- see cool video on front page
- click
- “Haha, fuck you, you’ve just clicked on the invisible button that takes up half the thumbnail like a fucking moron!”
- redirected to the sponsorship info page
- go back
- video gone
why are you completely incapable of making a functional website you wet dildo
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The UX team is almost never to blame for this shit. It’s almost always the monetization folks and PM forcing the UX team’s hand.
You can quit if you don’t like it, but the market for UX is shit right now. So you grumble and draw the dark patterns so you can pay your mortgage while you casually browse LinkedIn for a new gig.
Engineers are successful in spite of management not because of it.
Every engineer of every type in every discipline in my experience
I’ve given up on YouTube because of its terrible interface and just use tube archivist + Jellyfin.
They’re just doing what they’re paid to do.
What they’re paid to do is increase ad exposure to drive as revenue and YT premium subscriptions.
General public UX is a distant tertiary goal, in terms of what’s actually on the Jira board (or whatever they use).
How the hell does getting redirected to this page drive any kind of exposure?
You need to understand that most software engineers are treated like code monkeys these days, and very often get overruled by product people going “idgaf just do the thing I said in the ticket”.
Source: am software engineer, and have been for about a decade and a half
I worked at Lowe’s and our method of searching for products was the same as a customer’s: the website.
But the website’s search is designed to always return something.
This means if you search for something we don’t have, it would just show you some random shit.
For some reason this infuriated me. I was always apologizing to customers for our terrible UX.
The TV UI is worse, especially the search. It only shows 10-12 videos related to what you actually searched. The rest are suggestions.
The TV UI is horrible and has negative development: Less features and more bugs every release.
Do you want to go to a video’s channel? Well, that depends on where you are:
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Go to Home.
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Long-press on a video.
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Press “Go to channel”.
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Go to Subscriptions.
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Long-press on a video.
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Fewer options because fuck you.
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Start the video, press down, up, right, select.
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Oh, it was a short video? You fell into the trap! Down goes to another video. Go back, select the video again, press right, right, select.
And that’s just one example.
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Not just the web UX unfortunately.
Would you like to engage in a polite and collected conversation about the YouTube Shorts UI?
Best I can do is unhinged and passionate, take it or leave it
“Best you can do”? Nah mate, give me the worst
I am with this person ☝️
Same
deleted by creator
Not even just the fucking UI. I have bad internet so it takes several minutes to watch a short, presuming jt ever works. And it’s just shorts. A full video loads no problem, but a short requires so much to even try to start playing.
I just hate the fact that when I open the youtube app, it just starts playing a random short. I have to stop the short to go to the search field which is the reason I opened the app.
I can strongly recommend not using the app, and just using a browser with ad block for YouTube mobile.
I suspect it’s also frantically trying to preloaded a bunch of other videos.
On my laptop, the UI is unresponsive for a solid minute until it loads several pages worth of comments and videos down the right side. It’s idiotic.
perhaps the best feature of the enhancer for youtube extension
Didn’t work well for me, I just use a URL replacer extension that also replaces reddit URLs with my local RedLib
Don’t have a cow, man
Or how “watch later” is a playlist that I can’t exit out of. I use watch later for hour long videos. I don’t want them to auto play
You can take the video ID of a shorts URL and paste it into a regular video URL to open it in the less dogshit UI. Like this:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fxJicOO_dBw->https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxJicOO_dBwYou could make a greasemonkey script that does this automatically.
I have a ff plugin or script or something that does it. It’s the only thing that makes shorts bearable and usable
I’ll do you one better: just replace the “shorts” with a “v”, and it’ll redirect you to the video version as well.
Bonus: since the “shorts” part of the URL is between two slashes, double clicking it will mark just that part.
Oh wow that’s such a good idea. I’d probably still just continue not ever watching yt shorts since they are generally really bad but if I ever for some reason need to see one I’d love to be able to actually have video player controls on it.
web 1.0 was superior; it was all downhill from there.
You can still make sites like that and they will work and also load faster.
But, for that to work, as a company, you have to actually care about the user. Shareholders and project goals are what they care about. Well. Mostly shareholders.
This is why you don’t go public.
I’m a shareholder and I don’t have the feeling the companies I own stock of care much about me. I have the feeling they care most about the CEOs, which are usually some rich friends of the companies founders. We can vote on the CEOs pay though, but the options are limited. If we don’t agree with them pocketing all the money, they can just run the company into the ground until our stock is worthless.
You’re not Paul Singer screwing up Southwest. https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2024/07/25/southwest-assigned-seats-red-eye-flights-more/
UX has seemingly disappeared across the web unfortunately. Sites just change things for the sake of it.
Sadly it’s like that because the money people A/B test things to make the numbers go up.
They don’t change things just for the sake of it. They change things so they can point at it and say, “look what I did! I deserve a promotion!”
Value-adders.
I’m convinced that almost all of the frustrating shit that corporations dump down on us comes from weekly staff meetings where some suckup climber just wants to tell the boss hey look, we did a shiny new thing! A thing nobody wanted or asked for. Line must go up.
That’s literally how google works. They want everyone “innovating” and changing shit constantly. Got a new idea for a thing? Roll with it. Gmail is a different name now? Roll with it! Massive UI change for no.discernable reason? You’d better believe you’re gonna be told to roll that out, and someone else will take your place and change shit again shortly.
Google is very annoying at times. I’m fine with constantly trying NEW stuff out but I hate it when they break (or make worse) popular stuff that’s widely used and people have come to depend on it. I feel like Microsoft is the absolute worst in this regard, but Google is really up there, too. I wish there could be a sea change where the “culture” (or whatever it’s properly called) shifts back towards putting a lot of value on reliability and resilience and less on gee-whiz crap. I don’t think it’s likely to happen, but I can dream. I’m old enough to remember when people really demanded this from their vehicles and that’s why Japanese cars started kicking American carmakers’ asses.
Paycheck justification.
- NewPipe
- Tubular
- GrayJay
- YouTube Revanced
- Firefox for mobile with ublock origin.
- Brave browser mobile are all options you can use instead of Google’s garbage.
- Those are mobile apps
- They have no effect on the website
- The issue is present on the desktop website
- Adblock does not remove the button in question without a custom cosmetic filter
- I’m already using Newpipe and Revanced, and block all ads on mobile and desktop (rude of you to assume otherwise)
Freetube is the app for the desktop platforms. It got some issues with the latest Google attempts to block the 3td party apps, but they’re working on the new releases fast
My apologies then. I misunderstood the issue. What button are you talking about if you could elaborate a little more!
When you hover the mouse over the thumbnail of a video that contains sponsored content, the preview starts playing (which is another separate gripe I have) and new buttons slowly fade in. One of those is a hyperlink to an information page about sponsorships that takes up the upper half of the thumbnail’s area. The problem is that those buttons are present and clickable as soon as the preview starts, but invisible for about half a second. Clicking on what appears to be the thumbnail might take you to a different page, and navigating back to the front page refreshes the suggestions.
This sounds new to me. I’ve never actually seen this. I do know about the hover over the video makes it play, but that’s all I know about. Nothing else happens when I hover over the thumbnail beside the video playing. Maybe because I use UBlock Origin and “Enhancer for YouTube” extensions on Firefox?
There is a similar desktop app: https://freetubeapp.io/
I’m so happy that new pipe is working again.
But… you clicked the sponsor link, thereby increasing their profits, right!? Sounds to me like the system is working as intended then:-P.
It’s not a link to a sponsor. It’s a YouTube info page about what it means for a video to have the “Contains sponsorship” tag.
That… sounds far dumber than I gave even them credit for! :-|
“Broken as designed.”
it’s an informational page about sponsors, not the actual sponsored link
they can’t even make a dark pattern right
The one that drives me insane is using the touchscreen on my Surface:
- Go to a channel’s page
- Click on the video tab
- Scroll through and find the video you want to watch
- Click on the video and YouTube slides to the playlist tab instead of starting the video. Every fucking time.
I have literally never experienced this.
Pretty much all of google products do that. I have to work with gsuite, and when you go to chat, you click on the person you want to talk to, start typing as you see the box, but then, for whatever reason, it switches to a search on the right, or bring you back to the chat home page.
On YouTube, you see a video, you click on it and then for whatever fucking reason, the video moves right and you click on a dumb ad or a video you don’t want to watch. Go back once and the video isn’t there anymore.
It’s a shit show
YouTube UI/UX in general is total trash. The Apple TVOS version is probably the worst but I haven’t seen a good one yet.
Piped or Invidious
One of the worst pieces of UX is when you turn on subtitles in the phone app. It will pop-up a banner that says something like “Subtitles turned on” that appears on top of the fucking subtitles and stays there for about 3 hours, making it impossible to read the subtitles. Why is there a banner for this in the first place, I know the subtitles are on. First of all I was the one that turned them on. No need to inform me. Second of all I can tell by the fact that there are subtitles on the screen.
What bloody UX genius came up with that crap?
You can slide the banner down. Still annoying af
it’s not that they’re “completely incapable of making a functional website”. It’s that making a good website might take traffic away from their apps, where they have more power to collect metrics and bypass ad blocking.
Wouldn’t that require the app the a better experience?
According to the guys down in analytics, the worse the app is the more money we make
