What if YouTube made the black empty space white? [PIC]

http://elzr.com/images/blog/screenshots/white-youtube.jpg

by elzr • 17 years ago

27 17 17 years ago

elzr.com

cflee• 17 years ago

Is the poster trying to make a point other than that it's more aesthetically pleasing to have it white?

ams1• 17 years ago

does it need to have another point? are design matters unwelcome at HN?

LargeWu• 17 years ago

I think it's more a matter of the author didn't include any commentary at all.

Raphael• 17 years ago

Even better: make the page background black. (I did notice testing of a "turn off the lights" button, but I no longer see it.)

lhorie2• 17 years ago

Making the page black by default would make comments harder to read (imo). Then again, I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

stcredzero• 17 years ago

Change the CSS so that the comments are light colors on black. The black page makes the videos look better by tricking your eye into seeing more contrast.

sofal• 17 years ago

Even better than that: http://quietube.com/

aliem• 17 years ago

It's definitely better with "turn off the lights", White is too bright for my eyes and adds distraction.

for greasemonkey users: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/49726 "turn off the lights" everywhere in youtube :)

bmelton• 17 years ago

I was expecting a commentary on whether or not this was more green, so I was a little shocked seeing the spartan page that awaited.

I think it LOOKS a lot better. Without the benefit of commentary from the author, I can't say whether that was his intent or not. From the stills, I can say that it takes a little away from the video, in that it isn't clearly framed as the main content on the page, but I'm guessing that motion video would make that problem go away.

As a complete aside, I almost love the lack of commentary from the author. I certainly don't recommend it for every post, but it's almost like blog art, in that the resultant conversation is free-form.

elzr2• 17 years ago

"Never tell people what to think about stuff. Tell them about it and they will surprise you with their ingenuity." (To paraphrase Patton.)

Thanks for the thoughtful comment bmelton. I very deliberately restrained from commentary to focus all the attention on what I really wanted to say: the picture.

I tend to overindulge in commentary and analysis, but I believe that even more than as filters of news, the true strength of reddits is in analysis filtering.

I also submitted it to Reddit, where it's had some success too. http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8yhay/what_if_yo... (and has proved quite controversial.) But the most striking thing is the different quality and spirit of their comments to those from here.

jcsalterego• 17 years ago

Meta-discussion: I feel like we should avoid single images if we want to avoid becoming yet another news aggregation site.

What's next, {"Top N [Nouns] to [Verb]" | N > 1}? :(

drawkbox• 17 years ago

Do it like Vimeo.

elzr2• 17 years ago

Thanks for the headsup, I hadn't realized how elegantly Vimeo solves the problem.

tetsuo13• 17 years ago

Perhaps use white when viewing the video is playing normally on the site and go back to black when viewing in full screen mode.

herval• 17 years ago

white makes the video size quite irregular - and a lot more different from TVs (as far as I know, the background and frames are usually black). That is not an excuse on itself since it's a different media - but making it similar reduces the adoption barrier.

And it looks a lot tidier with a cleanly defined black square anyway, imho...

What if YouTube made the black empty space white? [PIC]

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