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, 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 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!

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Yep, it's completely jacked. Very annoying. Of course, back in Twitter also randomly uses your place sometimes, 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, 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.

Yes, I run into this all the time in Firefox

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.

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.

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