This has been one of the most frustrating things I run into with Youtube scrolling the page. Can’t leave your cursor on the page while scrolling without managing to have the spacing shift the thumbnails just so slightly so that your cursor lands back into a thumbnail for an autoplay to start and add to the metrics.

As to the reason, at least with Youtube and Facebook, the answer is obvious: they want to increase their ad revenue by claiming additional “plays” or “interactions” or whatever they want to call it today. I remember realizing several times over the years that I had been conned when I paid for ads. The top-level numbers looked good, but when I dug in, I realized they were all faked.

Same stuff with the mobile youtube app. If you so much as graze the screen anywhere while watching a video the replay speed doubles. This is so sensitive that even a tiny unintentional finger touch, or a water droplet landing on the screen triggers it. Whoever thought that is a good idea as a feature, i can’t comprehend.

Plus they have no data to see how badly their feature annoys me. From a metrics perspective “the user wanted to fast forward for 5s” looks the same as “a careless finger cradling the phone triggered the fast forward and it took the user 5s to realise what is going on and adjust their hold, now they are annoyed at how fragile this app is”. Someone might have even used the statistics of all the inadvertent activations in their promo package to show what a popular feature they made!

I mean, I suppose you're right. However, that being said, a case is a good idea nonetheless, just as is a screen protector. A good case protects the phone against damage from dropping, just as a good screen protector does the same for the screen.

Sure there is. iPhone or otherwise, I don’t touch the screen when holding my phone.

Might be an issue for people with small hands perhaps. I’m trying to figure out in what circumstances I would be forced to touch my display whilst merely holding my phone but can’t of one, so it must be a size/grip thing, or I’m just holding my phone like a weirdo.

EDIT: or did you mean on autoplay as in part of a playlist playing in the small player in the corner while you are on the home page?

I have it turned on, but leave my mouse to the right of the screen if I don't want autoplay. It's habit now.

You can disable autoplay at https://www.youtube.com/account_playback, then uncheck "Video previews". It resets itself every 15 days or so, but at least one can have some peace in the meantime.

Absolutely no sites, including YouTube, honour the parameter. But you can at least tell the site that you'd prefer it another way.

Unfortunately there's no way to set this per-site, at least in Chrome. Similarly, if you disable animations in Windows, you also disable all animations and transitions in websites that support prefers-reduced-motion, causing some sites to feel janky as a result.

They really need to add a per-site toggle for that, and a browser-level option to ignore the OS' setting. Turning off animations in Word shouldn't turn them off in Google Calendar.

Chrome: command line switch:

--force-prefers-reduced-motion --force-prefers-no-reduced-motion

Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?

I suspect that the managers in charge of some of these features are lobbying for it as a way to artificially increase the engagement stats for their features, but spinning it as actually being good UX instead of a user-hostile move because it's important for "discoverability" or something like that.

Then it was "hide shorts for X days" (I think 30?).

Now it is "show fewer shorts".

Lately the option to disable ambient lighting around video has been reseting to ON for me on every video I open.

I cant even formulate how I feel about that without breaking some rules somewhere

Like a relative commentor said -- a product manager on the "Shorts" team is doing a helluva job boosting their team's stats.

Even while pretending they've not recorded your viewing history they could still make recommendations from your subscriptions or give you the same glurg that they give viewers they know nothing about... but instead they break the site.

It's still better than having shorts on the screen.

A year ago, I had a serious YouTube habit, once I replaced my trash Jellyfin server with a Plex server I can listen to my music collection on my phone anywhere… so no more music from YouTube. I got tired of asmongold and all his imitator gaming YouTubers, fell out of the habit of watching Ukraine warbloggers, etc. I saw other people who got into toxic rabbit holes in YouTube so bad that they decided to physically destroy their computers…

The few of us who go "ew" and recoil are vastly outnumbered by the billions who just watch.

Every complaint about ads on youtube is someone who can't even be bothered to download an adblocker before Chrome killed it. It was one click, but that didn't dissuade the vast majority of eyeballs.

for some people, like me, for example, it turns them away even in the short term, and also in the permanent term, so to speak ha ha, not only in/after the long term.

because, you know, we know our rights and likes. and we wrong and dislike people who disrespect them! :) choice of rhyming words used for effect, but the point is also true.

I'm fearing the day they'll just remove that toggle for good.

Don't. Nowadays we can just re-introduce it, at least all who read this. iOS, macOS, Windows, Android... All have browser extensions, all can be modified.

My preferences change all the time, regardless of Youtube. For example, when I was a kid, I hated mustard.

On the other hand, my Youtube configuration may change independent of my actions.

this is quite bad behaviour.

they should not sneakily change our preferences behind the backs. similarly, all notifications, advertisements, et cetera, should be opt in, not opt out.

many of these cos. do this sort of thing, of course.

they excuse it under the protect of company policy.

Google the ant letter as an example.

sorry, pretext, not protect. an autocorrect error.

Surely you don't expect YouTube, a company that doesn't store any data at all actually, to be able to store a single boolean value somewhere in your account, do you? This would be impossible for a company as broke and small as YouTube.

It's also just stored in a cookie/session, so you have to do it in each client and every time you wipe your cookies. Very frustrating.

This is unacceptable to me. I've turned this setting off more times than I care to count. I've submitted feedback a couple times as well. I don't remember doing it lately, which is good. But I should have only ever had to do it once. I have a Google account, there is no reason this setting shouldn't be saved with my accounts, synced to all my devices, and only set once. I pay for YouTube Premium; I shouldn't be subjected to all these tactics which I assume are there to increase engagement and watch time. The price I pay is fixed and they don't earn ad revenue off me... why the games?

That's your mistake. Never pay someone to remove the same obstacles they've been putting in front of you. It's the definition of racketeering.

By all UI logic this should not scroll as this element is not scrollable (it's the top bar above the scrollable content), but YouTube and Google in their infinite UX wisdom kept the scroll mouse events go behind the hovered element. I won't complain about this one too.

Additionally there's a bug on the Android app that it sometimes doesn't show video titles (or the worlds worst A/B test?), so scrolling through I just see talking heads (since it autoplays instead of showing the video thumb) and have to force restart it to actually understand what's going on.

Most useless message ever, placed exactly where you do not want it to be.

Ie I hovered over one video of some Ronny Chieng commentary of RFK jr yesterday which somehow popped out of blue, and next time half of my feed was hardcore political with current admin (nothing what few Not interested clicks won't solve but then I am battling over-optimization of video platform).

I guess it suits certain audience well and keeps the feed fresh, but such behavior would cater to some maybe other type person better than me.

If you manually increase the quality on that video, it will only apply for that video, and whatever videos you play next, will still be limited to 480p.

All this is just to save costs..A truly fucking shady tactic to fuck over paying users. Fuck Google for what they do and how they cheat naive users.

Also the compression algorithm is very aggressive and it works reasonably well for general content but for edge cases (like starcraft streams), the 1080p loses enough details to make it hard to see important things like observers and outlines of individual units in crowded clusters. The compression algorithm just isn’t trained/tuned for these types of content, so even on a 1080p screen I need to stream at 4K just to see the details properly.

The original functionality of the quality selector was to throw out whatever video had been buffered and start redownloading the video in the newly selected quality. All well and good, but that causes a spinning circle until enough of the new video arrives.

The "new" functionality is to instead keep the existing quality video in the buffer and have all the new video coming in be set to the new quality. The idea is that you would have the video playing, change the quality, and it keeps playing until a few seconds later the new buffer hits and you jump up to the new quality level. Combined with the fact that YouTube only buffers a few seconds of video (a change made a few years prior to this; back in the Flash era YouTube would just keep buffering until you had the entire video loaded, but that was seen as a waste of both YouTube's bandwidth and the user's since there was always the possibility of the user clicking off the video; the adoption of better connection speeds, more efficient video codecs, and widespread and expensive mobile data caps led to that being seen as the better behavior for most people) and for most people, changing quality is a "transparent" operation that doesn't "interrupt" the video.

In general, it's a behavior that seems to come from the fairly widespread mid-2010s UX theory that it's better to degrade service or even freeze entirely than to show a loading screen of some kind. It can also be seen in Chrome sometimes on high-latency connections: in some cases, Chrome will just stop for a few moments while performing DNS resolution or opening the initial connections rather than displaying the usual "slow light gray" loading circle used on that step, seemingly because some mechanism within Chrome has decided that the requests will probably return quickly enough for it to not be an issue. YouTube Shorts on mobile also has similar behavior on slow connections: the whole video player will just freeze entirely until it can start playing the video with no loading indicator whatsoever. Another example is Gmail's old basic HTML interface versus the modern AJAX one: an article which I remember reading, but can't find now found that for pretty much every use case the basic HTML interface was statistically faster to load, but users subjectively felt that the AJAX interface was faster, seemingly just because it didn't trigger a full page load when something was clicked on.

And, I mean, they're kind of right. It's nerds like us that get annoyed when the video quality isn't updated immediately, the average consumer would much rather have the video "instantly load" rather than a guarantee that the video feed is the quality you actually selected. It's the same kind of thought process that led to the YouTube mobile app getting an unskippable splash screen animation last year; to the average person, it feels like the app loads much faster now. It doesn't, of course, it's just firing off the home page requests in the background while the locally available animation plays, but the user sees a thing rather than a blank screen while it loads, which tricks the brain into thinking it's loading faster.

This is also why Google's Lighthouse page loading speed algorithm prioritizes "Largest Contentful Paint" (how long does it take to get the biggest element on the page rendered), "Cumulative Layout Shift" (how much do things move around on the page while loading), and "Time to Interactive" (how long until the user can start clicking buttons) rather than more accurate but "nerdy" indicators like Time to First Byte (how long until the server starts sending data) or Last Request Complete (how long until all of the HTTP requests on a page are finished; for most modern sites, this value is infinity thanks to tracking scripts).

People simply prefer for things to feel faster, rather than for things to actually be faster. And, luckily for Internet companies, the former is usually much easier to achieve than the latter.

> It's the same kind of thought process that led to the YouTube mobile app getting an unskippable splash screen animation last year; to the average person, it feels like the app loads much faster now. It doesn't, of course, it's just firing off the home page requests in the background while the locally available animation plays, but the user sees a thing rather than a blank screen while it loads, which tricks the brain into thinking it's loading faster.

So they decided it's better to show lower-quality content (or not update the screen) than a loading screen, and it's the same school of thought that led to a loading screen being implemented? I agree both examples could be seen as intended to make things "feel" faster, but it seems like two different philosophies towards that.

(Also, I remember when quality changes didn't take effect immediately, but I've been seeing them take effect immediately and discard the buffer for at least the past few years-- at least when going from "Auto" that it always selects for me to the highest-available quality.)

Except "a few seconds later" can become minutes. Sometimes it just keeps going at the lower quality while the UI claims to play a noticeably higher resolution than the one actually playing. To be clear, I don't care that the "automatic" quality is actually automatic, I care that the label blatantly lies about which resolution is playing. "Automatic (1080p60)" shouldn't look like a video from 2005.

These were unlisted videos, so I’m not a YouTuber or anything, but I’m pretty sure this is one thing some people do to make their videos appear better sometimes

Filmed in HI8 480p, but YouTube's 480p looks like mud and doesn't do the uncompressed analog source justice. You can see this when you select 4K

I might be traveling and be on very expensive 3g data, and want to listen to a video and not care about the display but low quality setting means little when you are a premium user.

You have to explicitly change video resolution every time the next video starts playing.

You cannot choose explicit resolution preferences like you used to.

And I get no difference in what happens to resolutions chosen for me between these two quality settings. Seems random/non-deterministic.

If that doesn’t work – reach out to YouTube support – as a Premium subscriber, you get to speak with a human.

e.g., https://www.t-mobile.com/offer/binge-on-streaming-video.html

> All detectable video streaming is optimized for your mobile device so you can watch up to three times more video using the same amount of high-speed data.

They're making slot machines, effectively.

It's easy to like them by accident though

You're excuse for doing something shitty is... that someone else will? What does another person even have to do with it?! Seriously, let them have the blood on their hands. You can't even assume that someone else will! If you do it, you guarantee that it happens. Even if it is likely that someone else will, there's a big difference between a certainty. This is literally what creates enshitification.

Plus, the logic is pretty slippery. Certainly you're not going to commit crimes or acts of genocide! You were "just following orders"[0], right? Or parents often say to their children "if everyone jumped off a cliff, would you?" Certainly the line is drawn somewhere, but frankly, it is the same "excuse" given when that extreme shit happened, so no, I won't accept it.

You have autonomy[1], that makes you accountable. You aren't just some mindless automata. You may not be the root cause, but at best you enable it. You can't ignore that you play a role.

And consider the dual: if you don't make it better, who will?

I believe you have the power to make change, do you? Maybe not big, but hey, every big thing is composed of many smaller things, right? So the question is which big thing you want to contribute to.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

[1] https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incent...

But I still stand, you aren't mindless automata and your actions matter.

I use YouTube 6+ hours a day and I have for probably 10 years, and I don’t even work there. (I have a few annoying personality limitations which make it so that I usually work better with YouTube on in the background, and NOT on autoplay, autoplay always chooses something I don’t want to see/hear; I know that because I use the tool a lot.)

I can tell you that it has steadily and continually gotten worse in that 10 year time. “I have to come up with stories or I won’t have a job” no you don’t, but even if you did, there are so many things YouTube needs more that enlarged thumbnails with visible compression artifacts.

I did. Not that anyone listened tho.

Using the most commonly version of the product, on the commonly used hardware, at least 2 days a week should be a prerequisite for every product owner.

I am a firm believer that the software should also be developed on commonly used hardware.

Your average user isn't going to have the top-of-the-line MacBook pro, and your program isn't going to be the only thing running on it.

It may run fine on your beefed up monstrosity, and you'll not feel the need to care about performance (worse: you may justify laggy performance with "it runs fine on my machine"). And your users will pay the price for the bloat, which becomes an externality.

Same for websites. Yes, you are going to have a hundred tabs open while working on your web app, but guess what - so will your users.

Performance isn't really product's domain, as in — they would always be happier with things being more snappy; they have to rely on the developer's word as to what's reasonable to expect.

And the expectation becomes that the software should and can only run fine on whatever hardware the developer has, taking all the resources available, and any optimization beyond that is costly and unnecessary.

Giving the devs more modest hardware to develop with (limited traffic/cloud compute/CPU time/...) solves this problem preemptively by making the developers feel the discomfort resulting from the product being slow, and thus having the motivation to improve performance without the product demanding it.

The product, of course, should also have the same modest hardware — otherwise, they'll deprioritize performance improvements.

----

TL;DR: overpowered dev machines turn bloat into an externality.

Make devs use 5+-year-old commodity hardware again.

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Usually, but not always, it ignores scroll events while an animation is playing…and hovering over a tile in the list cause a pointless zoom-in animation (the result of which occludes parts of adjacent tiles). Sometimes, the animation won't start immediately, but will still play. To prevent the cannot-scroll-while-animating problem, the only safe place for the mouse pointer is over the scrollbar.

Clicking the (completely invisible) track of the scrollbar has random multi-second delays.

Most of the search filters are hidden by default…and can't be shown without waiting for a slow animation. You can click the show-filters widget over 30 times if you're in a hurry, and still the animation hasn't even drawn the first frame. That delay before it starts means that even if you try to wait, you might click one extra time, and then see both the show-filters animation and then the hide-filters animation…all while none of the rest of UI responds. …And then you might realise you want to refine your search terms…which will reset all filters and re-hide the filter options.

Once you find a tile you want to click, be prepared for another two animation delay: one, if the tile isn't already zoomed in, and another while the app mysteriously animates a slew of placeholders instead of just dumping the items information directly into view. It's slow like a 33.6 moder on a noisy phoneline, but now you finely have details about the item you clicked on maybe 7 to 40 seconds ago.

Now maybe you click a screenshot to enlarge, and decide it wasn't the app for you. You hit your mouse's 'back' button or click the app's strangely tiny (given how freaking huge most of the UI is) back button. Nothing happens. You try again, potentially numerous times…because the app ignores those inputs while a screenshot is enlarged. The app's so unresponsive, it at first doesn't occur to you that no amount of waiting or retrying will help. No, you have to click the little close widget on the opposite side of the window, or 'back' will never mean 'back' again.

You try to go back to your search results. The app eventually responds, but decided to discard that data for some reason and has to play more placeholder animations while reloading it and rediscovering your scroll position.

Then you go into another search result and decide the sidebar of other apps people viewed has some interesting items. These don't have animations on the tiles or any details, so you have to click each one of interest, waiting for more placeholders while imagining modems noises and being outpaced by a Colorado glacier that's crossing the road. And when you page back, the item you just came from does /more/ animations while reloading everything via IP Over Avian Carrier With Quality Of Service.

But when burrowing through the people-also-viewed sidebars, don't go too many layers deep, or when you return to your search results, it will have forgotten your scroll position and turned of your search filters. Ah, time for more UI-blocking animations.

But that's okay, right? Nobody ever made an app that responds in milliseconds to every user input, right? And we all know that doing long, blocking operations on the UI thread is right and holy, right? Even routines single-threaded apps never need to yield to other code blocks or process interrupts, …right?

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Yes, I have reported this to MS via Feedback Assistant. A few times. No, I don't know why they haven't appeared to do anything about this unshippable pile random bits that somehow slopped out of the Bit Bucket.

"Rectify?" No, the only answer is “Games."

</>

May your screams into the void be heard by the stakeholders, and not just people.

  > Careful there are programmers here watching

And good! Fix your shit. Take some god damn pride in your work! Just because all code is shit doesn't mean it can be infinitely shitty.

This isn't (exclusively) a forum for programmers (in fact, since it belongs to YC, maybe you'd expect businesspeople etc.) For example, I'm not a programmer, and I've never worked anywhere near the IT sector, yet I visit HN often. Also, if you look at the frontpage there are usually many topics not related to programming, or even tech in general.

  were made with good intention

As a counterpoint I love that feature on desktop and use it all the time.

Often I don't even click videos but just watch them with the preview autoplay (with sound enabled). I also zoom in on my mousepad so that it covers the whole screen and I only need to click through to like the video or for the comments. Much more seemless experience for me.

There is no way to handle autoplay correctly. It's simply been broken for the past few years. There is also no way to detect autoplay using workarounds. I.e. autoplaying a silent audio, because you can only prove the existence of autoplay, but never its absence, since autoplay could be delayed for whatever reason and happen outside of your timeout based hack.

The home page is made up of: a search bar with some extra buttons that link to different pages, a sidebar with some more buttons and a list of videos. What are the multiple teams for ? And even assuming it is necessary, there is really no single person responsible for the page so that issues like this can be seen and fixed ?

And since we are talking about pet peeves, on my laptop when you open the homepage you get a placeholder with 4 videos per row, and then you get 3 videos per row (or 5 shorts per row)

Conway's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Conway's law is expressed as "communication structure -> program structure" but it's actually even stronger than that; the arrow is bidirectional. If either the organization wants to break up the homepage into different teams, or if the organization has to have multiple teams work on their homepage for whatever reason, the homepage will reflect the organizational structure. YouTube falls into the second branch, which is that their home page is so complicated it has to be broken up between teams due to sheer organizational size. At YouTube's size you'll even have organizational distinctions you can't even see on the homepage like dedicated reliability engineering teams. At their scale I see at least six teams most likely, the "normal" video team, the shorts team, the sidebar menu, the hamburger menu, the search team, and the team responsible for the top-level all-Google interaction, plus multiple invisible ones like recommendation algorithm, reliability, possibly a dedicated performance team, etc.

You can, organizationally, try to put these all under one manager, but even when you do that it is a surprisingly uphill battle to maintain coherence, even when it is a goal, which it often isn't particularly. There's a lot of reasons few companies have the visual and design coherence of a ~2010 Apple, including arguably even 2025 Apple.

Are we just going to gloss over this like the list of videos is random? haha

And if not the case, I would expect at least one team to be responsible for the final result

Nobody cares about coherent UI/UX anymore. They certainly don‘t care about your fringe usages. Do new stuff. Do good enough. Expensive designers with a clear vision and attention to detail? Sounds slow. And expensive.

The move towards forced autoplay and infinite scroll will continue in any media app. AB tests show it is what humans crave.

I tend to select some text in long textblocks to keep a point of reference while reading. Medium and other new generation slop loves to open an obtrusive menu above my selection.

If anything, I feel like that this is by design to hyperstimulate their core audience seeking instant gratification.

Is it maybe caused by an adblocker? (I have YouTube premium, so no ads.)

Edit: Actually, the picture in the article shows a misalignment in the "Breaking News" section. It's odd, because the sections align perfectly for me on various screen sizes

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43848061

Bunch of hackers using adblockers that modify the client-side UI to cheat Google out of money and then complaining loudly about a minor UI convenience. How dare Google not optimize for them!

I say this as someone who uses an adblocker myself. But come on.

https://github.com/insin/control-panel-for-youtube/blob/cf18...

It's buried in the settings but it's there.

They added fuchsia to the timeline bar so that it now clashes in an ugly way with everything else on the page.

Don't like Shorts? TOO BAD!

Wait what? Thumbnails are useless. DeArrow has been god sent.

This might be intentional. Depending on how they calculate a view, this means they can pump up their stats they use to sell ads by making you "view" more videos than you actually click on.

I like the previews TBH. If you turn on sound in the preview, you can watch part of a video without seeing an ad. It only shows me an ad when I actually click the video to watch it, so I can spend the first minute or two watching the thumbnail to decide if the video is going to get into meaningful content and be worth watching the ad. Without previews, you click on a video, watch an ad, then watch the video for a minute or two before deciding you don't want to finish.

Or your theory and its view fraud for ad or metric purposes.

Me too! So I turned them all off:

    Youtube Settings -> Playback and performance -> Browsing -> video previews (off)

The automatically generated thumbnails were often the best at conveying what the video actual is in combination with a title and description that is currently overlooked in place of thumbnails.

These went away when people started gaming the system with a thumbnail frame right in the middle to intentionally misrepresent the content of the video. Same problem with the current YouTuber pog faces. The next step is to automatically generate multiple random frames to preview.

The garbage stock footage doesn’t work well here because it’s not great content to begin with. It’s lazy filler often used to hit the bare minimum arbitrary adsense time limit which wastes countless amounts of user hours.

Irritating, but the quality is fine for most things and I save a few minutes not watching ads.

Fortunately, there's an actual setting to get rid of that. Found out yesterday, when trying to fix the OP problem (which youtube sadly forced on me).

That's extremely depressing on 27" 4k screen. Give me a density setting! I want compact thumbnails and to glance at a pack of vids at once.