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Mildly Infuriating @lemmy.world rtxn @lemmy.world 3 mo. ago

Youtube's web UX team is a joke.

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

86 comments

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
- 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
- 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_dBw
  
  You could make a greasemonkey script that does this automatically.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  I have a ff plugin or script or something that does it. It’s the only thing that makes shorts bearable and usable
- 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
- 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 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.
  
  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.
- May I interest you in an extension?
  
  No thanks, I'll stick with the orIginal UI
go back

video gone

That part is the worst. I am sick and tired of websites breaking the back button! When I click back it's because I wanted to see the thing that was there before. If I wanted it to just refresh from scratch I would reload the page instead!

It's not just YouTube, by the way. Even Lemmy does that shit too!
- That's why I always middle click the links.
  
  ...and it drives me insane when it is not real links but some javascript/button/div-with-onclick/etc and middle click won't work
- I still see websites doing that shit where you click back and end up on a page that redirects you to where you where.
- YouTube had a solution not too long ago, when you hovered on a thumbnail it would show a little button that queues up the video on a temporary playlist while you keep browsing. But for whatever reason they hid that in a menu.
  
  That's not really the issue. The issue is that it doesn't give you a proper URL with enough information to uniquely identify the set of results it loaded for you, so if you reload the page it re-runs the query and you get a new set of results instead of the same set you had before. That fundamentally breaks how the Internet is supposed to work: any particular URL should always go to the same resource.
  
  The fact that Youtube also does lazy-loading infinite scroll bullshit makes it even harder to show examples about, so I'll switch to Lemmy now. Take this URL, for example:
  
  https://lemmy.world/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&pageCursor=P115f329&sort=TopSixHour
  
  (That's from navigating to page 2 of my feed, which is set to "all" and "top 6 hours".)
  
  If I go to that URL now, and then I go to it again, say, six hours from now, it ought to still show the same list of posts. But it doesn't. Instead, it re-runs the query and shows me the new results from six hours in the future, which is an entirely different result set. That's not what I want! I want to be able to keep navigating back and forth through the old result set until I explicitly ask for a new one e.g. by clicking on the instance logo or choosing a new search from the [posts|comments], [subsribed|local|all], and [sort type list] controls.
- All the lemmy clients I’ve tried do this.
  
  I see a thing, try to get back to it, and it just refreshes the whole thing from square one.
  
  I’ve built react apps before, I get how that’s kind of easier because “when in doubt, goto 10” (I’ve written code from BASIC through jsx) but damn.
- Jerboa doesn't do that in my experience.
UX has seemingly disappeared across the web unfortunately. Sites just change things for the sake of it.
- 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.
  
  Paycheck justification.
  
  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.
- 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.
- Sadly it’s like that because the money people A/B test things to make the numbers go up.
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
- Contrary to popular belief among creatives, it is creatives job not only to do their own work, but also to keep everyone else’s hands off it.
  
  I was a developer once, and when I was complaining that management just didn’t understand why this thing was needed, a very successful coder friend of told me “It’s your job to make them understand”.
  
  This is why everyone needs to know politics. Part of your job, whether it’s documented or not, is to keep your boss from giving you stupid orders.
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.
- 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
- Piped or Invidious
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.
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.
- "Broken as designed."
- it's an informational page about sponsors, not the actual sponsored link
  
  they can't even make a dark pattern right
- 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! :-|
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
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've raged at the incompetent UX design so many times, like recently when I was trying to add videos to the currently playlist in a certain order, since you can't reorder yourself. The mini player blocked the controls I needed for the last item on the page, but closing the player wiped out the playlist. Cue scream of rage and a few choice words at volume.
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)
  
  There is a similar desktop app: https://freetubeapp.io/
  
  My apologies then. I misunderstood the issue. What button are you talking about if you could elaborate a little more!
  
  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
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
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:
  
  Go to Home.
  
  Long-press on a video.
  
  Press "Go to channel".
  
  Go to Subscriptions.
  
  Long-press on a video.
  
  Fewer options because fuck you.
  
  Start the video, press down, up, right, select.
  
  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.
Not just the web UX unfortunately.
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’ve given up on YouTube because of its terrible interface and just use tube archivist + Jellyfin.
Piped

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