Comment by InMice
7 months ago
Thank you for writing this post! I opened youtube a few days ago to this as well. On a 24" 1440p monitor its ridiculous. It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this. Thank you again for writing this post. After searching it seems like they've been "testing" this in segments for a while now.
As a result I installed the "Control Panel for Youtube" chrome plugin and Im able to fix it back to 6 videos per row. I also found I could make shorts play in the traditional youtube player by default - which is an added relief.
You assume the UX team has any say in any of this.
Some of the revelations from the various lawsuits against Google by the US and other governments over the years have been about this.
The company replaced leaders who cared about users with leaders who cared about revenue optimization and those leaders changed the direction of the company to what we all see in all of their products these days.
I think this change came from the UX team.
Relevant articles:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/simplicity-vs-choice/
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/short-term-memory-and-web-u...
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/working-memory-external-mem...
Their design/UX team 100% had a hand in it. Just look at Google's design blog, it's complete dogshit.
"It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this."
Unfortunately UX teams aren't actually paid to make great UX, especially at large corps and any place ad-driven. They're paid to move the metrics and move the revenue line.
the question then becomes why do these bad UX/UI design makes higher revenue (and what makes them game the metrics too)?
Most likely what happened is some MBA ran a short A/B test of smaller vs. bigger video thumbnails, and the A/B results showed more "engagement" with the larger size thumbs, and so, of course, to meet his/her performance goals, the MBA had the page altered to the version that showed "more engagement".
I think it also helps them figure out which videos keep people on YouTube longer. If I scroll to a section of the page that has 6 videos, and I stare at them for 10 seconds, then scroll down, they'll know that one or two of those videos must have been somewhat interesting. But if I stare at 6 videos, then scroll away 2 seconds later, it knows that nothing in that batch was worthwhile.
The fewer videos they have in focus at a time, the more accurate their algorithms can be.
>It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this.
this is the story of the big company web sites
- huge budget
- best programmers
- terrible design
- terrible usability
- doesnt make sense
- gets worse over time
it's unreal. seen on many major sites.
Yes, but they have the largest amount of video content, so they have us by the balls.
And yet they make searching that library as painful as it can be so they can funnel you into an engagement pit
Yes, this my experience all the time. it's insane.
It's not enough to have hindustantimes.com articles for local American news on google-- even YouTube must be sacrificed. The rivers of enshittification must flow.
It's infuriating that a plugin/extension is needed to bring back what should be the a setting, if not the default, in the UI for this.
This is inevitable when a company has a revenue model where they claim to serve both users and advertisers. The wants of each will always be diametrically opposed. The customer with the deepest pockets always wins, which are the advertisers.
I'm also starting to think that no large company will ever act in the best interest of their customers unless required to do so by regulation. As long as those customers are individuals.
Maybe the regulation we need is that companies like Google can't have "ad supported" products that are simultaneously sold as products to users. Either you're selling a product to users, or really running an advertising platform. It can't be both.
[flagged]
Could I implore you to please stop breaking the site guidelines? I don't have the energy to even list all the times we've asked you already.
I don't want to ban you, but you're making it increasingly difficult not to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Ah yes, but front-paging a headline that implies colleagues at YouTube are blind, that establishes a tone of reasoned civil discourse?
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Perhaps the incentives of said UX team don't align with those of the user. They might be optimizing for maximal time spent on the site, for instance.
Yup, and that's what I meant by them turning the pain dial all the way towards money. Presumably they can run A/B tests and will no doubt be able to prove that this change makes them $X more money (since it's 1/6 a full screen ad after all). At the cost of being a miserable tasteless change.
The YouTube team has been blindly chasing monetization at the expense of their website being useful and pleasant for a while now. Unfortunately it seems they can get away with it. I wrote this post to just shake my fist at the cloud
I’m going to take up smoking because Philip Morris says I should.
Microsoft's adware and spyware was designed by one of the wealthiest companies in the world, so it's good for you. Google's ad business is the most sophisticated on the planet, so their spying and tracking and reporting your location to the government is good for you, you're just too dumb to understand. The USA, one of the most powerful and advanced countries in the world has suspended FDA testing of dairy. Since you can't possibly know better, this must be a good thing.
This is called "appeal to authority" and it's a pretty unintelligent logical fallacy. Do better next time. Maybe read a book or two?
>This is called "appeal to authority" and it's a pretty unintelligent logical fallacy. Do better next time. Maybe read a book or two?
This is called ad hominem, and has no place here.
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