For example, if you pause the video by clicking the main action button brings up an overlay that takes up almost the whole screen, so you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame. How do you start it again? By clicking the same button, right? No! By clicking up. For some reason up means back and down means to open some additional UI with related videos and what not.
No other app is like this — Plex, Infuse, Apple, Netflix etc. abide by relatively sane UI controls where the action button pauses and unpauses, and up/down don't scroll between weird overlay elements.
The YouTube filled with these incredible non-unintuitive UX choices that drive me crazy. I never use it unless I have a clear idea of something I want to watch.
> you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame
You can press up on the D-pad to dismiss that overlay, if you want to see the full paused frame.
> How do you start it again? By clicking the same button, right? No! By clicking up.
Maybe we have different remotes? On the latest model, you play/pause with the same button.
One issue I’ve noticed in the app is there seems to be no way to move the cursor “up” to the channel button when the video is in the last 10% of the playback bar. If you rewind it a bit, then you’re able to move the cursor up there.
Only in the last few days have Shorts appeared at the top of my home page. I fear it may be the end for me.
We were talking about Google here. (you know, former search engine, don't be evil)
YouTube did push a version of the Apple TV app that tried this, but it would cause the app to crash/black screen, no joke. They reverted it.
This would be true if the Android or Android TV would have been better. It is just profit maximization combined with crappy UX/UI. Google wants your personal data and will make UI changes to get it. (double record/send button in messages, UI elements very close to others so that they can be pressed accidentally, although there is plenty of space between other UI elements)
Maybe it could be styled a bit differently so the search bar is more prominent and in the center of the screen, but just having a search bar without any distractions is a fantastic feature.
You don't need the obnoxious refusal to show videos on the front page.
Unless you're testing this with blank accounts?
That popping up on your phone is not 100% reliable, though, and even more hilariously, when using it with YouTube, it'll sometimes just take the first handful of characters and drop the text input box on the phone. Oh, how we laughed.
(this may be a generic Apple TV problem but it's something I've only noticed on the YouTube app)
For example: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254761316?sortBy=rank
The YouTube app is a walk in the park compared to the app for Hayu which is like torture sometimes it’s so buggy.
I would've agreed until Netflix did their redesign and started pushing wrestling for whatever braindead reason. Some executives should just quit.
Everytime YouTube gets an update it gets worse. This has been true for years. It's like their design and product team is run by second-graders.
Last time I checked, the LG webOS app was just running tv.youtube.com which only expects a TV-specific user agent.
Amazon has started getting into a state, lately, where it ignores the remote, unless I go back, then go forward again.
This kind of “quality” is considered “acceptable,” in today’s world.
AppleTV has a JavaScript-based development system. It also has a fairly classic native Swift system (which I use). I suspect most apps are JavaScript, though.
[EDIT: Added the “routinely use” qualifier]
I should also qualify that it’s not really “every single one” (that’s hyperbole). It’s the ones that I routinely use (Apple, Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix).
I’ll probably get another one, sooner or later, but I’ve been waiting for them to release a new version[0],
If you rapidly keep skipping through a song, then to the next one and repeat, the performance will keep on tanking. After a while it'll take 5-10 seconds just to load a song, going to other UI sections will take 3-5 seconds to load, and eventually the application completely locks up and soft reboots itself.
Probably JavaScript garbage collectors getting overwhelmed.
Then please realise your advice is completely unneeded and unhelpful.
Edit: Did have one problem where the centre channel would occasionally drop out - this would go away if you changed the volume and didn't happen that often so wasn't a big deal. I had assumed it was a problem with the Denon receiver we use but when we replaced our original Apple TV earlier this year wit a 4K model it stopped so must have been something to do with the device.
These people care only about each other: power, influence, money, etc.
Actually using or - gasp - improving the product is beneath them.
Or do you seriously think the billionaire CEO of some white goods company knows or cares about the quality of the wash the cheap Chinese-made washing machine does? He’s got staff laundering his clothes!
Similarly it’s very clear nobody with real power at Microsoft uses their own tools. I see their seniour product managers turn up to Microsoft Ignite with Apple Macs, for crying out loud!
Given that every other app manages to get basic interaction right, I’m not inclined to believe it’s an os/hardware issue.
It's similar on desktop, if you pause the video, an overlay with recommendations appears, and it prevents you from reading the subtitles, for example.
Disclosure: I work at Google but not YouTube.
I would not be surprised if there is no QA team for the tvOS app.
The content they offer is either a big back catalog of reality TV dross, or Live sport. The live sport streams, when left open when the AppleTV is turned off will always crash and go into a frozen state where there's no way out except by force quitting the app.
Reported multiple times to their tech support, no fix in 2 years. This for sports services that cost 30GBP a month, minimum, and with a regional monopoly on coverage.
> So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in the title. In this case you also see “(Part”.
> Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that.
> The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.
I'm looking at youtube right now. There's a video displayed with the title "Word Differences Between 11 Countries! | Europe, Africa, Asia , ..."
That "..." is the indicator that the title has been truncated. If you hover the title with your mouse, you can see the entire thing: "Word Differences Between 11 Countries! | Europe, Africa, Asia , America | Why Are They Similar?"
Not far away, there's "Alex Honnold Answers Rock Climbing Questions | Tech Support...", which expands to "Alex Honnold Answers Rock Climbing Questions | Tech Support | WIRED".
Am I using Apple TV? No. Is it really true that they removed the truncation indicator?
Yes.
DeArrow replaces thumbnails and titles with crowd sourced versions. I can't use youtube without it anymore. Usually the titles get replaced with stuff like "How to build a table" instead of "Watch the world explode as I try to make a table!!!!!!!!!!!!". Same with thumbnails. No longer are they over-saturated close up AI generated garbage images, but usually just a screenshot from the video that shows what's really going on.
[1] https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV/issues/60#issue...
The idiotic clickbait images and titles WORK. People don't use them because they want to, they use them because they have to.
Thus -> DeArrow.
(Or follow the channels via an RSS feed and filter there)
Children are attracted to soy-boy suprised pikachu face on clickbait thumbnails. CHLIDREN are ATTRACTED to EVERY second WORD being IN all CAPS!!! They like the three exclamation marks. They like flashy text on MrWhoseTheBoss videos which repeat the same thing the fucking guy is talking but just with flashy text on screen. They like the whizz-bang animations and ADHD addled three-second shots. They like the Mr. Beastification of Youtube.
I'm not a child. I'm too old and weary for that. LTT wants to do it, he can. Godspeed, and may his next twenty million subscribers fill the hole in his pocket and his soul that the first twenty million couldn't. I just ain't gonna be watching.
This have been a thing on Japanese TV since long ago, doubling down on the punchlines with subtitles or adding a comment or comeback (conveniently, Japanese text takes less space that Western text, so the characters can be relatively large). So I think they just copied it.
LTT does not have a choice
Youtube's system is adversarial. There's more content than eyeballs, so if your brand new video is placed in front of like three people who do not click on it, it stops getting shown to people entirely including subscribers!
Clickbait thumbnails and titles are what Google wants, and they provide tooling to encourage it, and punish you if you do not use it.
You want to get rid of clickbait titles and thumbnails? Kill google. Then also legislate it away because it will naturally arise in any such adversarial system.
>They like the Mr. Beastification of Youtube.
Google likes the Mr. Beastification of Youtube. Google would rather every LTT go away and be replaced with another Mr. Beast. It's more profitable that way.
I realised over the last years that my weariness with the internet was born mostly out of Youtube and Reddit. Reddit I've successfully cut out of my life, Youtube is more difficult to do because much of modern culture happens there. But I've drawn the line at the worst offenders. In tech, people like Dave2D and Marques Brownlee have managed to avoid having stupid thumbnails, so I'd rather watch them. Thereafter, I have a CalmYoutubers.md file that has the (few) channels that I find are not idiotic, so I stick to them.
So I don't believe someone like LTT needs to resort to clickbait. LTT has 16 millions subscribers and half a million views per video. They make plenty of ad-revenue from those videos. If he stopped making videos today, he would still be getting a sizeable income by doing nothing for at least a decade. Even some washed up YouTubers from the past get a low five figure income from their Channels.
If he has that many employees for his YouTube channel he is letting his expenses get out of control. It is as simple as that.
If he fired everyone tomorrow and stopped making videos, he would probably still be making six figures a year just from people watching the existing content.
You see this happen a lot on YouTube where someone starts getting a lot of money in via YouTube AdRevenue and they start trying to operate it like it is a television station and paying for co-hosts and researchers etc. Costs then increase ten to twenty fold. Then once inevitably YouTube change how monetisation works or people get bored with their content and their revenue dips they resort to clickbait, scamming, and other nonsense.
This could all be avoided by just keeping control of their costs.
They only "work" if your only goal is to get clicks. Lots of literal toddlers and stupid adults will click on idiotic clickbait. Will they stay and watch the content? Will they understand it? Will they appreciate it? Or, will they just smash their fist at the screen when the next shiny obnoxious looking thing pops up or drool all over themselves until the next video auto-plays?
If all you care about are clicks and views and you don't give a shit about your audience you might as well just start posting disturbing videos of Elsa and pregnant Spider-man because as it turns out that WORKS also.
If on the other hand you respect your audience and don't want to mislead or annoy them with click-bait titles and irrelevant bullshit thumbnails then, yes you will get fewer clicks and views, but the smaller number of people viewing your videos will be people who clicked because they actually care about your content and not just because of bullshit clickbait. Those users will be thankful that your channel isn't polluted with the garbage that plagues so many other videos made by youtubers who don't care about anything but clicks.
Having and maintaining integrity is usually a little inconvenient, but it is also very much appreciated and people with integrity improve the spaces we share. Youtubers sacrificing their integrity for clicks and views isn't something they "have to do", it's just what they choose to do. If their content is actually worth watching then people will watch it without that crap, especially when it comes to an already well established channel like LTT. Don't make excuses for youtubers who care more about clicks and views than they do about their viewers or the quality of what they put out into the world.
You can always "respect your audience", but that won't pay the bills with Youtube's algorithms sadly.
It's not the world I want to live in, but it's the current reality.
I do agree it is annoying. Some people do it quite a lot with car work videos to make the car look in far worse than it is.
I do this instead: When a thumbnail and/or title is displayed on my screen feels like some variation of spammy clicky ragebait, I use the 3-dot menu and pick "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel".
Nowadays, that kind of stuff is pretty much just gone.
This has certainly nuked whole channels (and also entire categories) from my youtube feed, and that suits me just fine. I need my life to be encumbered neither by clickbait, nor by the subset of creators that are compelled to generate it in the first place.
There's more good, interesting, non-bait content created every day than any person has time to consume. The herd is plenty big enough to be culled.
I think I'll be OK without watching videos -- at all -- from people who are working to jam the cock of influence as hard as possible into whatever they can.
It is my own opinion that a creator who deliberately creates a bad thumbnail and a baited title is a bad creator, and that (by extension) I do not wish to consume their content.
There's plenty of other fish in the sea that aren't introducing themselves to me with one or more damned lies. I'm pleased to go watch what they're doing, instead.
Also a bad thumbnail isn't a damned lie. Clickbait usually just means vague and flashy.
My Youtube feed has an amazing abundance of great content. I'm learning stuff with it all the time from creators that aren't prima facie lying scumbags.
Others are free to keep the likes of Scotty Killmer and Linus employed. That's fine.
They're dead to me, and I do not miss them in my life.
Though when I go look at the last big bunch of LTT videos I don't see any lies? Scotty Killmer I can find some lies pretty fast. "New Law Will Put You in Jail for Driving Your Car" for example.
This discussion is over. You do you.
Any other app, you leave a video paused, the OS screensaver will come on. Those beautiful, aerial screensavers that are better than any screensaver I've ever seen in all my decades of working with computers. So of course the Youtube app had to block them with their own shitty variant. They have no taste and no respect.
(Although it's on a 5 minute timer which might be short enough to pre-empt everything else.)
The fact that they would ever think that was possibly an OK thing to do though shows you how brain dead they are.
Even with the missing “ (Part 2!)” added, that’s still only 68 characters. I would probably begrudgingly call this long, but I would definitely not call it “really long”—my threshold for that would be at least 90 characters.
If they’re truncating around 60 characters, I’m content to call it unreasonable.
I agree in the abstract it’s a perfectly reasonable title. It should absolutely be readable.
But it’s not. Because the app sucks.
They could use their fancy AI to generate shorter titles.
YouTube making up a shorter title would be so much worse...
Damn it, I still appear to be on 4.51.08/web_20251117_11_RC00 with no indication that there's a new version. Not looking forward to any updates...
> The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.
I sometimes wonder if YouTube is a weird kink cult that gets off on people complaining about the ridiculously user-hostile decisions they make. Because it's either that or they're an evil troll cult that aims to make life just that little bit less pleasant for as many people as possible.
That’s not an option. And if it was? I wouldn’t want to use it.
Dedicated remote-oriented apps usually do improve upon that user experience.
But does it have to be an app that runs within Apple TV's walled garden?
With a $20 Android streamer box (like the one sold under Wal-Mart's in-house ONN brand), a person can install SmartTube and watch ad-free YouTube with a configurable glitz-free remote-oriented interface and SponsorBlock. (If it dies or something better comes along, it was only $20. $20 doesn't buy very many cheeseburgers these days.)
[1]: There have been attempts to improve the WWW's sofa experience, perhaps with WebTV being the largest effort. And I've sat down with a trackpad-equipped wireless keyboard and run Firefox on some manner of television-connected computing device at various times. It's always pretty severely lacking compared to browsing the web with a laptop, desktop, or pocket supercomputer. Even though it's ostensibly almost exactly the same thing, it just never really flows well at all: It's worse than using a computer and also worse than using a TV remote in ways that compound with eachother.
Not sure why you would rely on an AppleTV or any bespoke streaming device. It's effectively a service. If you like it right now, it will be worse in a few weeks, months, or years. Eventually it will be unsupported even though the hardware still works fine. You don't own it an it'll just be made worse by the different incentives of the hardware provide and the media streaming companies.
If somebody disagrees with the above post, then get off your arse and type a fucking rebuttal. Don't lazily click downvote.
'Drive-by' downvoting so is turning this place into another reddit.... and yes this is true, no matter how cliched a comment the admins consider it to be.
If they worked for me, they'd learn fast or wouldn't work for me for long.
The direction of your swipe no longer matters. All the app does is interpret wherever your finger _lifts up_ as a _directional tap_ on that side of the trackpad. So you can't do nice smooth accelerated swiping like it works _everywhere else in tvOS_; you can only use the remote as a bad D-pad.
My personal long-term complaint is the length of video titles.
Lots of people like to make really long video titles. So right now there is one on my screen titled “The Best Decisions Every Video Game Console Developer Made”.
Now if you didn’t know, that is not the whole title. But there’s absolutely no indication of that. The only way you actually know that is either by checking or if the stuff on the screen is clearly not the end of a sentence.
So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in the title. In this case you also see “(Part”.
Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that.
The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.
Obnoxious.