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Tell HN: YouTube's web UI just got even worse
343 points by Pooge on Oct 28, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 325 comments
The only two possible filters on the list of videos of a channel now are most recent and most popular.

I know it's a small thing but somehow this hits me really hard.

Also, there's less videos on a single row now. Because we can't read more than that without our attention span going poof.




On youtube's desktop site, I've also noticed that sometime within the last couple months the home page no longer shows the duration of videos when the page loads. After 3-6 seconds, the timestamps pop in. I don't know if this is intentionally or a result of lazy-loading - but seeing that the video thumb, title, author, view count, and age all load instantly with the page, I struggle to come up with a reason it could be unintentional.

This bothers me because I like to know how long a video is before I commit the time to sitting down and watching it. This feels like an attempt at a dark pattern with the intent to improve metrics - surely watch time is a metric youtube cares about.


Another thing I've noticed in Youtube on the smart™ TV, is that the app does not adapt the suggestions based on previous searches anymore. Now it's almost entirely generic crap all the time (Seriously, I am so sick of those thumbnails with the surprise face. I hate them!)

Between the ads and the poor content, I feel like Youtube is pushing hard to become the new public TV.


It's not just you. Mozilla ran a study recently and found user content controls on YouTube such as the 'Like' and 'Dislike' buttons are largely useless and have no effect on what we're recommended.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/research/library/user-cont...


The algorithm might not take it into account but it's useful for viewers to see how downvoted a video is. If I see that it's 50% downvoted then I know the contents to be controversial.


Downvotes haven't been public on YouTube for a few months (Google justified this saying dislikes were "harassment", whatever that means)


(likes / views) is still interesting, but you need to grade on a curve


Same with the 3 dots that show extra options like saving to playlist. They pop in after the rest of the site has loaded.


They also have a tiny hotbox which encourages misclicks (trying to click "Not Interested" but whoopsie, another view on that video!). Dark patterns galore.

Edit: looks like the dots are 40x40px on desktop


And then they torture and ban sites who use the same dark patterns with Adsense. It's as hypocritical as it gets.


And sometimes the save to playlist is a separate button while at other times it's hidden behind the dots. I've had to cancel countless clips from misclicking. (Multiple times in a row even)


My timestamps don't pop in, they're either there immediately or never show up. It's very frustrating, since I also decide what to watch based on them.


Could be your adblocker sometimes blocking them, other times not?

Though it probably is some bug or... rapid A/B testing thing Google has going on.


I'm pretty sure it's just a bug, I don't think adblock caused it for me. Wouldn't put it past them to intentionally break things for adblock users though.


yeah, I've noticed that timestamp thing as well. Super annoying.


Has anyone experienced a bug with navigating back from a video? It's been happening for months now but it's on and off.

When you're watching a video and you go back, the url updates but the page doesn't refresh/redirect, the video just ends up restarting. Very annoying.


Yep, it's completely jacked. Very annoying. Of course, back in Twitter also randomly loses your place, too. I guess it's one of those "we're a big deal site now" checklist items: Fuck up the back button.


In regards to what you’ve mentioned about hitting back on Twitter and losing your scroll position - I think this is a difficult technical problem so solve in an elegant and reproducible way. We’ve attempted to address this back location issue at my work for an “infinite scroll” feature and can only get it right about half the time and believe that’s handled mostly by the browser. We’ve specifically looked at how YouTube handles this - and it’s about the same success rate for them.

Oh well even HN will always mess up your scroll position when hitting back so it goes


As a non-web dev, it is mystifying to me that this is hard.

But, taking it as true (for some arcane reason), then perhaps they should change the design of their site so that popping away from the timeline isn't a part of the normal usage flow!

Specifically, if you want to expand the conversation under a tweet, you tap it, which takes you to a new page; when you're done, you want to continue reading your timeline. If making the back button can't be made reliable, then it seems a design that simply expands the thread off to the right or inline below or in a popup, without leaving the timeline page, would work much better.


> for an “infinite scroll” feature

I think I found the problem.


Haha yeah not my design and personal choice. But it’s really supposed to be “infinite scroll for the first 3 pages of results than see more button”. I understand the business decisions into implementing “infinite” scroll, though, and at the very least it’s an interesting problem to take on. Compared to “make this button bigger”


Yes, that is very annoying. In general YouTubes UX is getting worse constantly. They moved the read more button for video descriptions up and to the right directly behind the end of the description text, which makes it almost completely invisible. Even now that i know where to look, it is still very hard to find. The like button is now only an outline, which is filled when active. I find this confusing, which lead to me unliking and reliking a video because i could not determine the state of the button visually. Was never a problem, back when the thimb turned blue. The site is quite sluggish in general, at least for me.

Overall YouTube makes for a nice example of how modern design often makes the experience worse


I've seen the new "read more" button sometimes actually completely be invisible... it'll come back if I force a re-layout (i.e. resizing the browser).

But yeah the new design is pretty awful. No idea what they were thinking.


We need 'hug a web dev day' a thing. People are so harsh over a button or a color these days.


To be fair everything being complained about in this thread is pretty clearly broken stuff.

And for design, I'm actually harsh over stuff like the new "top comment" box that, when clicked on, /completely removes the normal comment interface/, shrinks the video, and moves the comments to a new and otherwise-completely-unseen comment interface to the right side of the video. Which is bizarre, inexplicable user experience and a fair amount worse than simply being a weird color.


This happens to me. I never realized that anything happened and that the URL changed, which means I would naturally click the back button again, and it takes me to the previous-previous page (which is usually a new tab for me). It's very frustrating.

Edit: this happens on Firefox on Windows. I haven't tried Chrome.


Yes. There's all sorts of bugs. The buggiest thing is the queue. Each time they fix a bug it seems other weirdness pops up. Having built a similar queue for the web UI of a music streaming app, I know it can be complicated, but surely it can't be this complicated. For a while it was unusable for me because I like building a queue and reordering the items, and sorting didn't work at all. The queue should be one of the primary things that automated tests and QA should be able to track pretty easily and be treated as first class.


I've harbored a thought which, incidentally, might also be more reliably testable for QA. Rather than rely upon drag-and-drop for reordering queue entries, provide explicit move-up and move-down performing small buttons, one pair per visible queue entry. Of course, drag-and-drop might be considered visually cleaner (no visual affordances) and allow for move-by-several-slots larger motions. Would that the current YT UI actually allow drag-and-drop-between to work as expected.


Yes happens consistently with Safari. I guess YouTube engineers only test on Chrome ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


‘member when YouTube intentionally put a bug in their site to mess with MS?


Wait, what?


I wouldn't say it's a literal bug but maybe they were talking about this:

https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6


This is incredible! I didn’t know the story! Thank you so much for finding the link, it’s a great piece of history!

Just a reminder, at that time you couldn’t do console.log(), because it worked with the devtools open, but “console” would be null with the devtools closed, which is treacherous because it only bugged for non-dev users. As a bonus, IE would ask the user whether they wanted to debug.


Yep. Firefox (seems to be a pattern in the replies). Back-back-forward every time on YouTube now. It's terrible.


or back -> ctrl+L -> return


This has been driving me mad.. I'm pretty sure I only started seeing this problem maybe a month ago? It's the cardinal sin. Don't break the back button!


Yeah, same problem on Firefox, I've thought that this may be because of one of the extensions I use, but after disabling everything it was still happening...


Yes, also there's been a bug in comment textfields for at least 3 years: press enter twice in a row and the cursor won't move to the next line.


Same problems in Jira: Start typing a comment, and it watches the issue or change issue, because keyboard navigation isn’t disabled while in a field.

But press Cmd+K to reach the address bar, or Cmd+W to close the tab: Nothing happens because Jira hijacks the keyboard.

It’s the big site challenge: Wreck the user experience and watch people who keep using it because they have to.


On a different note I have encountered a bug where I reach a page with a video title and description but the video being played does not match and is instead from another one. I think it has happened especially after going to a full page video from the homepage when there is a video in the mini-view being played and about to switch.


A few years ago a friend and I were debugging a website he'd built that scraped data from Youtube, reorganized it, and built a web page that automatically categorized and assigned metadata to it. It was quite effective, and got more traffic than he expected, but it's value came in how it shed light on all sorts of bugs Youtube has.

One of the things we discovered is that Youtube actually runs from three content delivery networks who all have to agree on what data is to be displayed. The user data, such as your profile, watch history, and subscriptions, are in the first CDN. The video description, title, and comments attached to the video are in the second. The video itself and related data such as ad placement, categorization, and closed captions, are on a third CDN.

If the CDNs don't agree or one doesn't get updated in time before the page draws itself, you get mismatched descriptions/titles, mismatched comments, or some of the strangeness people have noticed where the timeline "watched" preview in the thumbnail is wrong by showing the user stopped watching earlier in the video than they actually did.


Sounds very interesting! (The website, and well also the bugs). Is the site still operational?


As far as I know, not any longer. At least publicly facing. The changes to Youtube in 2021 broke some of the functions, and he decided not to keep maintaining it and instead to move on to another project. The website was called EDM Engine, and was designed as a music marketing system that followed many of the design principles of the Vidya Internet Playlist created by the Aersia community. There is still a Facebook page that's up that might have screenshots of what it looked like, but I know people's aversion to going on that site.


Happened to me as well, now I click the search button to go back.


Yep. On Firefox, haven't tried on other browsers. At this point I just hit "back, back, forward" without thinking about it when I see it happen.


Yes, I run into this all the time in Firefox


I don't know how it relates, but that bug seems resolved on wayland.


> The only two possible filters on the list of videos of a channel now are most recent and most popular.

Isn't that all there's ever been? Just chronological and popularity? This post isn't very helpful unless you say what you think has been removed. (I, for one, have always wished for most popular over the last 30 days, but oh well.)

> Also, there's less videos on a single row now.

You're going to have to tell us how many there were before and how many there are now. I'm not seeing any difference. It also depends -- are you talking about the home page? Channel home page? Channel videos tab? Because they all act differently.

Are you sure you just haven't changed your zoom settings or something? Or your window width?


>Isn't that all there's ever been? Just chronological and popularity?

Youtube old UI "SORT BY" option had "Date added (oldest)" : https://imgur.com/a/9czAAiv

Youtube new UI removed "oldest" option and only has "Recently uploaded" : https://imgur.com/a/aSAhxLC

(Apparently, the new javascript for Youtube hasn't propagated to all worldwide servers yet which is why I was able to get screenshots of both the old & new UI by using different computers.)


Google does a lot of A/B testing, called Experiments. YouTube has some cool tools for QA testing those experiments...

This redesign is being A/B tested (with high percentages of users it's rolled out to). It comes in different parts, so if you clear your cookies and reload you can be reassigned a bucket and therefore see slightly different interfaces.

Bonus: I think the redesign is called called Amsterdam, don't quote me on that though...


There was an "oldest" filter too. Especially necessary for today's YouTube for us to revisit channels that once used to be good but then gradually fell into dark patterns like everyone else in the industry.


you can add it back in since it just takes a url param. (until they break this too of course)

https://github.com/sw-yx/youtube-browser-extension


Fyi... the url params in that source code[1] no longer work:

  const urls = {
    popular: `?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid`,
    oldest: `?view=0&sort=da&flow=grid`,
    newest: `?view=0&sort=dd&flow=grid`,
  }
Which means the following url modification with "&sort=da" will not work in an attempt to list the oldest videos first: https://www.youtube.com/c/veritasium/videos?view=0&sort=da&f...

[1] from https://github.com/sw-yx/youtube-browser-extension/blob/e76f...


I slapped together a really quick script to get oldest videos via Youtube API. It goes through all the videos from a playlist ID and then writes them to a html file with oldest first. Looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/ZxCgnBY.png Not perfect but works ok

https://github.com/n0x5/scripts/blob/master/youtube_api_uplo...

Need an API key and also the Uploads playlist ID from the channel which can use this script to get: https://github.com/n0x5/scripts/blob/master/youtube_get_uplo...

It's a little convoluted I might implement get uploads id right into the script but the issue is it doesn't always return the correct channel when searching by name, in which case one has to manually go through the results and find the right channel id which would take longer to code to actually work all the time.


suggest sticking that into a replit so that people can easily run/fork on the web :)


just fyi i got very upset and retried again and... it works on https://www.youtube.com/c/JessicaSanchezOfficial/videos. they made youtube slower to load (which broke my extension.. i fixed it) but those queryparams still work.

the thing on the veritasium looks to be a new layout. trying to see if i can modify for it.

update: looks like a very opaque api request so i cant figure it out in the time i have for this. extremely sad.


Good product design is not based on personal preferences, it's data/usage-driven. Having an unused feature is bloat that takes away important dev/QA resources.


Depends what you mean by "the product". If the product is a content platform where the main purpose is serving ads, then I agree. If you're trying to build a "bicycle for the mind" that actually empowers the user then removing seldom used, but useful features will kill the thing. I can imagine what A/B tested Vim would look like.


>I can imagine what A/B tested Vim would look like.

Much more intuitive to learn?


A vim A/B test blindly adhered to would make it so any key pressed quit vim.


I want Clippy for Emacs. "It looks like you are trying do define a new mode. May I help with that?"


And then all it knows how to do is help you install Gentoo

in 3 commands


I disagree. Good product design is faithful and doesn't change every time someone does an A/B test


You used to be able to filter by oldest to newest which doesn't look possible anymore


Err, that’s sorting - not filtering. And I’m staring at a YouTube channel right now and the sort options are:

Most Popular Date added (oldest) Date added (newest)


>Most Popular Date added (oldest) Date added (newest)

That's what I see too, but worth remembering that other people might see totally different UI options, given the number of A/B tests that Google run


Was it there recently for you? I hadn't seen that option on a channel's list of videos for what must be years now.


I appreciated this comment, especially since this article is currently near to the top of HN at the same time: https://www.karlsutt.com/articles/communicating-effectively-...


Am I the only one who uses YouTube like this:

* Only go on the Subscriptions page; I've never once visited the "Home" page

* Blocked the Recommended Videos sidebar using uBlock

* Use SponsorBlock

* Use uBO filters to remove Shorts from Subscriptions page

I come to watch what I want, not get all the clickbait on the side.


Personally, the majority of my Home page are videos from my subscribed channels. I get the occasional suggestions for related content from other channels, but I'd say 8/10 times the suggestions are good ones for me.

My typical usage is:

* Go to Home page * Add highly relevant videos to my Watch Later playlist * View the videos from Watch Later, like/dislike as appropriate * Rinse and repeat

I'm trying to give Shorts a shot. I particularly like them for viewing podcast shorts, but I've noticed the suggestions are taking a longer time to give me 'relevant' videos. Some of the Shorts are totally random, while others are from my Subscribed channels. I make sure to like/dislike as appropriate, and I've noticed a slight improvement in a week's time.


There is one primary reason why I don’t watch shorts, you cannot adjust speed of them (I watch most YT at 2.5x speed).


On desktop you can use a script that redirects you to normal video UI instead of the shorts one and you can change the speed there: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/439993-youtube-shorts-redi...


Thanks, I knew there had to be a solution, once short content opened in normal player for me, I just didn't find it worth to look for it.


Yes, you probably are one of a tiny group.

Youtube power is in its recommendation engine. I discovered amazing content through this engine. You say you come to watch what you want, but how do you initially fill the "subscription" page without exploring first?

There can be various levels of exploring. Maybe visiting the home page only once a month. But the distribution capabilities are what makes Youtube what it is.


I use Youtube as more of a delivery channel than a platform, kind of like podcasts. I listen to a fair number of podcasts and to be honest I have no idea where I found most of them, I guess word of mouth? Or maybe linked from some article I read a long time ago? It definitely wasn't from any recommendations engine, although my podcast app does have a "Browse" section that I've never used.

I don't think it's necessarily bad to use the automated recommendations but there are certainly other ways to discover new content.


The recommendations for me are trash. They are 50% videos that I have watched and 40% videos that I have had recommended and scrolled past before. Most of the 10% of new stuff is just clickbait trash.

Every once in a while after scrolling for a while it gives me a "Want something new?" link and then the recommendations are fanatic but that feed has no bookmarkable URL or reliable way to get to it.


> I discovered amazing content through this engine

Did you actually discover it through youtube's algorithms and discovery engine or was it linked to you by friends and you simply watched it on Youtube?

These are completely different things in this context.

> But the distribution capabilities are what makes Youtube what it is.

Hold on, I thought it was the recommendation engine? Which is it? Distribution is about economies of scale and good engineering, recommendation is about putting the user first, rather than monetization.


agree. a lot of people I've known who say "there is nothing good on YouTube" either ignore or outright block recommended videos from showing up. there are centuries of videos worth watching on YouTube, and the more you tell YouTube what you like (by watching) the better it gets at recommending things you like.


I deleted my youtube account last month and started new one because it stuck in a loop of feeding me bs I don’t like. I don’t know where do you find good recommendations there, for me it’s still the same bs. Maybe I am too picky, maybe you just like what it recommends, but I don’t. I guess if an engine makes enough users happy, it may be called good, but not for the other 5%.

For example I watched and subscribed to PBS ST to kick start. It instantly flooded my feed with low-quality sci-pop with “pro voice actors” voices and stupid sensational topics like “shocking alien planet” or “will our sun explode tomorrow? Emoji emoji emoji”. No astrophysics was recommended yet. Yesterday I searched for and binge-watched about hyena clan relationships, today it recommended me two quran surahs for good sleep, few colorful open-mouth-sensation morons (not sure which topic they were trying to “wow”) and a very badly compiled drama about different snow leopards chasing goats. And that’s while I’m holding my finger on “not interested” trigger for weeks.

What am I doing wrong?


I don't think you are doing anything wrong, YouTube is showing you videos that others who have watched what you've watched also watched.

if there is anything you started to watch, but didn't like, clean that stuff from your watch history.

click the "Like" button on any videos you like a lot, and favorite the very best.

sometimes YouTube's skull is very thick, but it will get a bead on you fairly soon if you do what you can to tell it what you like and don't like. that's been my experience, anyway.


Does it really use watch history? I mean when it’s off, it still collects it, just doesn’t show it to me/publicly. I know that because sometimes people watched videos at my work pc and after that I had to clean up this mess.

I tried to turn it on for a while and it didn’t make any difference. Same for likes/dislikes. The only effective methods are channel-wise, i.e. “subscribe” and “don’t recommend channel”, but then the feed becomes 90% of videos I have watched or new videos (from these channels) in which I mostly have no interest in. Other 10% are irrelevant to me.

Anyway, I’ll try to follow your advice (thanks!) with more active liking etc for a while, but my hopes are weak atm.


When I check my recommended feed it's all stuff very closely related stuff to my subscriptions and recent views, and some useless shorts. It's just an echo chamber at this point.

If I'm looking for potentially interesting content outside my core subscription views, I'm better served by turning on FM radio.


I actually want it to stop “recommending” and be a year 200x youtube when you could randomly stumble upon something interesting and follow it. Today’s youtube really feels like a chamber, a very secure one.


it's not an echo chamber unless you tell it to be.

all those videos in your watch history? others have watched those videos, too. youtube will recommend videos that those others have watched and that you have not.

the narrower the focus of your viewed videos, the narrower the focus of the recommendations will be.


My recommendations have become such an echo chamber that it actively pushes me away from using YT. It's frustrating scrolling through rows and rows of the same rehashed content from mostly the same network of creators. I wish I could turn the dial down on similar content and ratchet up interesting but unrelated content.


Is the recommendation engine more than just "Currently watching X - people who watch X usually watch Y next"?

I say that because, as someone who does not sign into YouTube, I have no idea if it gets more complex.


There's a tag system and data metrics matching system. Based on your comments, watch history, audience crossover between channels, watch time, and subscriptions, and data collected from your Google account (searches, apps opened in Android, etc.) it will generate a list of tags that are visible at the top of the home page. For example, some of my current ones are Electrical Engineering, History, Film Criticisms, and Scientific Explanations. The tags are constantly changing based on the factors mentioned above.


I use it like this:

* Never go to https://youtube.com to find anything. Only go to YouTube when it's a known link you found on another site. I don't need recommendations or ads

* Copy the URL, paste it into yt-dlp

* Wait a few seconds for the video to download and watch it in my viewer of choice with no crap attached.


To add to this, you can directly play stuff in mpv if yt-dlp is installed and in your PATH.

Combine this with a window manager shortcut to open the clipboard contents in mpv and the experience is pretty slick.

You can also dump the URLs in a .m3u file and watch a bunch in a row with mpv that way.


I use SponsorBlock and uBlock quite heavily but you're missing out on Home. The recommendations are surprisingly good.

For me, it basically takes a guess what topics and themes I find interesting and pulls content around them. Automatic notifications are also pretty good.

YouTube figured out that I like interviews on a certain channel and nothing else, or Ukraine war updates from another channel but not their regular content. Probably through simple similar audience trick but solid selection nevertheless.

For whatever reason, it cannot apply this knowledge to shorts which are dreadfully bad.


I find the recommendations genuinely horrible. I only get channels like real life lore, Adam Something etc, with sometimes very shallow takes at politics. And after marking those channels with "I don't want to see this", I get their hundreds of copycats.

I mostly watch channels like Aswath Damodaran, mCoding, etc., which are not related to the contents of the mentioned channels at all, yet their recommendation engine still shows me all this stuff.


Talking with friends: some report most recommendations align with their interests, even those that are surprising because they haven't expressed interest in that category (hadn't yet watched or liked a video in the theme). However like you other friends report routinely aweful recommendations across the board. My experience is in the middle somewhere.

I wish there were a way to see how it places you in various demographics, with a corresponding 'slider' to move yourself in/out of topics.


Most or my recommendation are OK, but after 10 or so, Youtube starts recommending MMA videos, football, the latest K-Pop song, "I am pregnant!" trending crap. None of it is relevant, I keep telling it I am not interested yet Youtube keeps recommending trending topics.

It just doesn't bloody care.

I added another reminder on my todo list to get rid of Premium and go rogue. My biggest issue is watching it on Android TV and the iPad, I will need a good adblocking setup, no way in hell I will watch ads.


> Ukraine war updates from another channel but not their regular content

Speaking of search and YouTube UI… are you talking about that veteran guy who occasionally does coverage on Ukraine but keeps a level head. He will often point out why it is important to think about why your enemy is doing what it is doing. And he uses some open source map to show what is going on?

…and the rest of his content seems to be reviews of military related things, or something else that has nothing to do with Ukraine?

Cause yeah I’m subscribed to that guy, I think… but I totally forget what his channel is and don’t seem to be getting any recommendations for his videos anymore.


It's a Polish travel channel "Podróże bez paszportu" which has taken up these updates after the war turned hot again so probably not the one you're thinking of.


Was it something like S2underground? I noticed he dropped off the edge of the map in the last 2 months or so, as well.


You can watch all your youtubes on vlc: just press open network stream and copy paste the link. this gives you more features through vlc than you can shake a stick at...


I'm the other way round: I _do_ use the recommendation engine, but I click "not interested" on anything that isn't a music video and make sure to only have music videos in my likes. Oh and of course adblock. Newpipe for mobile.

This works OK, although it tends to promote the same things over and over, seemingly at random.


I'm not as extreme, but >90% of my YouTube watching is via the channel RSS feeds (which I get sent to my email and filtered into "Videos" and "Videos Background" folders). Then 10% of the time if I am out of subscribed videos and want to see something new I scroll the homepage. I find that I rarely appreciate the recommendations below the videos but sometimes the homepage is ok.


Set aside the custom uBO filters and add "Remove Youtube Suggestions" to your arsenal. You can block a huge array of UI elements.

I too only do subscriptions, watch everything my subscribed channels put out by placing them in my playlists (custom watch later lists for attention spans/activies), and only find other channels through my current channels. If you don't watch everything from specific channels (some big ones really pump them out), I recommend PocketTube's Subscription manger (and playlist manager).

Youtube hates us. It takes away tools for us to watch how you and I want, and refuses to add basic tools to playlists like "removed all watched" and "sort by length". I'm subscribed "watch later" still exists. They want you to just watch "recommended" videos one after the other like tik-tok-television.


My only interaction with youtube is clicking on a link from another site, or searching for something on google and clicking on the link from their. I never navigate within youtube, nor click on any other videos.


Don't forget dismissing the ads, and then the login nag, and then ad to subscribe, so the video is actually visible.

...all of which serve to remind me what a pit of suck the service is, and ensure I never subscribe.

And the cycle of life is complete.


It might be because I've got a large and diverse enough set of channel subscriptions, but the Home page is surprisingly good at recommending good quality new channels and videos.

I don't think I could use YT without SponsorBlock and uBO. The SponsorBlock outage of the last few days really made me aware how much time is wasted on those sponsored segments, intro reels, and interaction reminders.

I love it when videos have a SB "skip to highlight" timestamp -that 10 minute video of the creator rambling on and on is now a 10 second video of the slow-motion moneyshot.


Nope! I did almost exactly what you described before ejecting altogether and consuming my subscriptions via RSS + a static site I generate hourly (linked in a top-level comment).

I recognize that people value YouTube for it's recommendation engine. That was never the draw for me; I just want a place to watch videos from creators I like. Overall, I found the recommendations to not work for me; they were overall noisy and distracting. Someone asked me once "well how do you find new content?", which I found hilarious.


How can you block Shorts using uBO? Tried a few methods but none of them worked!


Try this:

https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts


YouTube is also unbearable without Clickbait Remover For Youtube. It changes the thumbnails to a frame from the video.

Linus' channel is particularly horrible without this.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...


Ah! This is very useful. I hate those over-the-top expressions in the thumbnails.


You go to the subscriptions page? I've been subscribed to channel RSS feeds for a year or so now, never even go to YouTube to "browse" because the interface is so awful.

I'd like to figure out how to filter Shorts from my RSS feeds, but my preferred channels almost never use them so it hasn't been a big deal. The only other annoyance is live streams, which seem to debut on my RSS feed several hours before they're actually live (with no clear information about the "live-iness" of the video).


"Try YouTube TV. "

This popup always shows up in my account no matter how many times I dismiss it. Very annoying.

Any way to remove this with uBO? I tried a few ways but it ended up not working well


Related: what I've been doing with the incessant "we need your consent" popups on incognito tabs is to write a tampermonkey script that on page load searches and auto-clicks the refuse / dismiss button, the same approach might work for your issue? Crazy this is the sort of nonsense we have to resort to in order to make Google products usable...


Did they ever fix the problem that prevented having both a YouTube Premium and YouTube TV subscription on the same account?


An extra shoutout to "DF Tube (Distraction Free)" extensions[0] which have some of those UI zappers pre-programmed.

I use YouTube like this! Definitely going to implement some of your suggestions.

[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distractio...


.. and in addition, why not use yt-dlp (or similar) to watch without the zillion ads and in full control of when and what you consume?


I block out all comments. Those are likely all bots or people indistinguishable from bots, I use grease monkey and a javascript script to block it out, I also use another one to be able to increase the playback speed beyond the arbitrary 2x limit.

But getting the clean google-videos layout which was just a video player and a search bar can be done entirely with ublock :D


> I block out all comments. Those are likely all bots or people indistinguishable from bots

definitely not. there are very few bots in YouTube comments these days, though there certainly are some.

there is a LOT of brown-nosing, though.

I don't watch ultra-popular stuff, so what I see is different from what you will see, necessarily.


Depends on the video. In DiabloLOL series there will always be someone breaking down all references second by second.

In gameplay and game streaming videos you'll find useful tidbits and hints on how to play a game.

etc.


I blocked the domain which serves thumbnail images.

Pages are amazingly clean now.

When I mouseover a video with an interesting title, the preview appears.


Seems excessive IMO. Many videos have good thumbnails, better than the titles.


I don't know how to define excessive in this case, but it made the website much more tolerable for me, and I'm grateful for being able to do it.

The thumbnails are very distracting, and I found it hard to pay attention to the video playing on screen.

I don't miss the thumbnails at all, not one bit.


Interesting idea, I will try that. I have disabled almost everything I could on YT (feeds, comments, video overlays, recommendations, history), but occasionally still encounter the horrible twisted-face-pointing-finger thumbnails.


I also usually watch from subscriptions (I am subscribed to 100s of channels). But I do like the home page and recommendations for discovering new channels! In my experience it actually captures what I like to watch a lot (perhaps because I subscribe to a lot of stuff and like many videos).


This is interesting to me- I'm curious to hear how people use it. I do one of two things:

- search duckduckgo, go to the "videos" tab, then I end up on youtube if that's where the video is.

- go to youtube.com, use the search, pick the video.

- I don't ever like/subscribe/comment on anything.


I follow a link from a local page of bookmarks I curate usually into a creators videos tab using firefox in private mode. I don't log in ever. I might click on some recommended videos in the sidebar, but a handful of videos later and the recommendations have jumped the shark and it's time to open a new window. If I happen on a new creator, I add a link to their videos tab on their main page to my list of bookmarks.


I have removed all feeds from the homepage, all recommended feeds, all comments, all video overlays with uBO. History is disabled, watch later hidden. I hardly ever use search directly on YT.

The easiest way for me not to get consumed by trash is to proactively hide it. I leaned that I have low self control when it comes to data consumption, so I block everything I identify as dangerous.


for mostly the same reasons, I tend to use `yt-dlp`; I go on a quick foray to look for what I _really_ (and rationally, not dopamine-driven) want, get them all locally (wrote a script to batch them) and then I watch without any ads and far away from temptations :)


Same for me. In addition, I exclusively browse YouTube in a private window, so they will have a harder time trying to compile a profile of my interests.


do this instead:

site:youtube.com <your_searchterm>


or like so: !yt <your_searchterm> !gv <your_searchterm>


Thanks! I forget that's a thing, even though I have muscle memory to use the bang notation to search !npm


I do all of the above, except the Shorts filter because I didn't know how to do that. Would you be willing to share this?

YouTube is so much better when you remove all the little overlays and dark-patterns meant to get you to watch something else at all times.


This is exactly how I browse as well. I have uBlock hiding all links that could possibly lead me to the home page, as well the sidebar, and post video recommendations. The only content I consume is from the 'Subscriptions' page.


I do the same thing. I also have search/watch history turned off.


I don't. I'm so off the chart in personality trait openness I have to see new stuff all the time. And not just any new stuff. It's annoying.


The problem I have is that I dont have a Google account. So I basically can't even use the website except through the recommender.


> Only go on the Subscriptions page

For this I just use the web feeds. Creators are free to hop platforms and my workflow won’t need to change.


With this many extensions you could write your own frontend :)


Like NewPipe?


Enhancer for Youtube lets me setup the UI the way I like it.


People at Google don't use Google products, YouTube in particular. It is quite astonishing that so many features are nonsense or not yet implemented. Why I can't search comments in comments section of a video; if a video has 100+ or 1 000+ comments I can't easily find comments that are relevant to me. Why I can't search my playlist videos and my liked videos; I have 1 000+ liked videos and 1 000+ videos in my Watch Later playlist. Maybe I'm disorganized with Watch Later playlist but I'm also a power user which is not satisfied with only casual features. Any yea you can't sort channel videos like you use to(Newest, Oldest, Most Popular). Like you said it's now only Most recent and Most popular. And one thing that I almost forgot, in Web version of YouTube you can search channel for videos and in native mobile app you can't search channel for videos. When I say search channel for videos I mean query with keywords(there is no Search Bar within Channel page or within Videos tab).


YouTube is slowly transitioning from a UGC video marketplace into a modern version of cable tv. These technical oversights aren't bugs. They're a deliberate effort to shape user behavior and maximize advertising revenue. Old content is a liability and is slowly being deprecated from the system.


My pet theory is that they only implement features which are lightweight enough to not cause significant load on their backend and if it does then the feature dies right there, no matter how useful. Extreme cost-focused tunnel vision.


But it doesn't make sense when you know that they have billions in cash sitting in bank waiting to be spend. They have the money and the knowledge to implement whatever feature they need to. Backend load and infrastructure scale is not a problem at this point. My somewhat simple explanation is; Google wants to cater to the casual crowd so hard to the point of sacrificing user experience for advanced users or power users who use YouTube every day. They rather prefer status quo than try to bother with more advanced features. But I have to admit, they already have some pretty advanced features but they need to keep pushing.


They took away 'sort by new' for mobile users (most users), which means most users won't see (possibly valid) critical comments anymore. Remember 'YouTube comments' meme existing because the comments were just that bad.

It's a pattern of 'don't restrict, just make it less convenient to use'.


Why is there such a mania for reducing sort/finest options?

They carry such a small cognitive load and are of immense value to many, many use cases.

Who decides these things?


Because allowing users to control how they use the platform is not viable in today's world.

From an engagement standpoint, the ideal Youtube is one where you can't actually view a list of videos from a specific channel at all. Or search for videos. Or anything really that isn't just watching whatever set of videos the algorithm thinks will maximize your engagement at that time.

The web in general is moving in this direction at a fast pace and the cause for all of this is one thing: phones. That's it. There's an increasingly massive number of people that spend hours a day staring at their phones mindlessly scrolling through tiktok, twitter, etc. to waste their time away when they have nothing better to do, simply consuming whatever content is fed to them, giving absolutely no thought to what they're seeing beyond how much it entertains them in that moment. They don't want to look for specific videos, they don't want to watch a specific channel, they just want to be kept busy by an algorithm. These people are insanely easy to please and will consume for hours at a time, watching plenty of ads. The more people start behaving like this, the more money these platforms make.


> The web in general is moving in this direction at a fast pace

True, with an exception of Mastodon, PeerTube, Matrix and other distributed networks based on free software.


Sounds like you are describing the typical HN reader


I read here in HN (whatever that means to you) that Product Owners in the Youtube team have an incentive to improve certain metrics if they ever want to be promoted.

I can imagine a "Watch Later" product owner thinking that if he removes a certain control, he can game the stats and say the feature is seeing more use - securing his promotion.

We see this in public administration all the time, no reason to think private enterprise would be any different.


I wonder how do product owners get assigned to features, in this case. Is it 'musical chairs'? Or at random?


Tend to agree. Given the actor, I'd bet they want you to search multiple times instead of search once and play with filters. They want you to feel lost so you are forced to search.

Having written that, I realize my YT usage is fairly low on search and I feel myself being forced towards it more and more in recent months/years.


okay, but who owns filters and search and whatnot? nobody? oh, okay.


> why is there such a mania for reducing sort/finest options

Apple started the minimalist, option hiding, functionality axing, 1984-ish control freak movement. They even got away with selling phones without chargers, making $40 billion on lightning cables sales.

Just blame Apple.


Not everything is a conspiracy to make more money.

I don’t know a single person in my bubble who needs more lightning cables. I have a dozen unused lightning cables already laying around.

I threw away every pair of headphones that came with an iPhone I have ever bought. Most of mini/micro usb cables that come with small electronics go into trash - I do not need more cables!


>Not everything is a conspiracy to make more money.

???? That's literally exactly what the point of every business decision is.


Well, no, that's why things like government regulations exist. Some business decisions are to keep within, say, a government target for waste produced.


And government control over these matters is why lobbyists exist


There are literally people in the world that can be motivated by something other than money. Some of those people are involved in making business decisions. Imagine that!


I’ve made business decisions.

It’s not always a conspiracy to make more money.


You are right sometimes it is all out in the open


Agreed. At this point extra cables and chargers seems wasteful.

If you need one there are plenty of options, including affordable 3rd party options.


Was just thinking about how they stopped including headphones. Yeah, I already have enough chargers, headphones and whatever else…

Cynically it’s probably a way to adjust for inflation or whatever by keeping the same price but reducing the amount of stuff you get.


Agreed. I've never even owned a device that uses Lightning, and I still have a small handful of Lightning cables in various cable drawers.


>making $40 billion on lightning cables sales

Someone commented this yesterday but the calculation was crap. What source do you have?


They still come with a Lightning to USB-C cable. I plug it into my laptop when I need a quick charge and use my existing lower power Lightning charger when I don't.


I think it in large part comes down to how the performance assessment process manages PMs at an org like Google. When you're measured at work on your success in 'launching' things, and the evaluation metric comes down to your personal idea authorship and impact generated, there's a profound need to extinguish other paths. An incremental improvement is insufficient, you need to have launched / authored / designed, and provided personal outsized impact. Or as an engineer, played some leading role in making this vision reality. The organization as a whole is constantly on the hunt for these units of work, because the internal metrics encourages this. X launched and replaces Y is a good story to tell the promo committee. Iterating on someone else's design is career suicide.


What do you do if you are in such org and your idea-less manager not only steals all your ideas but also sabotages you to the point where you never get to implement anything yourself?

Are there books on how to play the game?


I dunno, I was there for 10 years and never learned to play. So I quit.

But I never had a hostile manager really. Some coworkers though. Most people were more than decent.

It's just... a hard environment to get used to if you're not inclined to think in a big-organizational way.


They probably ran an A/B test and whomever is in charge at YouTube was thrilled that the B test resulted in people clicking around more. Engagement!


To many, a simpler product is more appealing to a greater number of users. I feel like the idea of "convention over configuration" went to an unnatural extreme in the world of product design - every choice you give a user is an admission that you as the creator of the app don't know what the user wants in this particular case, and you have to let them tell you. For this reason, you may want to stick to what you know.

At the same time, there is some pipe dream that the app can just give the user a 100% ideal experience with virtually no input on the user's part. What this really means is less optionality for users who want it.

Lastly, in any company there are going to be people fighting against complexity to keep things maintainable, scalable etc. The product gets sacrificed for the organization.


Designers gonna design. Even if it's a stupid mess. I wonder why nobody from Google ever shows up when there is negative feedback.

On that hand: Google never cares about feedback, you can't submit it, if you can it gets ignored.


Not sure if you work with designers. They are not some isolated partially insane org in most tech companies. Decisions like that likely start with a PM, get reviewed, then eng reviewed, then they run an experiment and confirm a hypothesis. None of that involves going to HN to seek feedback. Should they ignore an engagement increases of 3% because someone has stern feedback? That’s just not the reality of tech.

Personally, I hardly use YouTube unless I follow a direct link. I have also disabled all feeds, comments, and suggestions using uBlock Origin.


> Should they ignore engagement increases of 3% because someone has stern feedback?

Yes. A sane person or organization must be able to make judgements that include values other than narrow metrics.

If your engagement numbers told you to jump off a bridge, would you?


User feedback is very unreliable. At a certain scale we tend to trust usage data more. (Eg why should they care more about your individual feedback than what seems like an increased user satisfaction with the platform?)

So far I have not encountered a single big tech company that is able to factor in values into decision making at this level. I don’t know whether we even have the tools for that. The incentives (promos, bonuses), company size (internal competition, changing ownership, focus on growth), being public (relentless growth), etc, etc - all of that contributes to this outcome.

Personally I prefer a more thoughtful and caring approach to introducing changes, but knowing how the industry works I don’t see a lot of space for that.


Not just HN. It's the same with Mozilla. They change stuff just because they feel like it. Then their metrics confirm that the users like it (because they have no choice, or the alternative is cumbersome). Then they pat themselves on the back.

If you expect that people are stupid you will get stupid interfaces.


Personally I don’t think they consider their users stupid. The problem is in the fact that they (teams, PMs, designers, engineers) exist. They have to do something. And these companies keep hiring more and more, staff more and more teams… So you end up with massive orgs that own relatively small surfaces. They all have perf reviews every few months, all have OKRs, all have the natural desire to make changes, build and refactor stuff.

There is just no way to endlessly improve a UI. At some point if you have 3K people work on it it will become a hot mess.


If it’s no longer an option, the platform can now control that lever with no indication of why. See how Facebook sorts the news feed for you? Oh, it doesn’t? That used to be a user option right up top.


/?sk=h_chr still works maybe


My best, charitable guess is that their goal is to make YouTube as easy to use and low-friction as possible for anyone. For all of us here, using technology is second nature, but for a lot of people, especially in 3rd world countries where I imagine YouTube is expanding, adding another button means adding a nontrivial mental overhead for those people


Usually bottom line efficiency (less surface area to maintain, fewer staff needed etc) drives action more than a long tail of user value. Don’t ask about use case value ask about business value. Don’t like it, well I agree but don’t be surprised that companies aren’t a project to deliver value to humanity.


People who's search term history looks like this:

<funny videos> <cats> <harry styles new gf> <steroid cycle> <apple or pc>


More data = bigger indexes = much much more complexity and cost involved in simple filtering.


This has been going downhill for a while. I don't know if YT engineers actually use the website. Below a certain screen width the date of the video just disappears from view. The video description becomes crammed to the side and is unreadable, with the "more" link rendering on top of the text. This seems to be (??) intentional behavior, why?

search has also become ... rather stupid? it shows a few results and then some irrelevant "recommendations"

Also would be nice if they stopped pushing shorts so hard. Why does youtube want to become tiktok, that is offensive to both users and creators, becayse YT has a distinct use case


The push for shorts is somewhat ironic, because Youtube used to have lots of short videos in the early days. But then Youtube pushed everyone to inflate their video lengths, first with a recommendation algorithm that rewarded watch time, then with monetization that rewarded videos over 10 minutes (now 8 minutes). It took TikTok's success to show Youtube that users might like shorter videos.

But I'm not sure where Youtube is actually going with this. There's now "normal Youtube", "Shorts" and "Live" coexisting on the same platform, along with Premium exclusives and Youtube Music. All of them integrated somewhat awkwardly.


Yes thanks! The date of video disappearing is so maddening. It is so blatantly, obviously bad design that is beyond me how that could ever have happened.

Also agree with the sibling comment that youtube was _full_ of fun short videos, but they are Not for some reasons counted as shorts, and now there is this situation of channels with yers-old catalogues of short videos, except the newest ones are “shorts” and the oldest ones in exactly the same style are “just videos”.

???


Invidious is an acceptable interface to YouTube.

Some things are missing, like searching and queuing videos while watching one (I guess adding this feature could be a weekend project), but there's no ads, you can listen to video without downloading the video part, it does not stop after a while, and is quite lightweight. You can subscribe to channels and there's no magic happening in the videos you actually see, nor any need for a Google account. The information density is correct. You don't wait before a skeleton while the interface loads, because it's instant. SponsorBlock works with it too.

I can recommend. It might not be very sexy, but its interface design is not driven by commercial reasons and does not follow the oversimplification trend.


I am a big user of Invidious as well. The biggest issue is the lack of subtitling, especially foreign language subtitles. Also, the lack of playlist support. Those things often force me back to YouTube when I need to view a video with english language subtitles. Is there any way to get subtitles into the Invidious interface?


Likewise, I recommend Invidious, it's clean and sane. There are a lot of things missing but that's a feature not a bug.


The biggest offender is Youtube Shorts at the top. With TikTok at least you can restrict your daily watch time and it is pure entertainment anyway - I don't have to open it when I don't want entertainment. Youtube is different because it has lots of useful stuff too and this mixture of the helpful and the addictive is pure evil. It is almost as if every food item in your life is served with a beer, a cigarette, some coke and some crack for free.

A bit OT, but I watch a lot of tutorials with many parts. Is there a good way to track which part I already watched?


I hate shorts with a passion. It's like they just decided to remove half of the features and think it is better. Like you can't cast a short to your TV via the YouTube app. You can cast other portrait videos, but if they have #shorts in the title then it gets blocked.

Luckily you can get the regular video UI if you go direct to the video link in your browser, but no casting and if you ever get to the video another way you need to edit the URL to do simple things like seek.


There is a chrome extension to block shorts fyi


Some channels have also opted to remove sorting altogether: https://www.youtube.com/user/enyatv/videos

I understand the desire to control how users are exposed to your content, but I think these options err too much on the side of removing user freedom.


Music channels are this weird, broken mess; some channels are weirdly split into two under the hood and which one you get depends on where in the UI you click ( try it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aajhC6GjK30 -- the icon and the artist name right next door under the video go to two different YouTube channels ). Playlists are sometimes replaced with Albums except it doesn't work right, and there's a bug where the infinite scroll repeats the first chunk of options forever when browsing albums. I assume the lack of sorting is just an oversight in the Music Artist template, because it's not like they tested anything else about it.


That happens a lot with music channels, which tend to aggregate videos uploaded across multiple channels but are labeled as coming from one channel. I’m not sure they opted to remove the option.


it annoyed me too so made a chrome extension to add it back: https://github.com/sw-yx/youtube-browser-extension


They should rename it to just Tube without You to better reflect the reality.


I recently wrote a browser extension for myself that allows me to filter out videos from the YouTube search results that come from Verified channels. The reason I did this is that some search terms get completely overwhelmed by mainstream media channels, and they happen to all have the Verified checkmark.

Turns out there's very little of the "you" in YouTube anymore. I remember a day when you could type in any given search term and there would be videos from everyday people arguing for one thing or another, or showing you how to do a thing without totally shilling out for dinner kits or mattresses. I was surprised to find that even the least controversial topics yield very little. When it comes to YouTube, it seems very few everyday people just vlog or express themselves anymore. Everything has to be a podcast, everything has to be sponsored, everything needs graphics and studio lighting, everything has to not piss off the wrong group, everything has to constantly retread safe topics, and so on.

What a boring place YouTube became. The only reason I still use it is because NewPipe still works and TikTok just seems like a den of mental illness.

Also, I do find my extension useful. If I'm searching for videos on a topic involving science or technology, I really don't need a bunch of mainstream popsci bullshit. Unfortunately, it only works for Firefox.


Funny because it's been a few months that the algorithm has been getting worse at giving personal suggestions. I used to have a lot of videos I enjoyed on my feed (maybe 75% of the time I didn't have to scroll to find something I'd be willing to watch) and now I often end up scrolling a lot to find a suitable suggestion. And when I watch one all I get as a suggestion is all of the things I didn't want before + another video from the same channel of the video I just watched.

I don't know if people experience the same but I feel like I'm just being fed whatever is trending now instead of things I actually want to watch.


My suggestions have become increasingly stale. Before it felt like they were trying to work in related videos but now it is just the same 30-50 videos on the home page for the last 3 weeks.


> getting worse at giving personal suggestions

I agree; which is astonishing, given how bad it was before. I wish there were some way I could actually tell it what I'm interested in watching; but no, I have to let it infer my preferences using it's "algorithms".

Even searching fails, even if I type in the full name of the documentary I want to watch. You really have to bend over backwards to make a literal search for the title of a show give you a completely different show, with a completely different title.


I've been hearing this criticism of "the suggestions are getting worse recently" for so long that, if it was actually true, YouTube would be only suggesting videos you actively hate by now.

My suggestions are still totally fine, as they have always been.


MoreAdsMoneyTube


GooTube


I gave up on the YouTube UI a while ago and now rely on a script that runs every hour to generate an HTML page of my subscriptions (via RSS feeds): https://kevinfiol.com/youtube/


This is actually fantastic. I think we need alternatives like this for every other "algorithmic feed" website.

Twitter has become unusable and toxic for me in recent years. It seems like most of the tweets are recommendations - those liked by my follows or their friends. It's maddening to not have control. It seems like no matter how much I try I can't help but see vitriolic politics tweets, million-like jokes, etc.


That is seriously useful on so many levels - thank you for sharing!


Are you open to sharing the code you use to generate this?


Sure: https://github.com/kevinfiol/youtube

Some things to note if you'd like to use it:

1. I deploy to Github Pages via Github Actions. See .github/workflows/build.yml for details. The only thing you might wanna change here is the `schedule` of how often to build your page

2. I define my subscriptions in src/feeds.json. It's just an array of tuples [name, rss_url].

3. I currently redirect to an Invidious instance. You can modify the `YOUTUBE_URL` const in scripts/render.js to `youtube.com` if you don't care for this

EDIT: By the way, I also wrote this scrappy user script to quickly download my youtube subscriptions as JSON: https://gist.github.com/kevinfiol/da63cd137327b8f8d6b7070601...

It'll just create a `get feeds` button at https://www.youtube.com/feed/channels


As usual, Piped is an alternative front-end made with users in mind. You can self-host (persistence not necessary) or use public instances.

Original author is the same as the equally excellent NewPiped mobile app.

https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped


Am I missing something, or is there no sorting option beyond channel?

That's what drives me nuts about Youtube, is that I can't put "science" youtubers in to a particular, very narrow category separated from other elements. This seems like the feature that would make Youtube infinitely more useful. I can't count how many times I've had to bounce back and forth through the shitty subscription view trying to associate some infinitesimally small avatar with a tutorial video I watched two months ago. Somehow I inevitably miss it, too.

Of course there's no incentive for Google to do this, but these other guys..?


Thanks, i'm going to check this out.

I hate how youtube doesn't just show whats new from my subscribed content creators, it's insane to me that instead is a bunch of random crap and I miss content from the people I have already told the algorithm I want to see.

Hoping this has a way of just showing the content from the creators I want to watch, trying to have a more balance digital life and remove the crap these companies put on you, while keeping up to date with stuff that is interesting to me, it's always a difficult battle.


How does this differ from Invidious?


Same idea, but it also has sponsorblock and the bring dislikes back thing. Also less limited resolution options. They are very similar, but I generally prefer piped


I gave up long time ago and just used RSS feeds from channels I subscribe.

I am fully convinced the only reason RSS still works is that someone at YT forgot the feature exists and so it didn't get fucked with from when YT subscription panel was still working.


The /feed/subscriptions page has also very consistently worked as a reverse-chronological feed of your subscriptions the whole time.


Conspiracy theory: If the only remaining sorting options all bury old videos, is this maybe a preparation to put old videos into cold storage?


most definitely. They don't want to support it. they make less money from old content and it would deviate from their fanatical control over suggestions that are probably some of the worst in the industry coupled with the worst user interface, aggressive ads, and dark patterns galore....it's trash....it's like a VLT machine at this point...designed to convert advertiser money and funnel it to affiliated creators for the most part.


On a tangent. I used to be able play youtube videos on firefox on my old android phone with the screen turned off. It was some setting in firefox that I can't seem to remember or else is no longer there. It was great because you could listen to a long lecture while walking using up less battery and even more importantly, not inadvertently clicking on something on screen. Anyone have any ideas if it's still possible?


It's possible with

1. Youtube Vanced (deprecated but still works),

2. ReVanced (in development),

3. Brave mobile browser,

4. NewPipe (opensource, doesn't support most account-based features),

5. YouTube Premium and their regular app.


Last time I tried this (a few weeks ago), the procedure turned out to be:

1. play video

2. turn off screen

3. video stops, turn on screen

4. pull down the menu from the top, showing a firefox notification with a play button

5. click play

6. turn off screen again

This is on Android 11, YMMV.


You can use this Android add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...


It's also possible with invidious[0].

[0]: https://invidio.us/


This works fine in Brave using a feature called 'brave playlist' (or something like that)


This is possible on iOS with the Vinegar extension. In case you are considering Apple or have family/friends with this problem too.


I think in the Android app that's only a feature for some videos if you have Premium. Never tried it in the browser.


I wonder if they're A/B testing it. Yesterday I wanted to filter a channel's videos and didn't see _any_ options to filter or sort. Now I'm seeing the option to sort by most popular, newest first, and oldest first, which is still different from your experience.

Or maybe they just had a bug interfering with it and are still getting a solution in place (if they even noticed it)


I recently got YT premium in response to their push, but it's messed with my YT enjoyment in a somewhat unexpected way: I hadn't realized to what extent I'd become used to having different sets of recommendations and being able to get fresh starts on recommendations by deleting cookies...

I've almost started to become strategic about what I click on now instead of just going with whatever flow I'm enjoying right now. Not sure if I'll continue the subscription after the trial if they don't give us more options for managing our preferences. I guess I could get a family option for myself just to get more accounts, but I'll have to see.


Can YT premium still have multiple accounts? That's the main way I manage my learned feeds.

I do wish there was something like "virtualenv" for youtube, where it's trivial to change your preferences without changing your account (which is still tied to things like subscribers and comments.


> Can YT premium still have multiple accounts?

Not that I'm aware of, at least not for a single standard subscription. There's a family option with up to 5 accounts that might work, but it's probably not how that's meant to be used, so you might run into some problems. virtualenv is a good analogy, that's what I'd want as well, but I doubt that we're going to get that.


You can definitely create a new Brand account, which is managed by the same Google Account. The brand account will then also have premium benefits, while having its own watch history.

This is how I use it.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/4642409?hl=en


Interesting, thanks!


Interesting story

I used to procastinate a lot in YouTube, so I installed a plug-in in the browser that don't let me get into YouTube. At the beginning I was worried that it's not going to work for me, because if you use te incognito mode the plug-in doesn't work, so I thinked that every time I would want to procastinate I just open the incognito mode.

But surprise! I'm no longer procastinate in YouTube, because every time that I open YouTube in incognito, the recommendations are sooo bad, that I just scroll a few seconds and get out, and now I'm YouTube free for a long time.


I shut down YouTube's addictive tendencies through a couple of less extreme factors.

DF Tube (Distraction Free) web extensions are available[0] for Chrome and Firefox which cut down intrusive UI (comments, recommended videos, the home page). It's easy to clone and extend the add-on if you want to block more.

When I'm on mobile, I limit the recommendations I can't block by disabling/clearing YouTube watch history. The new UI is aware of how much worse the suggestions are and hides them altogether—which is exactly what I want.

From there, I try only look at my subscriptions feed and occasionally the trending videos page. This makes YouTube less overwhelming—even if I watch just as much content—because I'm in control of what I want to see.

Curious if anyone else uses YouTube like this!

[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distractio...


I've seen weirdly different sorting options for a while now that vary channel by channel. I assumed it was set by the uploader, but I would believe that its a global change now.


I've noticed few months ago that Metallica channel didn't had any sorting options. I could only switch between uploads and past live streams.


As each of these subscription services have gotten worse, I’ve ended my contracts with each one and I’m probably way happier this way. I’m not overloaded by content, and I feel a more enjoyable sense of discovery when I go looking on purpose for a video. I use brave browser, so gg ads.


Eventually, YouTube will degrade to the point where it’s not worth using. If you know of any truly precious videos up there, I’d start downloading them now.


I'm using https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp to download my favorite videos, and after years of using it, its worth the effort. Many good memories would have been inaccessible otherwise.


To expand on this, setup one of the various yt-dlp "servers" (It's just software, often in a docker container. I have an old one that uses youtube-dl, I need to update it) where you can post over to them and it will download the video and drop it in a folder somewhere. Then setup a Shortcut (iOS), bookmarklet, etc so that on any platform you are on, you are 1 click away from kicking off a download. Then sort/organize those videos as you see fit at a later date.

Bonus points for putting your intake folder in a place your media server can see.


Sounds great. Any shortcut/bookmarklet code or pointers to servers to share? I'm sure readers could set that up themselves, but time/attention are always limited resources.


Something like this: https://github.com/frznman/yt-dlp-server

In my case I stuck my instance (not that exact software but similar) behind Caddy and added basic auth. Then I just setup Shortcuts or bookmarklets that just did:

    curl -X POST --data-urlencode "url={{url}}" http://{{address}}:8080/yt/q
Where {{url}} was the current page I was on and {{address}} was where my instance was available (with username:password added to it, example: "https://user:pass@ytdlp.mydomain.com/yt/q").


Thanks very much! Going to add that to our NAS.


I've started just in the last couple weeks. Series with entries on thetvdb or imdb go on Jellyfin, mixed in with ordinary TV shows. Works great. Others I'm squirreling away for now (I don't like how Jellyfin handles web videos that don't have a TV metadata entry, even with the 3rd part addon for using Youtube's metadata, so I'm waiting for a better solution or until I get bored and write my own metadata for those others)


This is really important. I've got 700 GB (and growing) of archived YouTube videos. Started downloading them a few months ago because I had noticed older stuff disappearing.

Who knows how many videos in my specific sub-interest (ASMR videos, for the curious) are already lost forever. I try not to think about that. I've got a representative sample archived and am working to keep up with the new stuff that gets posted. Anything added to the archive is picked up by Jellyfin for later perusal. From here I can create playlists, tweak metadata, etc...

A video or two being taken down for creative reasons by the author is one thing. YouTube making executive decisions to delist videos or channels is entirely different.

Google has had it too good for too long with YouTube being the de-facto video host of the Internet. Society at large is at fault for buying in so completely.

I just want important examples of an interesting art form to stand the test of time. And if you want something done right...


I'm also annoyed that I can't sort for oldest videos.

I remember being a 10-year old and reading these kinds of threads on the Neopets forums everytime a UI change happened. Back then, everyone would promise to switch to a competitor. Then everyone would forget, get attached to the new UI, and then if they ever changed it again (even changing it back to be more similar to the old one!) we'd hear the say peans about how they are ruining it.

See also: livejournal users threatening to go to dreamwidth, and /b/day (the 4chan exodus to 7chan).


I use the YouTube app on my Tesla often and honestly this UI update has been a welcome improvement so far. The like button is now above the fold so I can easily tap it. It’s the little things


Ugh. One of my favorite things to do is go to my favorite channels and sort by oldest to see how their videos have progressed over time.

Such a shame they’ve made that so difficult for…nothing?


Everything also have a rounded corner now. This is only in my A/B test group though, I don't see it when in incognito.


I just tried and changing "dd" to "da" doesn't work, so it looks like they ditched it completely:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_jKrZ130j5QcXycYK_HePw/vid...


Oh I see what you mean. I'm not sure I ever used those filters so I don't know what it was before... but the overall frontpage seems to keep getting less enjoyable. Shorts, which I'll never watch, taking up tons of room and less videos. I'm not conscious of all the differences, but it sure was better before...


What's been driving me nuts is they took away the ability to toggle comments to the right of the video, so you could scroll them while viewing instead of having comments below the video necessitating scrolling the video out of view while reading comments. I thought that toggle was relatively new too.


You can still do it in YouTube Android app as far as I know. Open video, tap that little empty square in the bottom right corner and your video will be rotated to the horizontal position(view) and then tap that little comments box[0] in the bottom left corner(third icon).

[0] https://i.imgur.com/vDzDrio.jpg


I feel like many Google UI's have been getting progressively worse... I used to watch my movies on google play..now i have no idea where they have gone... in the web i can still access via play, but phone app not there?! no idea what this company is doing left and right hand aren't in sync


Definitely. Were you aware that Google search will never return more than 400 results? Most people don't run into this because they use the default of 10 results per page and it takes 38 pages. But I use 100 per page and that's only 3 page of results. I can (and do) scan through that in under a minute. http://googlesearchonlyreturns400results.lol/

Google search has been severely gimped. And it's not alone. Bing too will only ever return under 900 results. The days of surfing the web are over. The tools to do so no longer exist. Now the searchable web it's just whatever has been posted on a corporate walled garden in the last year.


I've literally never in my life needed more than 400 results. What could you possibly be doing where you need over 400 results?

Severely gimped? Are you sure your use case doesn't just represent an extremely extremely small percentage of users?


I'm absolutely sure that people who actually search the internet are so few that google does not think serving them is profitable. That's what I'm saying. Most people are like you and only click the first couple results.

And this is a terrible situation. There's an entire generation of people that can never learn how to search, even if they wanted to, since it is no longer available.


yea this is how i feel as well, no longer searching, more like spoonfeeding and that's your only option


I was just thinking the same thing this morning using the Play Store dev console, which reminded me of Cloud console. Everything is randomly jumbled into a bunch of menus on the left. I can't remember where anything is.


I very much dislike the "glow" behind the videos now. Its constantly updating and very distracting.


I don't log into google, and I noticed the YouTube search suggestions were hot garbage.

Anyway, I was watching a logged in friend using YouTube, and realized their suggestions were equally irrelevant.

I wish people would mirror their videos somewhere that's more archival focused and less of a spam shovel.


I think this is a YouTube Premium feature now.


I had naively assumed that "YouTube Premium" would add functionality that users would pay for instead of leaving it the same and reducing the experience for everyone else. I'm apparently a moron.


That's not all, there are some channels where you can't even sort by most popular anymore.

From what I gather they're mostly music-related ones (perhaps in favour of YouTube's "most popular songs" playlists). Here's a random example: https://youtube.com/c/DomDolla/videos

Notice there's no option to even select any type of sort.

It makes a tiny bit of sense to use that YouTube playlist instead (for example artists may upload songs to a label's channel or something), but it's still very annoying.


You can try Invidious it's an open source alternative front-end to YouTube. https://docs.invidious.io/instances/


After archiving petabytes of inferior content, youtube is about worthless if you do not know what you are looking for. UI/UX/IQ/EQ do not apply.

Years ago, tcp/ip was cool to explore. Now, its just ad-bait for tabloid and low aptitude fodder populations.

At least on IOS, "Halt" is a good browser that blocks all youtube ads, beginning to end.

Much like grocery shopping, I only have a short list of content to view on youtube, with their algo recomendations and UI being moot for the past several years.

Even google places low quality results littered with ad-infested pages in the SERPs for inferior time suck pennies.


Now there's "pull up for precise seeking" which doesn't do all that much but it's a new feature. And of course ambient mode which doesn't do much either.


While everyone is complaining sometimes the bottom of the video is cut off on mobile... this is particularly annoying in Chess videos if the bottom row of white pieces is cut off.


I use YouTube frequently, but I don’t consider myself much of a power user.

I have no idea how I’m “supposed to use” YouTube. I assume because I’m a fairly light user my confusion must be because it has some powerful tools/ interface for power users that confuses light users like me.

But then I try to understand how I should find what I’m looking for and it seems there’s no good / efficient way to use it where I don’t end up wondering why I can’t just click this or that to get what I want.


Am I crazy or did they remove 1.15x playback? That one seemed like the right mix of "I don't have 30 minutes" and not skewing the voices too much.


Does it matter? It seem to literally throw random videos it thinks you may like into the search results.

It is hard to process for me how could they screw simple things so bad.


My biggest peeve is how on the app, scrolling past a thumbnail removes it and starts playing a preview. So the title or whatever disappears, and instead I get to watch some person talk on mute. Then when I actually click the video, it starts from where I was in the preview, instead from the beginning, so I have to rewind since I obviously didn't catch anything from the small muted preview.


For me it shows captions in the preview, so I actually get what they're saying. I don't have captions on for videos, so no idea why it's different between us.


I do get captions, but they seldom make sense. I guess no one at YouTube have tried watching non-English videos when making this preview feature..? To be fair, the captions are quite bad for the British panel shows I get recommended as well.


That's fair, I forgot how awful the captions can be. Still not sure how we got to a situation where, when watching a video on my Google phone, the phone can make vastly better, and near real-time, captions than YouTube can.


Always found it puzzling that it takes 5 clicks to remove a recommendation from the homepage. 1. dots menu 2. "not interested" 3. "tell us why" 4. I've already watched this video, check. 5. submit.

No doubt there's particular reasons for not doing so, but a "don't show me videos I've already seen" would be quite effective for my aims.


There needs to be a "Don't show me this type of video ever again."

I recently watched some of the trial of the mass murderer who killed a bunch of people at a parade in Wisconsin.

Now almost my entire youtube feed is things like "Trial lawyer REACTS to Darrel Brooks VERDICT!" - just absolute click bait garbage. I hate it, and I genuinely don't know how to make it go away.


It really needs a "topic" based system like Google News. Their recommendations have serious flaws as well, but at least I can see the topics a story was (potentially) recommended based on and flag one as not for me. The YT homepage kind of does that now, except you can't tell it topics are bad.


That would be nice. Or in addition to 'liking', an option to 'show me more like this' which can be turned off.


It's a tale as old as time: Programmer on HN complains about the removal of obscure menu items from a popular social media app


This one makes me really sad. Frequently I find myself wanting to look at the oldest video on a particular channel.


I feel like an old man in my own head, muttering, "I remember the Sort feature like it was yesterday!"


Same here. Since YT has been going downhill I've started downloading videos and storing them offline (no not on google drive for G to scan and remove in the future) in a couple spots because I've seen many items in my saved lists get removed or set to private over the years.


I've created a small macOS app to track YouTube channels without being distracted by the web UI: https://github.com/agentcooper/telik. Maybe some of you will find it useful.


I always feel dumb when using YouTube’s apps and website. It is probably the most non intuitive site I use


Despite having premium there is just no way to get rid of Shorts everywhere. It is the worst form of content which deliberately removes the seekbar & is not enough to convey anything meaningful. It's basically video reddit but minus the option delve further into the content.


The funny thing is that Google brags about the science behind their UX and then they have complete garbage UX like Youtube and libs like material design. I also wonder if the Youtube mobile app testers are minors or have transparent fingers.


SOMEBODY pls write a firefox extension that allows you to simulate high engagement for any feature you pick. that way we could ascertain only the stuff we like about websites get's to stay and everything else goes by the wayside...


One recent change that I really hate is the way the video pops up and follows you down the page when you scroll down to look at comments. It blocks what I'm trying to look at! Very annoying.


What were they before? This post assumes a level of YouTube knowledge that I lack.


5 out of 12 recommends are future streams/premiers all from the same channel. I like the channel's content but 5/12 suggestions for something I can't even watch _right now_ is just a joke.


Seconded those pills make me want to commit murder... It's really annoying then there is randomly adjusting css on the home page, they have over done stuff in the name of mobile first.


the pill/rounded corners make it feel plushy, but are discordant with the square edges of the rectangular video, overall making the design feel off.


Going to take this opportunity to ask if anyone else hasn't been able to find any playlists in YouTube search results? Whenever I filter for playlists, there is always nothing.


they keep making minor changes like this that invariably make things worse. For me it's the loss of controls for quickly removing individual videos from the Watch Later playlist.


Something to keep in mind is that YouTube does A/B testing, showing different interface design changes to different people and then comparing the stats later.


Freetube - https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube


Lately I often have trouble finding the date/time a youtube video was posted. Sometimes I find it when I open the description box, but not always.


Youtube has become almost unusable. recommendations are so bad. Because I'm politically independent I've been put into some kind of right-wing recommendation track... Now I'm getting recommended ignorant pwnd the lib shorts. I've pressed not interested and don't recommend this channel but it does nothing.

I really hate the endless short videos of youtube, instagram, and tiktok. I have no tiktok but they've essentially recreated the same crap on youtube.

The experience of YouTube has been pretty much completely ruined for me. The content of videos seems to have gone way down too. I think this may have coincided with the change in monetization strategy. Seems like the quality of recommendations has gone WAYYY down since then.


It's not just you, I'm left of Democrat and end up getting Jordan Peterson recommended to me. Especially on shorts. My guess is the algorithm thinks I like "politics" and suggests whatever "political" content it can find.

Besides this, I too have found the content quality declining. The best content now comes from channels/creators I followed years ago, while most new stuff that's being recommended is of the reaction to reaction to reaction variety.


On the TV app it is nuts now. Only 4 rows of recommendations, and 5 videos per row. Like a 1000% reduction in possible recommendations. No idea why.


The Watch later UX is atrocious too :

- Adding : hover the video 1000ms to reveal the button

- Removing : 2 clicks away under a menu

Why hide the 2 most frequent actions? Do you even do user testing?


Your most frequent actions aren't necessarily everyone's. I very rarely use the watch later feature. Maybe they are doing user testing.


I'm referring to the UI when you're specifically in watch later mode.

Imagine if opening a Google result took 2 clicks, it'd be infuriating.


I wish people would use Twitch more to make it a more viable Youtube alternative. Amazon doesn't have user hostile attitude like Google.


Do you know what Twitch is? It's not a Youtube alternative in the slightest, and it was never meant to be.


Don't mind all those counterfeit goods on Amazon.com.


>Amazon doesn't have user hostile attitude like Google.

Yes, not user hostile is exactly NOT how I would describe Amazon's trash heap that is Market


Vimeo is more of a YT alternative than Twitch is.


Yes, and the cure for us users is : yt-dlp

I don't even do that. I use mpv + yt-dlp + SponsorBlock plugin: `script-opts=ytdl_hook-ytdl_path=yt-dlp`


Noticed this UI change today as well and it’s awful. Makes me feel less bad that I canceled premium and won’t be using YT anymore.


Waddya mean?

https://postimg.cc/Wq3t4Fxn


They've also hidden away the "save to playlist" button, making it extra clicks to do.


What filter/sorter was removed?


YouTube is/was a really good YouTube. It should stop trying to be a second-rate TikTok.


It is even worse for a music artist, on the Videos tab there is no sort at all.


Why even worse? I use youtube a LOT and I don't particularly dislike it.


Install LibRedirect and you never need to visit youtube.com again.


Needs New Management.... thats the first step. :)


how else did you filter uploaded videos? i don't remember what the other options are. also, the new UI is faster on my old 10 yo machine.


you could also filter by oldest first.


It's so annoying that they keep removing ways to watch a channel from it's beginning. This isn't the first time. Do you not want me to spend more time watching videos, YouTube?


In the dropdown there was oldest, and they had been playing with a shorts/videos toggle


I love how everything keeps getting "condensed". Tweets took us to 140 characters, but then doubled. Vines took video to short short short segments, then everyone else followed. Eventually, we're going to have some SV darling of a startup release a new app called Frmz that only allows for 1 frame video segments. They're going to try to release a photo app as a video app and the sheeple will fall over themselves trying to become the next big video influencer. Some VC trying to challenge SoftBank will go big on Framz and the hype will be insane.


Imho, Freetube is the best way to use YouTube.


I hope some from YouTube sees this feedback


it only ever gets worse




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