Comment by matsemann
7 months ago
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.
The intention was that some product manager wanted their name/team to have made impact at the quarterly review.
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cats _are_ evil indeed
Careful there are programmers here watching. Pretend to like the bird.
Good thing they're fucking blind I guess.
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Hey! Don't blame us programmers for new features! We don't usually write the user stories!
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All the "The opinions stated here are my own, not necessarily those of my employer" googlers are silent.
Why would you be on HN if you weren't a programmer?
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.
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Hissssss!
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.
It would probably hurt more than help, by way of retention metrics.
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.
Shh
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.
Actually, when I uploaded stuff on YouTube I’d notice sometimes that it was best to, even if the source footage was 1080p, upscale / upload it at 4k or 8k resolution so that people with sufficiently good internet could view it without as much compression. (In fact, when the original video uploaded is upscaled to 4k, even the 1080p version of the final video looks closer to the source footage)
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
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The desktop issue was an intentional change that happened sometime in like 2017 or so.
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.
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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.
I'm using Revanced - it removes a lot of shit like this.
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.
My problem is I get high resolution (1080p) even if I want 240p!
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.
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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
Triggering autoplay by accidentally hovering does add videos to your history though, which is annoying.
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