Tell HN: YouTube's web UI just got even worse

I was just thinking the same thing this morning using the Play Store dev console, which reminded me of Cloud console. Everything is randomly jumbled into a bunch of menus on the left. I can't remember where anything is.

Definitely. Were you aware that Google search will never return more than 400 results? Most people don't run into this because they use the default of 10 results per page and it takes 38 pages. But I use 100 per page and that's only 3 page of results. I can (and do) scan through that in under a minute. http://googlesearchonlyreturns400results.lol/

Google search has been severely gimped. And it's not alone. Bing too will only ever return under 900 results. The days of surfing the web are over. The tools to do so no longer exist. Now the searchable web it's just whatever has been posted on a corporate walled garden in the last year.

you could also filter by oldest first.

In the dropdown there was oldest, and they had been playing with a shorts/videos toggle

Thanks, i'm going to check this out.

I hate how youtube doesn't just show whats new from my subscribed content creators, it's insane to me that instead is a bunch of random crap and I miss content from the people I have already told the algorithm I want to see.

Hoping this has a way of just showing the content from the creators I want to watch, trying to have a more balance digital life and remove the crap these companies put on you, while keeping up to date with stuff that is interesting to me, it's always a difficult battle.

Am I missing something, or is there no sorting option beyond channel?

That's what drives me nuts about Youtube, is that I can't put "science" youtubers in to a particular, very narrow category separated from other elements. This seems like the feature that would make Youtube infinitely more useful. I can't count how many times I've had to bounce back and forth through the shitty subscription view trying to associate some infinitesimally small avatar with a tutorial video I watched two months ago. Somehow I inevitably miss it, too.

Of course there's no incentive for Google to do this, but these other guys..?

How does this differ from Invidious?

I'm using https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp to download my favorite videos, and after years of using it, its worth the effort. Many good memories would have been inaccessible otherwise.

    curl -X POST --data-urlencode "url={{url}}" http://{{address}}:8080/yt/q

This is really important. I've got 700 GB (and growing) of archived YouTube videos. Started downloading them a few months ago because I had noticed older stuff disappearing.

Who knows how many videos in my specific sub-interest (ASMR videos, for the curious) are already lost forever. I try not to think about that. I've got a representative sample archived and am working to keep up with the new stuff that gets posted. Anything added to the archive is picked up by Jellyfin for later perusal. From here I can create playlists, tweak metadata, etc...

A video or two being taken down for creative reasons by the author is one thing. YouTube making executive decisions to delist videos or channels is entirely different.

Google has had it too good for too long with YouTube being the de-facto video host of the Internet. Society at large is at fault for buying in so completely.

I just want important examples of an interesting art form to stand the test of time. And if you want something done right...

Funny because it's been a few months that the algorithm has been getting worse at giving personal suggestions. I used to have a lot of videos I enjoyed on my feed (maybe 75% of the time I didn't have to scroll to find something I'd be willing to watch) and now I often end up scrolling a lot to find a suitable suggestion. And when I watch one all I get as a suggestion is all of the things I didn't want before + another video from the same channel of the video I just watched.

I don't know if people experience the same but I feel like I'm just being fed whatever is trending now instead of things I actually want to watch.

MoreAdsMoneyTube

I recently wrote a browser extension for myself that allows me to filter out videos from the YouTube search results that come from Verified channels. The reason I did this is that some search terms get completely overwhelmed by mainstream media channels, and they happen to all have the Verified checkmark.

Turns out there's very little of the "you" in YouTube anymore. I remember a day when you could type in any given search term and there would be videos from everyday people arguing for one thing or another, or showing you how to do a thing without totally shilling out for dinner kits or mattresses. I was surprised to find that even the least controversial topics yield very little. When it comes to YouTube, it seems very few everyday people just vlog or express themselves anymore. Everything has to be a podcast, everything has to be sponsored, everything needs graphics and studio lighting, everything has to not piss off the wrong group, everything has to constantly retread safe topics, and so on.

What a boring place YouTube became. The only reason I still use it is because NewPipe still works and TikTok just seems like a den of mental illness.

Also, I do find my extension useful. If I'm searching for videos on a topic involving science or technology, I really don't need a bunch of mainstream popsci bullshit. Unfortunately, it only works for Firefox.

GooTube

I've noticed few months ago that Metallica channel didn't had any sorting options. I could only switch between uploads and past live streams.

Usually bottom line efficiency (less surface area to maintain, fewer staff needed etc) drives action more than a long tail of user value. Don’t ask about use case value ask about business value. Don’t like it, well I agree but don’t be surprised that companies aren’t a project to deliver value to humanity.

If it’s no longer an option, the platform can now control that lever with no indication of why. See how Facebook sorts the news feed for you? Oh, it doesn’t? That used to be a user option right up top.

I read here in HN (whatever that means to you) that Product Owners in the Youtube team have an incentive to improve certain metrics if they ever want to be promoted.

I can imagine a "Watch Later" product owner thinking that if he removes a certain control, he can game the stats and say the feature is seeing more use - securing his promotion.

We see this in public administration all the time, no reason to think private enterprise would be any different.

More data = bigger indexes = much much more complexity and cost involved in simple filtering.

> why is there such a mania for reducing sort/finest options

Apple started the minimalist, option hiding, functionality axing, 1984-ish control freak movement. They even got away with selling phones without chargers, making $40 billion on lightning cables sales.

Just blame Apple.

Designers gonna design. Even if it's a stupid mess. I wonder why nobody from Google ever shows up when there is negative feedback.

On that hand: Google never cares about feedback, you can't submit it, if you can it gets ignored.

Because allowing users to control how they use the platform is not viable in today's world.

From an engagement standpoint, the ideal Youtube is one where you can't actually view a list of videos from a specific channel at all. Or search for videos. Or anything really that isn't just watching whatever set of videos the algorithm thinks will maximize your engagement at that time.

The web in general is moving in this direction at a fast pace and the cause for all of this is one thing: phones. That's it. There's an increasingly massive number of people that spend hours a day staring at their phones mindlessly scrolling through tiktok, twitter, etc. to waste their time away when they have nothing better to do, simply consuming whatever content is fed to them, giving absolutely no thought to what they're seeing beyond how much it entertains them in that moment. They don't want to look for specific videos, they don't want to watch a specific channel, they just want to be kept busy by an algorithm. These people are insanely easy to please and will consume for hours at a time, watching plenty of ads. The more people start behaving like this, the more money these platforms make.

I think it in large part comes down to how the performance assessment process manages PMs at an org like Google. When you're measured at work on your success in 'launching' things, and the evaluation metric comes down to your personal idea authorship and impact generated, there's a profound need to extinguish other paths. An incremental improvement is insufficient, you need to have launched / authored / designed, and provided personal outsized impact. Or as an engineer, played some leading role in making this vision reality. The organization as a whole is constantly on the hunt for these units of work, because the internal metrics encourages this. X launched and replaces Y is a good story to tell the promo committee. Iterating on someone else's design is career suicide.

They probably ran an A/B test and whomever is in charge at YouTube was thrilled that the B test resulted in people clicking around more. Engagement!

People who's search term history looks like this:

<funny videos> <cats> <harry styles new gf> <steroid cycle> <apple or pc>

My best, charitable guess is that their goal is to make YouTube as easy to use and low-friction as possible for anyone. For all of us here, using technology is second nature, but for a lot of people, especially in 3rd world countries where I imagine YouTube is expanding, adding another button means adding a nontrivial mental overhead for those people

To many, a simpler product is more appealing to a greater number of users. I feel like the idea of "convention over configuration" went to an unnatural extreme in the world of product design - every choice you give a user is an admission that you as the creator of the app don't know what the user wants in this particular case, and you have to let them tell you. For this reason, you may want to stick to what you know.

At the same time, there is some pipe dream that the app can just give the user a 100% ideal experience with virtually no input on the user's part. What this really means is less optionality for users who want it.

Lastly, in any company there are going to be people fighting against complexity to keep things maintainable, scalable etc. The product gets sacrificed for the organization.

Music channels are this weird, broken mess; some channels are weirdly split into two under the hood and which one you get depends on where in the UI you click ( try it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aajhC6GjK30 -- the icon and the artist name right next door under the video go to two different YouTube channels ). Playlists are sometimes replaced with Albums except it doesn't work right, and there's a bug where the infinite scroll repeats the first chunk of options forever when browsing albums. I assume the lack of sorting is just an oversight in the Music Artist template, because it's not like they tested anything else about it.

That happens a lot with music channels, which tend to aggregate videos uploaded across multiple channels but are labeled as coming from one channel. I’m not sure they opted to remove the option.

it annoyed me too so made a chrome extension to add it back: https://github.com/sw-yx/youtube-browser-extension

With this many extensions you could write your own frontend :)

I use SponsorBlock and uBlock quite heavily but you're missing out on Home. The recommendations are surprisingly good.

For me, it basically takes a guess what topics and themes I find interesting and pulls content around them. Automatic notifications are also pretty good.

YouTube figured out that I like interviews on a certain channel and nothing else, or Ukraine war updates from another channel but not their regular content. Probably through simple similar audience trick but solid selection nevertheless.

For whatever reason, it cannot apply this knowledge to shorts which are dreadfully bad.

This is interesting to me- I'm curious to hear how people use it. I do one of two things:

- search duckduckgo, go to the "videos" tab, then I end up on youtube if that's where the video is.

- go to youtube.com, use the search, pick the video.

- I don't ever like/subscribe/comment on anything.

Enhancer for Youtube lets me setup the UI the way I like it.

Yes, you probably are one of a tiny group.

Youtube power is in its recommendation engine. I discovered amazing content through this engine. You say you come to watch what you want, but how do you initially fill the "subscription" page without exploring first?

There can be various levels of exploring. Maybe visiting the home page only once a month. But the distribution capabilities are what makes Youtube what it is.

Personally, the majority of my Home page are videos from my subscribed channels. I get the occasional suggestions for related content from other channels, but I'd say 8/10 times the suggestions are good ones for me.

My typical usage is:

* Go to Home page * Add highly relevant videos to my Watch Later playlist * View the videos from Watch Later, like/dislike as appropriate * Rinse and repeat

I'm trying to give Shorts a shot. I particularly like them for viewing podcast shorts, but I've noticed the suggestions are taking a longer time to give me 'relevant' videos. Some of the Shorts are totally random, while others are from my Subscribed channels. I make sure to like/dislike as appropriate, and I've noticed a slight improvement in a week's time.

I blocked the domain which serves thumbnail images.

Pages are amazingly clean now.

When I mouseover a video with an interesting title, the preview appears.

How can you block Shorts using uBO? Tried a few methods but none of them worked!

An extra shoutout to "DF Tube (Distraction Free)" extensions[0] which have some of those UI zappers pre-programmed.

I use YouTube like this! Definitely going to implement some of your suggestions.

[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distractio...

I do the same thing. I also have search/watch history turned off.

.. and in addition, why not use yt-dlp (or similar) to watch without the zillion ads and in full control of when and what you consume?

I do all of the above, except the Shorts filter because I didn't know how to do that. Would you be willing to share this?

YouTube is so much better when you remove all the little overlays and dark-patterns meant to get you to watch something else at all times.

YouTube is also unbearable without Clickbait Remover For Youtube. It changes the thumbnails to a frame from the video.

Linus' channel is particularly horrible without this.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...

You go to the subscriptions page? I've been subscribed to channel RSS feeds for a year or so now, never even go to YouTube to "browse" because the interface is so awful.

I'd like to figure out how to filter Shorts from my RSS feeds, but my preferred channels almost never use them so it hasn't been a big deal. The only other annoyance is live streams, which seem to debut on my RSS feed several hours before they're actually live (with no clear information about the "live-iness" of the video).

I block out all comments. Those are likely all bots or people indistinguishable from bots, I use grease monkey and a javascript script to block it out, I also use another one to be able to increase the playback speed beyond the arbitrary 2x limit.

But getting the clean google-videos layout which was just a video player and a search bar can be done entirely with ublock :D

You can watch all your youtubes on vlc: just press open network stream and copy paste the link. this gives you more features through vlc than you can shake a stick at...

My only interaction with youtube is clicking on a link from another site, or searching for something on google and clicking on the link from their. I never navigate within youtube, nor click on any other videos.

I'm the other way round: I _do_ use the recommendation engine, but I click "not interested" on anything that isn't a music video and make sure to only have music videos in my likes. Oh and of course adblock. Newpipe for mobile.

This works OK, although it tends to promote the same things over and over, seemingly at random.

"Try YouTube TV. "

This popup always shows up in my account no matter how many times I dismiss it. Very annoying.

Any way to remove this with uBO? I tried a few ways but it ended up not working well

> Only go on the Subscriptions page

For this I just use the web feeds. Creators are free to hop platforms and my workflow won’t need to change.

It might be because I've got a large and diverse enough set of channel subscriptions, but the Home page is surprisingly good at recommending good quality new channels and videos.

I don't think I could use YT without SponsorBlock and uBO. The SponsorBlock outage of the last few days really made me aware how much time is wasted on those sponsored segments, intro reels, and interaction reminders.

I love it when videos have a SB "skip to highlight" timestamp -that 10 minute video of the creator rambling on and on is now a 10 second video of the slow-motion moneyshot.

Nope! I did almost exactly what you described before ejecting altogether and consuming my subscriptions via RSS + a static site I generate hourly (linked in a top-level comment).

I recognize that people value YouTube for it's recommendation engine. That was never the draw for me; I just want a place to watch videos from creators I like. Overall, I found the recommendations to not work for me; they were overall noisy and distracting. Someone asked me once "well how do you find new content?", which I found hilarious.

I use it like this:

* Never go to https://youtube.com to find anything. Only go to YouTube when it's a known link you found on another site. I don't need recommendations or ads

* Copy the URL, paste it into yt-dlp

* Wait a few seconds for the video to download and watch it in my viewer of choice with no crap attached.

I'm not as extreme, but >90% of my YouTube watching is via the channel RSS feeds (which I get sent to my email and filtered into "Videos" and "Videos Background" folders). Then 10% of the time if I am out of subscribed videos and want to see something new I scroll the homepage. I find that I rarely appreciate the recommendations below the videos but sometimes the homepage is ok.

This is exactly how I browse as well. I have uBlock hiding all links that could possibly lead me to the home page, as well the sidebar, and post video recommendations. The only content I consume is from the 'Subscriptions' page.

I also usually watch from subscriptions (I am subscribed to 100s of channels). But I do like the home page and recommendations for discovering new channels! In my experience it actually captures what I like to watch a lot (perhaps because I subscribe to a lot of stuff and like many videos).

I don't. I'm so off the chart in personality trait openness I have to see new stuff all the time. And not just any new stuff. It's annoying.

Set aside the custom uBO filters and add "Remove Youtube Suggestions" to your arsenal. You can block a huge array of UI elements.

I too only do subscriptions, watch everything my subscribed channels put out by placing them in my playlists (custom watch later lists for attention spans/activies), and only find other channels through my current channels. If you don't watch everything from specific channels (some big ones really pump them out), I recommend PocketTube's Subscription manger (and playlist manager).

Youtube hates us. It takes away tools for us to watch how you and I want, and refuses to add basic tools to playlists like "removed all watched" and "sort by length". I'm subscribed "watch later" still exists. They want you to just watch "recommended" videos one after the other like tik-tok-television.

The problem I have is that I dont have a Google account. So I basically can't even use the website except through the recommender.

There needs to be a "Don't show me this type of video ever again."

I recently watched some of the trial of the mass murderer who killed a bunch of people at a parade in Wisconsin.

Now almost my entire youtube feed is things like "Trial lawyer REACTS to Darrel Brooks VERDICT!" - just absolute click bait garbage. I hate it, and I genuinely don't know how to make it go away.

I think in the Android app that's only a feature for some videos if you have Premium. Never tried it in the browser.

This works fine in Brave using a feature called 'brave playlist' (or something like that)

You can use this Android add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...

It's possible with

1. Youtube Vanced (deprecated but still works),

2. ReVanced (in development),

3. Brave mobile browser,

4. NewPipe (opensource, doesn't support most account-based features),

5. YouTube Premium and their regular app.

Last time I tried this (a few weeks ago), the procedure turned out to be:

1. play video

2. turn off screen

3. video stops, turn on screen

4. pull down the menu from the top, showing a firefox notification with a play button

5. click play

6. turn off screen again

This is on Android 11, YMMV.

This is possible on iOS with the Vinegar extension. In case you are considering Apple or have family/friends with this problem too.

It's also possible with invidious[0].

[0]: https://invidio.us/

I think this is a YouTube Premium feature now.

This happens to me. I never realized that anything happened and that the URL changed, which means I would naturally click the back button again, and it takes me to the previous-previous page (which is usually a new tab for me). It's very frustrating.

Edit: this happens on Firefox on Windows. I haven't tried Chrome.

Yep. On Firefox, haven't tried on other browsers. At this point I just hit "back, back, forward" without thinking about it when I see it happen.

Happened to me as well, now I click the search button to go back.

Yes, that is very annoying. In general YouTubes UX is getting worse constantly. They moved the read more button for video descriptions up and to the right directly behind the end of the description text, which makes it almost completely invisible. Even now that i know where to look, it is still very hard to find. The like button is now only an outline, which is filled when active. I find this confusing, which lead to me unliking and reliking a video because i could not determine the state of the button visually. Was never a problem, back when the thimb turned blue. The site is quite sluggish in general, at least for me.

Overall YouTube makes for a nice example of how modern design often makes the experience worse

This has been driving me mad.. I'm pretty sure I only started seeing this problem maybe a month ago? It's the cardinal sin. Don't break the back button!

Yeah, same problem on Firefox, I've thought that this may be because of one of the extensions I use, but after disabling everything it was still happening...

Yep. Firefox (seems to be a pattern in the replies). Back-back-forward every time on YouTube now. It's terrible.

Yes. There's all sorts of bugs. The buggiest thing is the queue. Each time they fix a bug it seems other weirdness pops up. Having built a similar queue for the web UI of a music streaming app, I know it can be complicated, but surely it can't be this complicated. For a while it was unusable for me because I like building a queue and reordering the items, and sorting didn't work at all. The queue should be one of the primary things that automated tests and QA should be able to track pretty easily and be treated as first class.

Yep, it's completely jacked. Very annoying. Of course, back in Twitter also randomly loses your place, too. I guess it's one of those "we're a big deal site now" checklist items: Fuck up the back button.

Yes, also there's been a bug in comment textfields for at least 3 years: press enter twice in a row and the cursor won't move to the next line.

Yes, I run into this all the time in Firefox

Yes happens consistently with Safari. I guess YouTube engineers only test on Chrome ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

On a different note I have encountered a bug where I reach a page with a video title and description but the video being played does not match and is instead from another one. I think it has happened especially after going to a full page video from the homepage when there is a video in the mini-view being played and about to switch.

I don't know how it relates, but that bug seems resolved on wayland.

The push for shorts is somewhat ironic, because Youtube used to have lots of short videos in the early days. But then Youtube pushed everyone to inflate their video lengths, first with a recommendation algorithm that rewarded watch time, then with monetization that rewarded videos over 10 minutes (now 8 minutes). It took TikTok's success to show Youtube that users might like shorter videos.

But I'm not sure where Youtube is actually going with this. There's now "normal Youtube", "Shorts" and "Live" coexisting on the same platform, along with Premium exclusives and Youtube Music. All of them integrated somewhat awkwardly.

Yes thanks! The date of video disappearing is so maddening. It is so blatantly, obviously bad design that is beyond me how that could ever have happened.

Also agree with the sibling comment that youtube was _full_ of fun short videos, but they are Not for some reasons counted as shorts, and now there is this situation of channels with yers-old catalogues of short videos, except the newest ones are “shorts” and the oldest ones in exactly the same style are “just videos”.

???

Do you know what Twitch is? It's not a Youtube alternative in the slightest, and it was never meant to be.

>Amazon doesn't have user hostile attitude like Google.

Yes, not user hostile is exactly NOT how I would describe Amazon's trash heap that is Market

Don't mind all those counterfeit goods on Amazon.com.

Vimeo is more of a YT alternative than Twitch is.

I shut down YouTube's addictive tendencies through a couple of less extreme factors.

DF Tube (Distraction Free) web extensions are available[0] for Chrome and Firefox which cut down intrusive UI (comments, recommended videos, the home page). It's easy to clone and extend the add-on if you want to block more.

When I'm on mobile, I limit the recommendations I can't block by disabling/clearing YouTube watch history. The new UI is aware of how much worse the suggestions are and hides them altogether—which is exactly what I want.

From there, I try only look at my subscriptions feed and occasionally the trending videos page. This makes YouTube less overwhelming—even if I watch just as much content—because I'm in control of what I want to see.

Curious if anyone else uses YouTube like this!

[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distractio...