For a long time the grid of videos on the homepage has been slightly misaligned. I imagine the different rows belong to different teams. This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over.
I find the autoplay so annoying because it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage. Often the video gets inexplicably added to my watch history, and if I do choose to click on it I have to go back to the beginning because I missed the start of the audio
What kills me with the autoplay (at least on mobile), is that the video continues from where it was when you click it. But the autoplay had no sound, and I probably didn't watch it closely. So I always have to scroll back to the beginning, as I've just now been put in the middle of a sentence a bit into the video. Especially for channels which actually gets straight to the point (like Numberphile) it's annoying. Such a stupid design.
Additionally there's a bug on the Android app that it sometimes doesn't show video titles (or the worlds worst A/B test?), so scrolling through I just see talking heads (since it autoplays instead of showing the video thumb) and have to force restart it to actually understand what's going on.
I call these features "dead birds" because they remind me of gifts that an outdoor cat will leave on your doorstep. They took quite the effort to do and were made with good intention, but ultimately I don't want them.
YMMV. If I trigger autoplay, it's almost always on purpose, and I tend to read the subtitles. Jumping into the video right where I was works well for me! Losing my position would be very annoying.
Does the creator get credit for that? I've got a few friends that need a few million views and I could easily write a mouse driver to take care of that.
Mobile? There's also another sneaky piece of crap Google pulls - even if you're a Premium user and set your video preferences to high quality, they only play videos for you at 480p, even though higher resolutions up to 4k are all available.
If you manually increase the quality on that video, it will only apply for that video, and whatever videos you play next, will still be limited to 480p.
All this is just to save costs..A truly fucking shady tactic to fuck over paying users. Fuck Google for what they do and how they cheat naive users.
This is also an issue on desktop web. YT will arbitrarily change the quality/resolution but doesn’t update the selector displayed in the UI. So for every single video I have to select 4K just in case YT might be serving it at 1080p or some other resolution even though it displays “4K” on the UI element.
Also the compression algorithm is very aggressive and it works reasonably well for general content but for edge cases (like starcraft streams), the 1080p loses enough details to make it hard to see important things like observers and outlines of individual units in crowded clusters. The compression algorithm just isn’t trained/tuned for these types of content, so even on a 1080p screen I need to stream at 4K just to see the details properly.
Actually, when I uploaded stuff on YouTube I’d notice sometimes that it was best to, even if the source footage was 1080p, upscale / upload it at 4k or 8k resolution so that people with sufficiently good internet could view it without as much compression. (In fact, when the original video uploaded is upscaled to 4k, even the 1080p version of the final video looks closer to the source footage)
These were unlisted videos, so I’m not a YouTuber or anything, but I’m pretty sure this is one thing some people do to make their videos appear better sometimes
This definitely works. I've uploaded 720p drone footage (which already looked pretty crappy), and youtube avc1-encodes it with low bandwidth settings. The video looks like absolute garbage. If I upscale it to 2k (it has to be above HD for this to work), youtube will vp09-encode it and use a significantly higher bitrate, and the resulting video retains most of the original detail. I consider this a requirement for all of my uploads.
The desktop issue was an intentional change that happened sometime in like 2017 or so.
The original functionality of the quality selector was to throw out whatever video had been buffered and start redownloading the video in the newly selected quality. All well and good, but that causes a spinning circle until enough of the new video arrives.
The "new" functionality is to instead keep the existing quality video in the buffer and have all the new video coming in be set to the new quality. The idea is that you would have the video playing, change the quality, and it keeps playing until a few seconds later the new buffer hits and you jump up to the new quality level. Combined with the fact that YouTube only buffers a few seconds of video (a change made a few years prior to this; back in the Flash era YouTube would just keep buffering until you had the entire video loaded, but that was seen as a waste of both YouTube's bandwidth and the user's since there was always the possibility of the user clicking off the video; the adoption of better connection speeds, more efficient video codecs, and widespread and expensive mobile data caps led to that being seen as the better behavior for most people) and for most people, changing quality is a "transparent" operation that doesn't "interrupt" the video.
In general, it's a behavior that seems to come from the fairly widespread mid-2010s UX theory that it's better to degrade service or even freeze entirely than to show a loading screen of some kind. It can also be seen in Chrome sometimes on high-latency connections: in some cases, Chrome will just stop for a few moments while performing DNS resolution or opening the initial connections rather than displaying the usual "slow light gray" loading circle used on that step, seemingly because some mechanism within Chrome has decided that the requests will probably return quickly enough for it to not be an issue. YouTube Shorts on mobile also has similar behavior on slow connections: the whole video player will just freeze entirely until it can start playing the video with no loading indicator whatsoever. Another example is Gmail's old basic HTML interface versus the modern AJAX one: an article which I remember reading, but can't find now found that for pretty much every use case the basic HTML interface was statistically faster to load, but users subjectively felt that the AJAX interface was faster, seemingly just because it didn't trigger a full page load when something was clicked on.
And, I mean, they're kind of right. It's nerds like us that get annoyed when the video quality isn't updated immediately, the average consumer would much rather have the video "instantly load" rather than a guarantee that the video feed is the quality you actually selected. It's the same kind of thought process that led to the YouTube mobile app getting an unskippable splash screen animation last year; to the average person, it feels like the app loads much faster now. It doesn't, of course, it's just firing off the home page requests in the background while the locally available animation plays, but the user sees a thing rather than a blank screen while it loads, which tricks the brain into thinking it's loading faster.
This is also why Google's Lighthouse page loading speed algorithm prioritizes "Largest Contentful Paint" (how long does it take to get the biggest element on the page rendered), "Cumulative Layout Shift" (how much do things move around on the page while loading), and "Time to Interactive" (how long until the user can start clicking buttons) rather than more accurate but "nerdy" indicators like Time to First Byte (how long until the server starts sending data) or Last Request Complete (how long until all of the HTTP requests on a page are finished; for most modern sites, this value is infinity thanks to tracking scripts).
People simply prefer for things to feel faster, rather than for things to actually be faster. And, luckily for Internet companies, the former is usually much easier to achieve than the latter.
This shit was one of the reasons I stopped paying for YouTube premium and went back to aggressively blocking all ads. You try to give them money and they spit in your face regardless.
This has been one of the most frustrating things I run into with Youtube scrolling the page. Can’t leave your cursor on the page while scrolling without managing to have the spacing shift the thumbnails just so slightly so that your cursor lands back into a thumbnail for an autoplay to start and add to the metrics.
I can’t think of other examples, but this exact problem is a constant frustration for me on multiple sites. I can’t scroll with my cursor on the page without crap happening that I don’t want to happen.
As to the reason, at least with Youtube and Facebook, the answer is obvious: they want to increase their ad revenue by claiming additional “plays” or “interactions” or whatever they want to call it today. I remember realizing several times over the years that I had been conned when I paid for ads. The top-level numbers looked good, but when I dug in, I realized they were all faked.
> I can’t scroll with my cursor on the page without crap happening that I don’t want to happen.
Same stuff with the mobile youtube app. If you so much as graze the screen anywhere while watching a video the replay speed doubles. This is so sensitive that even a tiny unintentional finger touch, or a water droplet landing on the screen triggers it. Whoever thought that is a good idea as a feature, i can’t comprehend.
Plus they have no data to see how badly their feature annoys me. From a metrics perspective “the user wanted to fast forward for 5s” looks the same as “a careless finger cradling the phone triggered the fast forward and it took the user 5s to realise what is going on and adjust their hold, now they are annoyed at how fragile this app is”. Someone might have even used the statistics of all the inadvertent activations in their promo package to show what a popular feature they made!
Couple this with the no-bezel iPhones, and there is no way to hold your phone without touching the screen and accelerating the video (or clicking on ads).
This may be a dumb question, but when you have video doing autoplay (as in the video starts playing while you're scrolling looking at multiple videos - you haven't clicked on one), does it show up in your watch history?
> This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over
You can disable autoplay at https://www.youtube.com/account_playback, then uncheck "Video previews". It resets itself every 15 days or so, but at least one can have some peace in the meantime.
This is unacceptable to me. I've turned this setting off more times than I care to count. I've submitted feedback a couple times as well. I don't remember doing it lately, which is good. But I should have only ever had to do it once. I have a Google account, there is no reason this setting shouldn't be saved with my accounts, synced to all my devices, and only set once. I pay for YouTube Premium; I shouldn't be subjected to all these tactics which I assume are there to increase engagement and watch time. The price I pay is fixed and they don't earn ad revenue off me... why the games?
That setting can be fairly sticky. Mine has stayed off since I initially disabled it, shortly after they added the "feature". I have no idea why it's not sticky for you. Maybe they fuck with me less because I have premium?
I don't have premium and it's sticky for me but only on a single computer, I have to reset it if I switch computers or browsers. Same with dark mode. So maybe it's stored as a cookie and they wipe their cookies?
Surely you don't expect YouTube, a company that doesn't store any data at all actually, to be able to store a single boolean value somewhere in your account, do you? This would be impossible for a company as broke and small as YouTube.
Constantly. They also keep resetting the settings to not show shorts or video games in the feed.
I suspect that the managers in charge of some of these features are lobbying for it as a way to artificially increase the engagement stats for their features, but spinning it as actually being good UX instead of a user-hostile move because it's important for "discoverability" or something like that.
If you turn off watch history it completely disables shorts as a whole (with no recommendations on the homepage as a side effect, but one I'm willing to live with). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795204
I love how passive aggressive the home page becomes: it momentarily displays a grid of thumbnails, then erases them and says, "Your watch history is off. You can change your setting at any time to get the latest videos tailored to you" with a button to do that.
The no recommendations at all sure feels like malicious compliance with California privacy law.
Even while pretending they've not recorded your viewing history they could still make recommendations from your subscriptions or give you the same glurg that they give viewers they know nothing about... but instead they break the site.
It's still better than having shorts on the screen.
The word "want" is the key there -- they have zero interest in what you 'want' to watch, they have every interest in what will compel you to watch for the longest time! Maybe a certain person wants to watch a few 2-minute cute cat videos, and subscribe to those exclusively. But research showed Google that those people's watch minutes per day can be tripled if you fill their homepage with "Trump did WHAT?" videos (or whatever effectively baits their rage, makes them more afraid, or stokes some addiction or anxiety).
Short term yes, but long term it turns people away from YouTube.
A year ago, I had a serious YouTube habit, once I replaced my trash Jellyfin server with a Plex server I can listen to my music collection on my phone anywhere… so no more music from YouTube. I got tired of asmongold and all his imitator gaming YouTubers, fell out of the habit of watching Ukraine warbloggers, etc. I saw other people who got into toxic rabbit holes in YouTube so bad that they decided to physically destroy their computers…
I used to have a cronjob to change them to what I want daily. Only worked for sites with an API, but was better than the user hostile "we know your preferences better than you" garbage.
> I'm fearing the day they'll just remove that toggle for good.
Don't. Nowadays we can just re-introduce it, at least all who read this. iOS, macOS, Windows, Android... All have browser extensions, all can be modified.
> You can also set this in your browser with the _reduce motion_ parameter.
Unfortunately there's no way to set this per-site, at least in Chrome. Similarly, if you disable animations in Windows, you also disable all animations and transitions in websites that support prefers-reduced-motion, causing some sites to feel janky as a result.
They really need to add a per-site toggle for that, and a browser-level option to ignore the OS' setting. Turning off animations in Word shouldn't turn them off in Google Calendar.
This bugged me so much and yet I ended up noticing a simple workaround: keep the mouse in the top bar where the search box is.
By all UI logic this should not scroll as this element is not scrollable (it's the top bar above the scrollable content), but YouTube and Google in their infinite UX wisdom kept the scroll mouse events go behind the hovered element. I won't complain about this one too.
I know this is just a weird workaround, but you can put your mouse cursor on top of the scroll bar. The scroll wheel still works like normal there (at least in my tests on Linux / Firefox).
Which ones are misaligned? At least the ones shown to me are perfectly aligned on my computer (both Safari and Chrome on a Mac).
Is it maybe caused by an adblocker? (I have YouTube premium, so no ads.)
Edit: Actually, the picture in the article shows a misalignment in the "Breaking News" section. It's odd, because the sections align perfectly for me on various screen sizes
It's probably an adblocker, I explained why they get misaligned ([is-in-first-column] attribute adding extra margin) if a video gets hidden and the rest flow to fill in its place here:
This bit of information makes the entire thread hilarious to read.
Bunch of hackers using adblockers that modify the client-side UI to cheat Google out of money and then complaining loudly about a minor UI convenience. How dare Google not optimize for them!
I say this as someone who uses an adblocker myself. But come on.
Hmm, on one hand I agree that autoplaying videos should be illegal but on the other hand the clickbaitiness of YouTube thumbnails has reached a point where it's almost better.
(cue deArrow comment)
Why I do agree, the autoplay is a distraction preventing me from reading the video title and which channel posted it. Also, the clickbaitiness ends up being a feature for me: they have a specific "style" that's recognizable almost immediatly. A bit like AI-generated images, that have some eerie feeling to them. This way, I know I don't want to watch them.
The video grid is mind boggling now, they keep making the thumbnails bigger, and now they don't even show two rows of 3, it's a row of 3 then a row of 3 but with only 2 links! There's a giant blank box for no reason!
They added fuchsia to the timeline bar so that it now clashes in an ugly way with everything else on the page.
> I find the autoplay so annoying because it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage.
If anything, I feel like that this is by design to hyperstimulate their core audience seeking instant gratification.
I never noticed that weird space between videos not stopping autoplay--I always just kept moving my mouse around until it stopped. You can start by entering the thumbnail space, but to stop it you have to enter another thumbnail space or get very close to it--the main spacing between won't stop autoplay. There's hysteresis between the start/stop edges.
Why do you even need _different teams_ for the homepage ?
The home page is made up of: a search bar with some extra buttons that link to different pages, a sidebar with some more buttons and a list of videos. What are the multiple teams for ? And even assuming it is necessary, there is really no single person responsible for the page so that issues like this can be seen and fixed ?
And since we are talking about pet peeves, on my laptop when you open the homepage you get a placeholder with 4 videos per row, and then you get 3 videos per row (or 5 shorts per row)
Conway's law is expressed as "communication structure -> program structure" but it's actually even stronger than that; the arrow is bidirectional. If either the organization wants to break up the homepage into different teams, or if the organization has to have multiple teams work on their homepage for whatever reason, the homepage will reflect the organizational structure. YouTube falls into the second branch, which is that their home page is so complicated it has to be broken up between teams due to sheer organizational size. At YouTube's size you'll even have organizational distinctions you can't even see on the homepage like dedicated reliability engineering teams. At their scale I see at least six teams most likely, the "normal" video team, the shorts team, the sidebar menu, the hamburger menu, the search team, and the team responsible for the top-level all-Google interaction, plus multiple invisible ones like recommendation algorithm, reliability, possibly a dedicated performance team, etc.
You can, organizationally, try to put these all under one manager, but even when you do that it is a surprisingly uphill battle to maintain coherence, even when it is a goal, which it often isn't particularly. There's a lot of reasons few companies have the visual and design coherence of a ~2010 Apple, including arguably even 2025 Apple.
> it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage.
Wait what? Thumbnails are useless. DeArrow has been god sent.
> This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over.
Nobody cares about coherent UI/UX anymore. They certainly don‘t care about your fringe usages. Do new stuff. Do good enough. Expensive designers with a clear vision and attention to detail? Sounds slow. And expensive.
The move towards forced autoplay and infinite scroll will continue in any media app. AB tests show it is what humans crave.
I tend to select some text in long textblocks to keep a point of reference while reading. Medium and other new generation slop loves to open an obtrusive menu above my selection.
I find the autoplay so annoying because it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage. Often the video gets inexplicably added to my watch history, and if I do choose to click on it I have to go back to the beginning because I missed the start of the audio