Comment by rozab
7 months ago
For a long time the grid of videos on the homepage has been slightly misaligned. I imagine the different rows belong to different teams. This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over.
I find the autoplay so annoying because it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage. Often the video gets inexplicably added to my watch history, and if I do choose to click on it I have to go back to the beginning because I missed the start of the audio
What kills me with the autoplay (at least on mobile), is that the video continues from where it was when you click it. But the autoplay had no sound, and I probably didn't watch it closely. So I always have to scroll back to the beginning, as I've just now been put in the middle of a sentence a bit into the video. Especially for channels which actually gets straight to the point (like Numberphile) it's annoying. Such a stupid design.
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.
I call these features "dead birds" because they remind me of gifts that an outdoor cat will leave on your doorstep. They took quite the effort to do and were made with good intention, but ultimately I don't want them.
Not always true.
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Careful there are programmers here watching. Pretend to like the bird.
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Thank you for that.
My YT mobile pet peeve is that when you toggle the captions, an useless "Subtitles/CC Turned ON" is shown for 5 seconds.. OVER THE CAPTIONS!
Most useless message ever, placed exactly where you do not want it to be.
I can never tell if the toggle is CC on or off until I wait and see captions or realize nobody has talked yet.
YouTube is now full screen.
I highly recommend uninstalling the YouTube app and just using the browser. It has all the same features and it actually works reliability. And at least Firefox lets you keep paying a video without keeping the screen up
What's even more insane is that if you hover a video for 5 seconds it thinks you "watched" it and it goes into your watch history.
Ah, that's why my feed seems like waves of themes. One opens the door a bit and then suddenly 30% of the videos on next page load have similar theme, (almost) completely forgetting tens of other videos of other themes I watches in past week.
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.
Does the creator get credit for that? I've got a few friends that need a few million views and I could easily write a mouse driver to take care of that.
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I found this "feature" triggers on videos I didn't even hover the mouse over.
YMMV. If I trigger autoplay, it's almost always on purpose, and I tend to read the subtitles. Jumping into the video right where I was works well for me! Losing my position would be very annoying.
Also you can preview the video without taking an ad hit. Clearly the stable genius behind previews has left some revenue on the table.
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Mobile? There's also another sneaky piece of crap Google pulls - even if you're a Premium user and set your video preferences to high quality, they only play videos for you at 480p, even though higher resolutions up to 4k are all available.
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.
This is also an issue on desktop web. YT will arbitrarily change the quality/resolution but doesn’t update the selector displayed in the UI. So for every single video I have to select 4K just in case YT might be serving it at 1080p or some other resolution even though it displays “4K” on the UI element.
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.
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YouTube Auto-HD browser extension: https://github.com/avi12/youtube-auto-hd?tab=readme-ov-file#...
I get "premium 1080p" most of the time, but yeah not being able to set it directly is annoying.
I can't remember which carrier initially compelled Google to do this, but it was done to save their networks rather than save cost for Google. It may have been Verizon when the HTC Thunderbolt launched. Now all the carriers are on-board.
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.
This shit was one of the reasons I stopped paying for YouTube premium and went back to aggressively blocking all ads. You try to give them money and they spit in your face regardless.
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I thought this behavior was just their way of punishing me for using adblock.
I have Premium and I always get a high resolution, if my connection allows for it.
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Autoplay has been broken since major browsers have silently added autoplay permissions. The fundamental problem with autoplay is that the getAutoplayPolicy() query is still a draft and only experimentally implemented in Firefox.
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.
> What kills me with the autoplay (at least on mobile), is that the video continues from where it was when you click it. But the autoplay had no sound, and I probably didn't watch it closely.
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.
That is what paperclip maximization does to your life. Stupid designs frustrate you more and make you engage more.
They're making slot machines, effectively.
All of social media is carefully tuned Skinner boxes. Even hacker news (maybe not as carefully)
Also if you do watch shorts, they are ALL added to your liked Videos.
Uh no they're not
It's easy to like them by accident though
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[flagged]
THIS. THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS.
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.
I can’t think of other examples, but this exact problem is a constant frustration for me on multiple sites. I can’t scroll with my cursor on the page without crap happening that I don’t want to happen.
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.
> I can’t scroll with my cursor on the page without crap happening that I don’t want to happen.
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!
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You can just... turn it off: https://www.youtube.com/account_playback
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.
It's not sticky. On iOS Chrome at least, I go pick that, within a few days it's set back to autoplay. And yes, I'm paying for premium
It just turns itself back on in a couple of weeks. Dark patterns ahoy.
Put your mouse up in the header on or near the scrollbar, scrolling will flow below to the video list.
It's even worse on mobile. You don't even need to hover for an autoplay video to show in your history.
This may be a dumb question, but when you have video doing autoplay (as in the video starts playing while you're scrolling looking at multiple videos - you haven't clicked on one), does it show up in your watch history?
Just tested. If you hover for 10s+ then it does get added to your watch history.
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?
Because of excessive things like this, I often point at my screen with a pen now and leave the mouse alone. Or take notes on a different laptop to avoid this stuff.
This drives me absolutely nuts on Netflix too, perhaps more so.
> This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over
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.
That setting can be fairly sticky. Mine has stayed off since I initially disabled it, shortly after they added the "feature". I have no idea why it's not sticky for you. Maybe they fuck with me less because I have premium?
I don't have premium and it's sticky for me but only on a single computer, I have to reset it if I switch computers or browsers. Same with dark mode. So maybe it's stored as a cookie and they wipe their cookies?
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> It resets itself every 15 days or so
Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?
Constantly. They also keep resetting the settings to not show shorts or video games in the feed.
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.
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It seems to do that all the time. Try hiding YouTube shorts and they just come back.
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Many websites do this. Facebook resets your feed sorting preferences, as does LinkedIn (sort by Recent, then refresh the page, it will be Top again).
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> Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?
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.
not op, but have seen the same.
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.
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If you are not being sarcastic, yes, it happens all the time. Probably to maximize whatever metric they're measuring.
I'm fearing the day they'll just remove that toggle for good.
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See also: Spotify's "repeat" functionality. I turn it off whenever I see it on, but somehow it's always back on within a few days.
In addition to what others said, they gaslight users by regularly resetting blocked accounts from recommendations. They also lose your play history after a while and start showing old videos you've watched as never been viewed.
You can also set this in your browser with the _reduce motion_ parameter.
Absolutely no sites, including YouTube, honour the parameter. But you can at least tell the site that you'd prefer it another way.
> You can also set this in your browser with the _reduce motion_ parameter.
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.
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> It resets itself every 15 days or so
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?
> I pay for YouTube Premium
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.
> It resets itself every 15 days or so, but at least one can have some peace in the meantime.
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.
I set that a long time ago and it never disabled. Maybe something with your browser?
I too found that my auto play setting was ignored. this is in the YT app.
A sea of perfectly crafted misleading YouTuber pog faces isn’t necessarily better than autoplaying previews.
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.
This bugged me so much and yet I ended up noticing a simple workaround: keep the mouse in the top bar where the search box is.
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.
I know this is just a weird workaround, but you can put your mouse cursor on top of the scroll bar. The scroll wheel still works like normal there (at least in my tests on Linux / Firefox).
> you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over
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.
100% what I was going to say. Some team's dashboard somewhere has "number of auto plays" and it's an important metric for them.
Or your theory and its view fraud for ad or metric purposes.
Hmm, on one hand I agree that autoplaying videos should be illegal but on the other hand the clickbaitiness of YouTube thumbnails has reached a point where it's almost better. (cue deArrow comment)
Why I do agree, the autoplay is a distraction preventing me from reading the video title and which channel posted it. Also, the clickbaitiness ends up being a feature for me: they have a specific "style" that's recognizable almost immediatly. A bit like AI-generated images, that have some eerie feeling to them. This way, I know I don't want to watch them.
Which ones are misaligned? At least the ones shown to me are perfectly aligned on my computer (both Safari and Chrome on a Mac).
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
It's probably an adblocker, I explained why they get misaligned ([is-in-first-column] attribute adding extra margin) if a video gets hidden and the rest flow to fill in its place here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43848061
This bit of information makes the entire thread hilarious to read.
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.
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The video grid is mind boggling now, they keep making the thumbnails bigger, and now they don't even show two rows of 3, it's a row of 3 then a row of 3 but with only 2 links! There's a giant blank box for no reason!
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!
Do you have an ad blocker? I've always seen blank boxes in the spots where ads would have gone.
It's worse, I pay for Premium so there should be no place set aside for ads.
> I find the autoplay so annoying
Me too! So I turned them all off:
Kind of forgot how horrible they were until I saw your comment.
In the browsers I use it switches itself back on about every four to five days on each of the four or so devices I use YouTube on. Not sure if this is a limitation of the browser local storage policies or if YouTube are 'helpfully' trying to convince me to like this 'feature' that I absolutely hate.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who gets annoyed by these details.
I never noticed that weird space between videos not stopping autoplay--I always just kept moving my mouse around until it stopped. You can start by entering the thumbnail space, but to stop it you have to enter another thumbnail space or get very close to it--the main spacing between won't stop autoplay. There's hysteresis between the start/stop edges.
>I find the autoplay so annoying
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.
> I find the autoplay so annoying because it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage.
If anything, I feel like that this is by design to hyperstimulate their core audience seeking instant gratification.
I have to admit I like autoplay… because the entire video will play, and it will never show ads. I often watch YouTube videos from the homepage entirely in autoplay and just zoom the browser in.
Irritating, but the quality is fine for most things and I save a few minutes not watching ads.
I personally love the autoplay (on hovering), as often I just want to see some part of the video without having to click on it and see a bunch of ads before any playback.
I thought i was the only one! I did realize at some point that you can avoid it if you hover on the left or right of the main grid. Still very annoying though
Why do you even need _different teams_ for the homepage ?
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)
"Why do you even need _different teams_ for the homepage ?"
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.
> and a list of videos
Are we just going to gloss over this like the list of videos is random? haha
Of course no, the search is handled by a different team, but does that team also work on the frontend ? I would expect them to have a quite different set of skills from those that do frontend work, at least at Google's size.
And if not the case, I would expect at least one team to be responsible for the final result
Generating a list of video IDs is different from rendering them on the page.
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Because everyone always runs A/B tests to decide whether to add a feature, but never runs them to decide whether to remove one.
To be fair you've started to answer it yourself: I'd bet 'search' is at least one team.
The homepage has many similarities to a landing page / marketing funnel.
You can disable autoplay. Both on desktop and on mobile (not sure about TVs)
It's buried in the settings but it's there.
It's stored in a cookie or the browser local storage and "conveniently" forgotten every few days for me.
it had never reset for me even once, so I'm not sure what's that about
If you didn’t look away fast enough then they want to count it as a view so they can profit.
I always open videos in new tabs and they start from the beginning.
> This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over.
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.
NewPipe is the better app by far in terms of usability, despite having no budget in comparison. It's impressive how far you can get by just not adding bs
> it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage.
Wait what? Thumbnails are useless. DeArrow has been god sent.