfaction is down, people leave, sales slump, then they make more user hostile changes in hopes to cover the sales gap with existing customers, but results in satisfaction going down at every pass. It’s a vicious cycle.

ImPostingOnHN• 8 months ago

If these changes are not hurting user metrics

I suspect there is no metric specifically answering the question "do users want [enshittification of the day]?"

There are probably plenty that measure success with dark patterns however, like viewership and engagement.

array_key_first8• 8 months ago

The metrics are bad. Data driven decision making is a very easy trap. If you capture the wrong data then you just optimize for worse stuff.

Classic example: reactions and watch time as measuring engagement. Leads to shittier content being promoted because the more garbage something is, the more outraged people will be.

And that's why Facebook has "optimized" itself to be as shitty of a platform as humanly possible.

haunter• 8 months ago

Funnily porn sites do 100x better UX than Youtube. Both on web and mobile. Probably because there is no monopoly but actual competition among them.

pessimizer2• 8 months ago

Yes, Manwin competes with Mindgeek competes with Aylo competes with Ethical Capital Partners.

binarymax2• 8 months ago

Why. Why are they doing this. It’s the same with Netflix. I don’t understand. What is the metric that goes up when they show a couple giant videos.

unsnap_biceps• 8 months ago

I would presume the conversion rate for those specific three videos are much higher then if they're just three of twenty

charcircuit3• 8 months ago

It may reduce decision paralysis and they are hoping their recommendation is good enough.

tavavex4• 8 months ago

I honestly think that at some point, there will be no recommendations page. You'll open YouTube and it'll start autoplaying the video that they (or the advertisers) think you should see. You'll be able to skip to other videos from there, like on short-form content platforms. Likes and subscriptions will dictate how likely it'll be that you'll see a video by that creator in the future. Search and other "outdated" features will be tucked away and purposefully made even more useless than they already are.

bambax• 8 months ago

Came here to ask the same question. How do they benefit from showing less videos? I don't get it.

OrangeMusic2• 8 months ago

I assume people click on the first "video" (not realizing it's an Ad).

csomar• 8 months ago

It's an Ad. Next quarter their revenue is up 25%. Since they need to grow 25% each quarter, by the end of 2026 YouTube will strictly display only Ads.

VMG• 8 months ago

"Make product worse, get money"?

https://dynomight.net/worse/

paulnpace• 8 months ago

Why. Why are they doing this.

Back in my day on the cattle ranch, the cattle had unique magnetic identifiers on their ears. They put their head in the feeder and get fed only what the rancher wants each specific one to to eat.

loudmax• 8 months ago

I find it baffling how bad Netflix's recommendation engine is. I can understand YouTube's priorities being skewed toward slop because their business model is delivering ads. It's not surprising that you have to fight the algorithm to find worthwhile content among the garbage on YouTube.

Netflix's revenue is subscription based long form videos. That should be a viable business model. Instead, they seem to be willfully heading in the direction of serving slop to an audience that's not fully engaged. This road leads them into direct competition with YouTube and TikTok.

When my son moved out of the house recently, he went on the additional household plan. What struck me was that the user interface steered heavily toward the option that includes ads. We had to search for the small print to let him pay Netflix a few dollars more for the non-ads version.

In the late 90's and early 2000's there was a sense that ads were a reasonable tradeoff for free services on the internet. If the last 20 years have taught us anything, it's that the perverse incentives are a catastrophe.

ericmcer• 8 months ago

I think it has to do with their CDN and edge caching? If you can get everyone to watch the same 10 videos it’s easy to serve content.

29athrowaway2• 8 months ago

Neuralink was mentioned, and it immediately made me remember the sad stories of the rhesus macaques that were used as Neuralink animal test subjects for brain implants. The quality of the work was poor and they were able to pull the implants out and then the implants got loose, causing bacterial and fungal infections and swelling and the macaques had to be euthanized. But not before banging their heads against everything, picking on the holes in their skulls and going insane as their brains got increasingly infected. Reading that kind of disgusting inhumane crap makes me ashamed of being a member of the same species.

If you want to read more the search keywords are: "Animal 20" "Neuralink"

Animal 20 was seen "pulling on port connector which is now dislodged (no longer secured)". The next day, Animal 20 was "picking at incision and occasionally pulling on implant". Soon, infections developed. On Dec. 20, UC Davis staff found antibiotic resistant E. coli and Candida glabrata, a fungal infection, at the surgical site. They discussed a "necropsy next week", meaning they planned to euthanize Animal 20.

Fucking cowards.

chrneu11• 8 months ago

This is normal in the meat industry. It sucks it happens to test subjects, or any living creature, but this is nothing compared to the daily cruelty inflicted upon innocent animals that we deem "food".

29athrowaway2• 8 months ago

So then because it's happens in the meat industry then it's least concern then. Whataboutism.

FridayoLeary2• 8 months ago

That's not even the main problem. Youtube is basically unwatchable with all the ads. Maybe it's just me but it often feels like it's badly broken. I found skipvids a while back. I find the videos on YT and watch them there. I don't watch yt often so that's the path of least resistance for me.

drivers993• 8 months ago

There are 0 videos on my YouTube homepage, just a screen asking me to turn on history. Just the way I like it. Here’s what I did:

Go into the YouTube app, settings, manage all history, under the history tab hit Delete -> delete all time.

Then go to controls (still in the manage all history dialog box under settings), under YouTube history hit Turn off. It says “pausing…” Hit Pause, and Got it.

It’s been exactly 3 months since I did that. I still watch stuff from my subscriptions and when I search for something I want to watch. There are still recommended videos when you’re watching a video but they are a lot less enticing since they are not personally targeted. I curated my subscriptions so it’s more what I would want to spend time watching instead of reaction videos for instance. My actual time watching YouTube has dropped a lot.

postalrat• 8 months ago

I see the same screen and wonder why they don't suggest videos based on subscriptions. I assume they figure no suggestions will nag people into enabling history.

ilikehurdles• 8 months ago

I thoroughly love this experience. I open subscriptions as needed to catch up on things I care about. Otherwise I use the homepage to search for something. No distractions. No infinitely scrolling feed of slop and ads.

wrxd2• 8 months ago

I did that as well and also removed all the subscriptions form YouTube itself and instead have all the channels I like in my RSS reader

jstanley2• 8 months ago

I tried to make a custom Subscriptions view for YouTube but they kept blocking me for trying to scrape hundreds of RSS feeds.

drivers993• 8 months ago

That would be the next level I should do. Maybe not RSS, but just making an html file linking to various channels (similar to bookmarks) organized by category, while removing them from subscriptions (and curate the list even further). Check out the channels when I feel like it, like how we used to surf the web. Right now, I'm seeing whatever is newest today which favors channels that churn out content like it's their job (which it is in a lot of cases).

jstanley2• 8 months ago

Weirdly I've had history turned off for just over 10 years (I can tell from the date on the most recent entry), but my YouTube homepage shows me videos related to things I've watched recently anyway.

I just deleted the all-time history and now the homepage is blank as you say.

I don't think they're really deleting your viewing history, else the homepage wouldn't have looked the way it did before I deleted "all time".

I have clicked "stop showing me Shorts" several times but they keep coming back, so I don't think the homepage works properly anyway.

EDIT:

On further consideration, I think what was happening with the homepage was that it was showing me videos related to channels that I subscribe to. (But not always videos from channels that I subscribe to).

However I don't see why they can't still do that even after I delete my all-time watch history? Not that I want them to.

But if you did want them to, you could probably turn watch history back on, click on any single video, and then turn it off again, and you'd probably have a home screen dictated by your subscriptions.

Or else they just ignore the setting and it's all a lie anyway.

ghtbircshotbe• 8 months ago

Internet companies will stop storing user data the same day AI companies stop training on copyrighted data.

drivers993• 8 months ago

On further consideration, I think what was happening with the homepage was that it was showing me videos related to channels that I subscribe to

I think so too. I turned my history back on and watched part of one video in order to make sure I had the steps right for clearing and disabling history again. In that time, after having at least 1 video in the history, the front page was like what you said. The first recommendation made me want to click on it. It was called "why c++ is terrible" or something like that. Cleared/disabled again and back to normal (blank home page).

unfitted2545• 8 months ago

You can go even further and remove the recommendations panel when you're watching a video using the eye dropper on uBlock Origin, it's so good.

itopaloglu832• 8 months ago

This was one of the most relaxing things I’ve done. Recommendations are so bad so useless, despite paying for premium for peace, it’s just hassle to interact with the platform.

And shorts, just let us turn them off in the subscription page exactly like the posts.

It’s utterly baffling that a multi-billion dollar video empire doesn’t provide much of an option to their users in terms of settings.

ryandrake• 8 months ago

It’s utterly baffling that a multi-billion dollar video empire doesn’t provide much of an option to their users in terms of settings.

In a better world with an actual open web, we would not have to rely on the graces of the hosting company to offer us a better UI. Our browsers would act as true "User Agents" and render the web page in a way that is best for the user.

Browsers should be able to by default pick and choose what elements of a web page get rendered, without having to reach for extensions. Browsers should be able to render things in a different order, and easily allow the user to override things like styling, size and so on. Browsers should provide this kind of flexibility by default! They should not just be canvases following orders, for the web developer to program against the user's interests.

Instead, we just punted, and handed over all of the control to the web developer. Now they decide what gets shown and not shown. They decide the layout. They decide everything!

5kg• 8 months ago

Best decision I made this year.

insin• 8 months ago

Low _usable_ information density is one of the main things I made Control Panel for YouTube [^0] to tackle, especially in Subscriptions.

On a 1080p monitor, my unmodified Subscriptions page currently has 6 fully-visible thumbnails, consisting of 3 livestreams from people I only subscribe to for videos, 1 watched video, 1 stream VOD (which I'll never watch), and 1 unwatched video, so that's a score of 1/6. Scroll down and you start getting into more watched videos, stream VODs, the unwanted Shorts shelf, thumbnails for Upcoming videos (i.e. videos which can't be watched), and videos from people I don't even subscribe to (via YouTube's recently-added Collaborations feature).

With everything in Control Panel for YouTube enabled and a minium of 5 videos per row configured, I have 15 unwatched or partially watched (up to a configurable %) videos every time. Same thing for Home, in which other things I don't want such as Mixes and Playlists can also be hidden.

It also tends to have fixes for the other things people rightfully complain about when YouTube comes up in these threads, such as (reads down the page) blocking ads and hiding promoted content, hiding Shorts everywhere, automatically switching to the original audio for auto-dubbed videos, hiding Related videos when they appear below the video pushing comments even further down, fixing the new oversized video controls and huge videos in the Related sidebar, etc. etc.

[^0] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube

1over137• 8 months ago

On a 1080p monitor…

There’s your problem. You have normal hardware. The rich SV folks at google are probably all using 6k monitors. (only half joking)

Orygin• 8 months ago

It's the same issue on big screens. I have a ultra wide 2k, and in full screen I only have 3 videos on the homepage.

kuschku• 8 months ago

Even on expensive, high-res screens, the homepage looks like this: https://i.k8r.eu/YOHPqQ.png

joquarky8• 8 months ago

It's so immensely frustrating to be frequently insulted by how little companies are obviously spending on QA these days while being out of a (UX dev) job for two years.

Many of these violations of my sanity could be fixed with less than 50 tokens worth of code.

anhner• 8 months ago

This is so awesome! This is why I love the desktop, my machine is still mine.

fhennig• 8 months ago

I love this, thank you so much for building this!

I didn't know I wanted 6 videos in a row, but now that I have it, it's so much better. Also linking youtube logo to subscriptions is great.

rubyfan2• 8 months ago

They have also gotten more aggressive on trying to get you to sign in. I have appreciated the shitty UX changes they have made which has resulted in me using it less. It’s just filler and I need less of that in life, so thanks for chasing me away.

conductr2• 8 months ago

On my work PC, they all but forced me to create an account just to watch videos. I could not find a way around it (I didn’t try super hard). I don’t use my personal accounts on that device so I just created a throwaway.

aeyes• 8 months ago

When did you create the throwaway? The last time I tried they directly asked for a phone number.

phendrenad22• 8 months ago

What's the polymarket on NO videos on the homepage AND THREE ads?

bryanhogan• 8 months ago

I can highly recommend using YouTube through Firefox with extensions or ReVanced that try to fix these hostile and anti user decisions. Although I do sometimes wonder why I do spend so much time on a platform that hates me so much.

duxup• 8 months ago

I miss when I could search youtube for "cats" and I'd get just raw cat footage.

Now I get cat influencers and influencers selling me on them ... while they tell me how to pick a cat. Maybe I find kinda raw cat footage, with a title that is misleading, annoying music, text bubbles popping all over it :(

I just want what I searched for ... youtube doesn't give me that.

It's not that unlike when I open the home page, I've no control and so much of that isn't what I'm looking for...

lan321• 8 months ago

For me it's 3 videos of what I searched for and then it just goes to my normal recommended. One of the issues I still haven't fixed with an extension so I just search videos via normal web search.

neop1x• 8 months ago

Sometimes it helps to use intitle:cats and other advanced search operators https://granwehr.com/blog/youtube-search-operators

ChrisArchitect• 8 months ago

Similar over at Netflix with the UI layout update they introduced in May. Oversized, limiting carousel items.

https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/netflix-new-homepage-...

everyone• 8 months ago

ublock origin \ my filters

youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 5 !important)

Ive had that for a couple years.

yearolinuxdsktp2• 8 months ago

YouTube app on Apple TV is inexcusable garbage, likely intentionally so. Google doesn’t want you to have a good experience on an Apple product.

throwaway173738• 8 months ago

As a workaround just disable the watch history. Then there are no videos on the home screen.

827a• 8 months ago

One of the things I dislike about the Youtube app on Apple TV is how it appears to maintain an entirely separate list of recommended videos, specific to the kinds of videos I tend to watch on TV, versus the phone and desktop (which might themselves also each have their own recommendation algorithm, but my behavior there is closer so as to not notice).

The difference is stark. I use YouTube on the Apple TV to play mostly background videos; 8 hour AI generated lofi mixes, burning fireplaces, things like that. Ambiance. Its all that gets recommended now when I pull up the app; but only on the TV.

This behavior is somewhat desirable: but the issue is, the youtube apple TV app is an abhorrent experience that feels deeply tailored to stop you from getting to any content that is not expressly recommended. And these videos are all that get recommended. A new Linus Tech Tips video might be in my feed on desktop/mobile; but finding that video on the TV literally requires me to search "Linus Tech Tips" and go to their channel -> all videos.

I certainly don't mind the platform raising the prominence of videos I tend to watch on that platform; but to me it feels like I should be able to at least scroll down on the home page a bit to get a more "centralized" view into everything my account watches and would be recommended.

hombre_fatal• 8 months ago

Yeah, I wish the UI could let me browse the various silos of videos I like to watch instead of trying to be clever with one feed.

And it’s like Youtube thinks I only want to watch the last three genres at any moment. If I branch out, then it pops another favorite genre from the set.

Sometimes I’ll go months or even years forgetting about video genres I love until I randomly remember it.

Feels like a wasted opportunity, and it should have more in common with music apps.

noisy_boy• 8 months ago

I hate the forced AI generated English translation of the non-english shorts with the passion of a million suns. It should never have been the default. If you are the person who made that decision, fuck you. If you know that person, please pass on my sentiments.

month13• 8 months ago

My latest favorite is now that the Subscriptions panel adds a bonus "Recommended" row at the top, and then two rows down, a "Recommended Shorts"

gyulai• 8 months ago

Reminds me of a comment I wrote just recently:

» I think that anyone who is technically sufficiently well-versed, is going to avoid that hellscape like the plague. So then, who is the actual audience for this stuff? My guess would be: the old folks' home around the corner, which, sooner or later, will be forced to upgrade those TVs to smart-TVs. And once those old folks put in their credit card numbers or log in with their Amazon accounts, there goes a lot of people's inheritance.

My own elderly father is wise to the scam, but not confident in his ability to navigate the dark patterns. So now, he is afraid to input his credit card information into anything digital, essentially excluding him from cultural participation in the digital age. « [1]

With that frame (the target audience for smart TVs is old people), "needing glasses" is not all that far-fetched.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45462816

recursivecaveat• 8 months ago

I was going to disagree by saying that the menus are extremely confusing to the elderly. However if the goal is to extract money from them by generating confusion about what is an on-demand vs a streaming piece of media; you could not design a better software system. Reminds me of the theory that micro-transaction revenue in video games has driven menu UI in the direction of confusing and disorientating the player.

mdavid626• 8 months ago

As with many other similar sites, it’s time to get off YouTube as well. The times when one could watch good content not made for money, are over. It’s about watching as much content as you can, the more addictive the better.

zombot• 8 months ago

Total enshittification has won and reality is indistinguishable from satire. And still we continue to empower the enshittifiers while complaining loudly about the self-inflicted wounds.

globular-toast2• 8 months ago

I just opened the YouTube app on my Android phone and there is similarly one video on the home page!

kalaksi• 8 months ago

Recently noticed that YouTube had also removed the button for disabling autoplay if you're not logged in. The enshittification continues.

Havoc• 8 months ago

It is rapidly becoming unusual. Already needs a bunch of extensions to make things bearable.

At some point it’ll become so shit people will look at trying to sidestep their frontend entirely. In other news YouTube is clamping down on ability to download videos…what a coincidence

ivanjermakov2• 8 months ago

On a sidenote, there is surprisingly no universal agreement on a default font size and "scaling" of a website.

Common recommendation is font-size: 14px on html element, but I often encounter websites that are way off in scaling.

ruszki• 8 months ago

Isn’t the recommendation to not use px at all? Or just “Pepperidge farm remembers”?

globular-toast2• 8 months ago

Sigh... You'd think people would know this by now. What does it even mean to be a "web developer" if you don't know the difference between pixels and text size? It seems like such a fundamental thing, like a decorator knowing how to calculate how much paint is needed for a job. But no... now we have web browsers where a pixel isn't even a pixel, it's 4 pixels, on a "HiDPI" display...

dvh• 8 months ago

Sorry pal but font size is not something you decide. Font size is something I decide!

ivanjermakov2• 8 months ago

Absolutely. Would be great to have a consistent starting point.

kevincox3• 8 months ago

This is unfortunately true. It feels like "1rem" should be the ideal body don't size. But on desktop browsers this is often quite small.

Personally I configure my browser's default font size (1rem) to something nice and readable, but I'm sure that the number of people who do this is <10%. Probably closer to 1%.

But either way I would recommend against hardcoding a size in px.

rcarmo• 8 months ago

Ironically, most people I know are now using alternative YouTube front-ends not for the ad blocking, but just for tracking their subscriptions in a proper list and skipping the junk in the home page.

guillevg• 8 months ago

Yes, YT UX is awful, specially on TV. I found about SmartTube and it is great, I recommend it. You can choose the grid size, among many other things (most importantly, no ads!).

blurr123• 8 months ago

that "i skied down mount everest" promotion by redbull is out of control. its the epitome of 'look at me' syndrome

alex11386• 8 months ago

I used to lurk the Google forums (they even changed the goddamn format of the forums now to where clicking things is tedious and I'm sure it's 100% intentional) and going back years with Google and also I suspect Youtube it was full of users complaining about "You're ignoring all our advice/wants in this thread". I don't remember all of it, but it was product managers being incredibly selective

The tyranny of distance (you can do x where x is usually 'ignore feedback' and you can get away with it separated by hundreds of miles, where otherwise you might get punched in the face) kills me with companies like this. You can't just ignore all of us (the customer isn't always right but it wouldn't kill you to listen every once and a while and if you don't, we'll gradually stop using your product). But you can, because listening to The People isn't where the product managers decide it should be or isn't where the ad dollars are or whatever

It's an emperor has no clothes situation. They know it we know it everybody knows it but we're all (corporate, anyway) just going to ignore it and plug our ears

sarreph• 8 months ago

I now project that there will be zero videos on the homescreen around May of 2026 now

This is already true. If you sign out of YouTube or turn your "Watch History" off you see zero videos on the home screen.

somat• 8 months ago

On desktop it has already hit zero. Clear all your tokens and go to home page, no videos.

I am being a bit obtuse of course, if you have any sort of identifying tokens it does show videos, but the irony was too good to waste on mere facts.

podgorniy2• 8 months ago

What could users do with this quazimonopoly? YT PMs can keep being discunnected from user's needs as long and far as their personal worldview limitations allow and bare no consequences.

reddalo2• 8 months ago

YouTube is a monopoly, and with huge barriers to entry.

Nobody else has the money, the infrastructure and the content to build a YouTube alternative.

OrangeMusic2• 8 months ago

The money or infrastructure: factually false.

The content: well I guess that's the network effect.

To be honest I don't understand content creators who bitch about YouTube constantly (about "the algorithm", demonetization, strikes and more), but DON'T put their content somewhere else at least as an alternative. You don't have to _move_ but at least also publish your videos to a podcast platform or something?

kotaKat• 8 months ago

I'd also like to scream at Youtube for the "experiencing interruptions? find out why!" bullshit that enforces a five second wait before videos will load.

I only put 2+2 together when I was running yt-dlp and realizing there was a "Sleeping 5.00 seconds as required by the site..." before downloads would kick in and... wellp. It all makes sense now.

As an ISP representative, I am getting absolutely pissmad that YouTube is gaslighting our users and making them think that our service is "terrible" because of perceived buffering on every video load because YouTube wants to play a shitty cat and mouse game against adblockers for all.

mooktakim• 8 months ago

Can someone write about how terrible the YouTube Android app is, so that some PM can actually fix it? Its an app i use constantly and hate using it all the time. I accidently click to another video and lose the position of where i was. It used to confirm the play of another video, but now it doesn't. The offline feature is terrible; you can't play something and make it go offline. It used to cast really well, with a "casting queue". When i disconnect from my TV, its still logged in. Adding/removing/changing the watch queue is so bad that I have to use my laptop to make changes. When browsing, you can't tell whether a video is already on your watch list; it's not always accurate. Sometimes you click add, and it removes it from the watch list because it's also in the list. Many more things.. can't think of them right now.

sph• 8 months ago

Good timing, now that the inept PMs at YouTube have decided to move the Subscription and Watch Later buttons on my desktop UI and make them more cumbersome to reach. What the hell are they even doing?

Like a sibling commenter mentioned, I used to happily pay for Premium, but I'd rather put up with the misery (and ad-block) than give them a single cent ever again. Why should I reward pervasive enshittification?

Sort yourselves out, Youtube.

Sammi2• 8 months ago

I use the Stylus[0] extension with this style in order to fix it:

  ytd-rich-item-renderer {
      max-width: 265px;
  }

  /* Show full length title instead of ellipsis cutoff at two lines. */
  a.yt-lockup-metadata-view-model__title {
      display: inline !important;
  }

[0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpee...

aembleton2• 8 months ago

If you've already got uBlockOrigin then you can add this to it instead of another extension. Add these filters:

  youtube.com##.ytd-rich-item-renderer:style(max-width:265px; !important;)
  youtube.com##.yt-lockup-metadata-view-model__title:style(display:inline; !important;)

Sammi2• 8 months ago

Thanks. That let me remove an extension from my browser, which was great.

But the filters actually need to be like this:

  youtube.com##ytd-rich-item-renderer{max-width:265px; !important;}
  youtube.com##yt-lockup-metadata-view-model__title{display:inline; !important;}

whichquestion• 8 months ago

If you have history turned off and you’re not signed in, the number of videos they show on the home screen is already zero

bentt2• 8 months ago

I really don't understand why there are not sites that curate Youtube videos? Like, present basically the same recommendation UI, but just hand pick cool videos around different topics? Hell, it could even be like Reddit with voting... but the algorithmic recommendation engine that Youtube uses is NOT aligned with my interests. It's aligned ONLY with my behavior. I want to learn! I want to explore! I do NOT want to get corralled into the same videos as everyone else just because they are engaging.

I'll give you an example. I'm super into game development. I also love the NBA. NBA videos are posted nearly every day and I click on them. Gamedev videos, not so often. So what do I get? Tons of NBA content because that's what I click on in my recommended. What I want, though, is for the recommendations to think about what I would _like_ to watch and not just what I _do_ watch. I think a curation site would help alleviate this problem, especially if I could steer it more than Youtube's.

swah• 8 months ago

API limits? I've been testing RSS + NetNewsWire for this.

ssl-36• 8 months ago

You could just... make a subreddit for it, right? Youtube videos still have URLs that can be linked to from anywhere.

On your personalized level: Don't let the algorithm work against you; instead, help it work for you. If you're being inundated with NBA videos and want fewer of them, then pick one or more of them and declare that you're "Not interested." This slows the flood of any over-abundant topic.

bentt2• 8 months ago

Thanks yeah thats a fair point. I just get a sense that incentives are misaligned. I pay $30/mo for family premium primarily to keep my kids away from ads, but Youtube still finds more ways to squeeze us by steering us around for retention instead of to what we actually want.

daliusd• 8 months ago

Maybe there are subreddits for that?

port11• 8 months ago

Maybe it's not financially viable? Or the admins don't want to depend on a third-party like that? Dunno.

URLIST was really great for this sort of things but they never made enough money.

mzajc• 8 months ago

People here might be interested in Invidious[0], a FOSS web frontend for YouTube. By default it shows 4 videos per row, but that can be trivially adjusted with CSS. It's a little light on features, but otherwise very customizable.

[0] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

user____name• 8 months ago

It's one video and it's titled "Why the Third Reich CURED CANCER but your GOVERNMENT does't want you to know." And has twelve ads on protein powder and dishwasher tablets in some foreign language.

S0y• 8 months ago

If you use Ublock you can add this to your filters to restore a sane number of videos per row:

---

! YouTube 7 Videos Per Row Fix (Home and Channel Pages)

youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;)

youtube.com###contents.ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;)

youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 7 !important;)

! YouTube 7 Videos Per Row Fix (Channel Page margin fix)

youtube.com##ytd-rich-item-renderer:style(margin-right: calc(var(--ytd-rich-grid-item-margin)/2) !important; margin-left: calc(var(--ytd-rich-grid-item-margin)/2) !important;)

! YouTube 7 Videos Per Row Fix (Font Size fix)

youtube.com###video-title.ytd-rich-grid-media:style(font-size: 1.4rem !important; line-height: 2rem !important;)

youtube.com###metadata-line.ytd-video-meta-block:style(font-size: 1.2rem !important; line-height: 1.8rem !important;)

youtube.com###video-title.ytd-rich-grid-slim-media:style(font-size: 1.4rem !important; line-height: 2rem !important;)

flipgimble• 8 months ago

The content on YouTube should qualify it to be preserved as a treasure of humanity. Think of all the college lectures, conference proceedings, sporting events, citizen journalism, podcasts that are the backbone of new communities and cultural revolutions. It is the modern version of public access TV and expresses a close to compelte spectrum of human interests.

At the same time Google Product Managers (or whatever euphemism for middle management they use at Google) are dumbfoundingly short shighted and myopic. They canibalize and destroy the value of the website to make some engagement or ad numbers go up, persumably in a short term play for promotion. When the consequences of their efforts to enshittify become apparent, they are long gone to another FAANG or moved up to executive level where severance packages mean they suffer no consequences. Its a shame there is no incentive to make the best product for the long term usefullness.

and I've paid full subscription price for a couple of years now to avoid the ads, and I can barely stand what it has evolved into. My screen is 80% games, shorts, "ads" and categories I didn't ask for.

OhMeadhbh• 8 months ago

For the last year I've mostly only been dropping into YouTube just to see how bad it's become. Invidious isn't my favourite bit of software, but it is better than the stock youtube interface. Also, on my ChromeCast (yes, I know it's not supported anymore) the YouTube app will play an ad in the middle of a video and never return to the original video. Most of what I do is look around to find videos that look interesting then download them with yt-dlp so I can watch complete videos.

There's probably a market out there for video hosting that doesn't suck. I think a video search / discovery platform on top of Vimeo might be useful.

lacoolj• 8 months ago

"...I fired up YouTube on an Apple TV..."

I thought Apple TV was a subscription service? Does Apple make TVs now?

kulshan• 8 months ago

https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-4k/

matt3D• 8 months ago

I have a slightly similar frustration; Netflix, Disney et al requiring me to figure out the name of the film by deciphering the poster. I don’t know how this passes any kind of accessibility testing.

behole• 8 months ago

I am dreaming of the day a YT killer shows up. I enjoy the content enough to pay for premium but the laundry list of problems is GROWING. I feel like "TV" is on the precipice of a paradigm shift. I wish YT was not going to be our substrate for that moment but it looks inevitable.

copperx• 8 months ago

Tangential: My eyesight is bad in the dark, and the tendency of darkening the video to show the controls that started with the YouTube player enrages me to no end!!! There is no need to make the video disappear!

66yatman• 8 months ago

Just sign in for better recommendations, it's clearly written there, you don't need glasses to see it.

Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

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