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Ask HN: New YouTube hover feature? Does anyone else find this annoying?

143 points by 37 ↗ HN
I noticed on the youtube homepage that I cannot hover over a video thumbnail without it getting big and auto playing a portion. Does anyone else find this annoying as hell?

I understand the argument about how people don't like change (which will probably be the first counter to my complaining) but this is somewhat overstepping a line for me.

What say you, HN?

113 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] thread
detaro
If you could scrub through the video by hovering over the play progress bar it'd be useful. Like it is it's kind of pointless, since I usually don't care about the previewing the intro of a video.
37
This is a unique and interesting point that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere in the thread.
protoax
I believe this is a feature on the mobile app.
jmole
I think the preview has been there for a little while. I like that feature.

The div zooming by 120% seems new, and I am not fond of it.

ksherlock
I hate it. You can disable it (for now at least) via Settings -> Playback and Performance -> Inline playback.
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FridayoLeary
Autoplay should be banned. Period. Also, hover menus should be strongly discouraged (they should really be banned as well but people must have the freedom to make mistakes).
james-skemp
Especially when they zoom/increase the size of the element.

I thought most designers learned back in the 2000s that you shouldn't make clickable elements increase in size on hover, for accessibility/usability reasons.

cc101
It is annoying. It interferes with my browsing.
throwawaysea
Another long standing annoyance is those links to other videos that pop up before my current video has ended. It always interferes with the last portion, usually when something important and climactic is being shown. There used to be a way to block these “annotations” but they removed it.
chris_wot
Oh god, those are the worst. Often you will be trying to watch the end of the video and you can't because they obscure text or other crucial images. Seriously, who at Youtube decided this was a good idea?
throwawayboise
So if creators start tacking 30 seconds of black on the end of their videos will that avoid this issue?
k12sosse
This reminds me of when they introduced the autoplay when scrolling on the mobile app. I'm fine with getting an audio-free preview, assuming I'm not on mobile data, but they originally started kicking the videos they'd preview into your history. I had a moderately well trained profile that kept my junk to a minimum but boy-oh-boy, all these "useless" (as in no value to me) YT shorts started invading my recommendations because of the feedback loop it gave itself.

I think I either finally found the option to not, or they reverted the change that put them into your history. Or maybe it's still happening. I've also noticed while scrolling on mobile (android) app, I found myself seeking the video preview, instead of scrolling up, because they enabled the ability to scrub these previews and my scrolling digit would often just land on the 5 pixel tall scrollbar element. Weird choices. Am a premium subscriber - I like to tailor my account to videos I want and take the time to deny suggestions and describe why in the hopes I get recommended less TikTok > YouTube repost junk.. did a pretty good job until they messed with it.

wpm
They definitely still show up in your watch history, at least on iOS.

What a dumpster fire of an app. I really don’t know how any of the people who work on it feel good.

jeffbee
People do quite a bit of complaining about the YouTube main page but I can honestly say that I have never once intentionally used it. Why would people go there?
james-skemp
I used to live by the subscriptions page, but for some reason interesting channel recommendations have been sneaking onto the home page for me.

YouTube still doesn't quite understand that if I happen to watch one video about cats, or a fish tank, that that doesn't mean it should suddenly show me only videos about those. Or that there's a large subset of videos that I don't really need to see today, since I just watched them yesterday (already discussed in a HN thread last week, IIRC).

So given that, you may want to give it another chance. Definitely set your expectations low.

37
I don't have a Alphabet or Google or YouTube account, and I greatly dislike the company, but I will say that their recommendations are usually pretty good.
itsbits
There is a bit of delay before popping bigger. Didn't affect my youtube browsing so far.
rmason
Do they actually do any user testing before launching a feature? Or did someone important at YouTube think it was a cool idea and greenlighted it.

How about doing a poll before a video asking people if they like the feature? If they answer no then ask if they'd like it turned off? Beats moving on to the next new feature.

knaik94
I know for a fact that they do a bunch of A/B testing at a time. The metrics they measure to decide if the change was effective isn't transparent. I wish there was a straightforward way but I imagine the "Send feedback" in the sidebar includes a way for them to see what experiments are active on your account.
lostdog
Did they write the headings of the report backwards maybe?
godDLL
They must be in discord of what they are measuring vs. what their vocal audience is. Their vocal audience is probably there to browse around and engage amongst themselves, while they are measuring retention and content engagement. Those user stories are not so subtly different.
daxuak
Annoying and I have a plugin to disable them.
knaik94
For me the delay on the home screen is long enough that I don't do it accidentally. It happens when I search as well and it's really useful when seeing if it's what I am looking for. I appreciate that it's muted. I have gotten used to resting the mouse cursor outside the thumbnail. I guess I changed my behavior without realizing, I can't remember when that feature was enabled for me.

I personally find it useful as long as the video stays muted while autoplaying. I love the mobile search even more where the subtitles on videos work in preview mode, I wish that feature was brought to desktop.

There is a "Send feedback" option in the sidebar. I am unsure if you need to be logged in to see it, I don't think so because YouTube in incognito has the the option send it too. I recommend you send feedback.

bayesianbot
The subtitles on desktop do work for me (and I agree that's a great function). I think you'll have to mess around your settings somehow. I got A/B tested to this hover feature months ago and the subtitles have been working all that time.
todorov84
I've blocked these popups and the suggestions overlay at the end of videos by using these rules:

  www.youtube.com##.ytd-thumbnail-overlay-loading-preview-renderer
  www.youtube.com##.ytd-video-preview
  www.youtube.com##.ytp-ce-covering-overlay
  www.youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element
  www.youtube.com##.ytp-cards
  www.youtube.com##.ytp-cards-teaser
  www.youtube.com##.ytp-cards-button-icon
37
Thanks! Where are you applying these rules? uBlock Origin? or will this just work with any adblocker type thing?
spoonsearch
It should work with pretty much all the ad blockers.
37
This completely worked for me (for now) with uBlock Origin in Firefox on Linux.

Thanks again! Much appreciated!

panick21_
So useful, thanks. I hate just random stuff popping up.
dominotw
i really like this feature and use it all the time.
Brajeshwar
If I remember correctly, this has been there for a while. You can disable it at

[YourProfile] > Settings > Playback and performance > Turn OFF the "Inline Playback" Button.

The weird thing is, this settings do not seem to stick when logging off and then in again. I remember setting this off few times.

Tarq0n
It’s pretty crazy how few options YouTube has for such a large website.
mort96
I don't seem to have that option? https://p.mort.coffee/fLT.png

I'm in Firefox, where the feature exists but looks a bit different. Maybe the setting only exists for Chrome.

Fuck Google and their consistent clearly intentional anti-Firefox behavior. Google's websites are in general the worst when it comes to cross-browser compatibility.

37
>Fuck Google and their consistent clearly intentional anti-Firefox behavior. Google's websites are in general the worst when it comes to cross-browser compatibility.

You'd think this might be grounds for some antitrust litigation, oh... wait a second.... I found a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_litigation

ps: I've never come across the coffeepaste before, but I love it. Especially love the man page at https://p.mort.coffee/ for example

mort96
Interesting how none of those lawsuits are antitrust related to their anti-competitive behavior in the browser or search engine markets, you 'd have thought that would be fertile ground for litigation.

Glad you like coffeepaste :) I made it a while ago since I had issues with all the other alternatives I found. Feel free to use my instance or set up your own if you want.

ffhhj
Really cool!

> The file will be deleted

> a while after the last read.

How long after?

mort96
It's configurable, but in my instance at p.mort.coffee, it's 30 days.
poopooracoocoo
Google's fight against Firefox isn't so visible on YouTube. I'd say it's mobile, Google Drive and their video calls. Google does a lot of A/B testing and I'm surprised someone on HN wouldn't blame that first. I'm not ruling out that Google may have done that against Firefox though. It's worth noting that YouTube's Polymer site was always very slow on Chrome too and it was never just about shadow DOM v0.
akomtu
This is "growth inwards": when a business unit can't keep growing outwards, it turns to this pathological mode where it squeezes out all value from its users and reputation. In practice, the corporate peons must find new ways to extract this value, regardless of whether it hurts the org in the long run.
37
The bottom line must grow every quarter, or the shareholders will not be happy!

(edit: I hate it!)

notatoad
I think it's a pretty innocuous change and I'm not sure it's worth anybody's energy to complain.

Why is it bad that the videos now get slightly bigger when you over over them? The auto-play on hover is not new.

endisneigh
https://www.youtube.com/account_playback

> Inline Playback -> Off

What exactly is overstepping about it? Just turn it off lol

ksec
>Just turn it off lol

Not an option on my account.

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tyingq
Same. No such option.
kiwijamo
Shows for me next to 'Browsing' (the last option/section).
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fuzzybassoon
Interestingly enough, I turned this off some time ago, and just yesterday, I noticed the hover behavior, and had to go back and turn it off again. I wonder if some / all of user prefs for this field got botched?

Thankfully, unlike sibling comments to mine, I still had the option and it worked no problem.

37
I don't have a YouTube account, so this is not an option it seems
ch_sm
Wow. Thank you.
37
Comments like this make me glad that I made the thread. HN can be pretty cool sometimes.
jhanschoo
I find it useful, ymmv. It's a better preview for me than the thumbnails they used to use, or the slideshow they were using before this change.

There's also a certain format on YT where a person says they are going to discuss X in the title, then wastes minutes belaboring on tangents and details before spending 5 seconds discussing X proper. This scrobbable preview helps me evaluate prior if their videos are worth watching.

ksec
Edit: Oh I completely misread it. Yes the autoplay on front-page was annoying as hell but it was only on for a few weeks and now it is off. They must be doing A/B testing.

I had not idea why I read it as thumbnails in player. I leave the original comments below in tact.

--

Interesting to see comments here so far.

I like it, a lot. I can now glance at the thumbnails and jump to section I am looking for. And the thumbnails are so fast it is near if not a native experience. ( I mean the thumbnails, not the actual playback experience which is far from native ) To be point I wonder how it is done. But I never had time to look it up.

Things I want would be Bitrate for Video and Audio in "Stats for nerds and better Skipping Video performance. Not sure why video experience in browser are always subpar. Especially considering most of my video are now consumed in browser.

leshenka
I usually scroll through YouTube and add videos I want to watch to "watch later". Before this change I could just hover on the video and click the button to add it to WL playlist. Now I need to hover, wait and click this unnecessarily big and ugly "ADD TO WATCH LATER" button
tatami
Yes this is massively annoying. Especially since the "old" watch later button will appear for a flash moment where it used to be.
DavidGetchel
For me, the autoplay was there and fine. The growing big is new, annoying and similar to Amazon/Netflix. There was no need to change it.
epistasis
This has severely limited my usage of Netflix. I'm pretty close to cancelling it.
foepys
You can disable autoplay for Netflix, weirdly only in the account settings that you cannot reach from any app but only in a web browser.
anon_123g987
Alternative to YouTube (same content, better UX/UI/frontend):

https://invidious.io/

https://yewtu.be/

37
Thanks! I appreciate this!

Does it use the same recommendation algorithm? I don't have a YouTube account but (sadly) do still watch a lot of the recommended videos

anon_123g987
No, I think there are fewer and different videos in the sidebar.
cercatrova
I quite like it, after having seen it in the, ahem, adult spaces. But seriously though, it's a good enough feature for just checking out whether a video is interesting enough to watch or whether the title and thumbnail are just clickbait, which they often are for making the creators money. It saves me a click or new tab which is even more annoying than hovering over a video.
akersten
> I quite like it, after having seen it in the, ahem, adult spaces.

Those of us old enough to have witnessed the early days of YouTube remember that their previous video-preview-on-hover feature was also lifted directly from those same adult spaces :)

numpad0
I remember attempts were made to improve upon by actually following through video contents and adding it to watch history, which not many in that industry did, if any, and were soon reverted back to exact same style as used in the said industry. I thought YouTube one upped the game, but they didn't. That was interesting.
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CSMastermind
They're also experimenting with rolling out 'most watched' graphs on the timebar when you're seeking in a video so you can see which parts are the most popular.

Personally I'm all for it. It's kind of embarrassing for Youtube to be lacking good usability features that adult entertainment sites have.

WHA8m
Once again, following applies: Criminals and the porn industry are the two common early adopters.
vagrantJin
It's not surprising that those industries are more than willing to pay a premium for innovation and execute. They can't survive on branding and marketing so must innovate to stay ten steps ahead of the competition just to stay afloat.
Swizec
I like the previews. The annoying part is that Cmd+click opens it both in a new tab (expected) and in the same tab (unexpected). Someone’s being cheeky with JavaScript “links” and for all the shit that Google devrels give everyone else about accessibility … akhem
37
This is the worst! I'm using Linux and Windows so its Ctrl, but the same thing happens... Surely this is a bug they will fix.
mod
I like the preview, but I don't like that youtube is basically playing the video (without audio) and if I watch 30 seconds, then click through, it starts me 30 seconds in.