I agree. The subscription model is actually pretty decent at allowing you to find stuff from the creators you care about without having a ton of algorithmic "for you" content shoved in your face.
Yes, obviously YouTube does still wield enormous power over what shows up on the home page and in the "watch next" queue, but it's still overall far less invasive than the tiktok/reels/shorts model, and gives me way less cause for anxiety about the political motivations of whoever is pulling the strings on that algorithm behind the scenes.
Non-sequitur aside, what specifically do you want to post on YouTube that's not allowed? To me it seems like you have to go pretty far off the rails before they'll step in.
- When I search for recent news e.g. "australian medical staff jewish" (current topic), all the results are left leaning responses. I would mostly prefer to see the original video without commentary and uncut, and also would like to see more right wing responses. (A lot of issues over the years that were right leaning would just surface late night comedians mocking the right wings perspective on such issues)
- Looking up medical or scientific claims that are "indisputable" e.g. climate change, covid. I was curious to see Kari Mullis speak about his claims around hiv/aids correlation but only one or two videos exist, I had to go to the alt-youtubes to find speeches and lectures he did.
For the first example: that’s not censorship? It’s just a bad algorithm. Also, I don’t even know what “left-leaning” means in this context; the top result is from the Australian national broadcaster, and seems pretty straightforward. No one thinks nurses murdering Israelis is a good thing.
For the second example: Mullis is literally insane, and you can still find his opinions on YouTube, as you yourself found. Did you try uploading those lectures you found yourself? I’ll bet money that they won’t be take down (except maybe for copyright).
To be a little less charitable: this is a persecution fantasy. The right wing is not being silenced by YouTube.
The down votes are kind of telling. There exists no censorship and anybody who says anything to the contrary has to be censored? If people don't like the answer, they should probably not ask the question.
Now you know why everybody loves the great leader. Because they make sure that the people who don't love him shut up.
I was born in a place where everybody agrees with everybody else on every issue, because if you don't agree in every detail you are shunned and shamed as a heretic or suspected enemy spy. Then you cannot have open discussion of anything except of discussing how much you hate people who don't think like you.
I quite agree with the YouTube policy with respect to health. Where it comes to health, I don't think that the layperson without the equipment and education to provide an opinion based in evidence should have a voice.
I will agree with you that the ban on RT comes selectively. The cited reason is that RT trivialized the Ukraine invasion, but the same criticism can be levied against the many news outlets that trivialize the Gaza genocide.
Youtube is probably the most reasonable of the social media websites now. Well it was until Twitter was fixed by Mr Musk, anyway.
People have been allowed to post crazy nonsense on YouTube for many years. For a short period they censored quite heavily (2020-2023ish) but theyve backed off. It has never been as bad as Twitter or Facebook were where milquetoast 2008 Obama would have been banned ten times over.
That song is directly inspired by the Pepsi nonsense; the lyrics and backing video [1] have some direct quotes. Definitely the first thing that comes to mind each time a multi-billion company decides to change their logo and nobody likes it.
"Redesign Your Logo" was actually directly inspired by this exact brand redesign document, so your instinct is well-founded! Here's a transcript of the official Spirit Phone commentary track where Neil mentions it:
I feel the same way when my AWS console asked me to take survey on the EC2 console. I replied that I don't know which version I was meant to comment on since it changes every other week, and that I hope someone gets there performance bonus. My favorite question was "it feels modern". Like just leave the damn thing alone. Rather than worrying about useless small tweaks like a gradient, make sure the core features of the product work.
A whole lot of nooks and crannies of the AWS console are missing major convenience UI features, and usually when a console is redesigned it solves some reasonably major pain points.
there's a chasm of difference between fixing something that's broken and redesigning. the vast majority of people will not recognize a slight shift in hue of YT Red or YT Magenta gradient, and of those that do most won't care or have their lives made better or have an improved world from it.
After reading this, I feel like Arthur Dent having an unshakable sense of the color magenta level of snark.
What’s frustrating about tech industry is that they are probably getting paid multiple hundred thousands of dollars for this. Meanwhile I know of engineers at Google who are being managed out for “performance reasons” after being gaslighted into working 60+ hour work weeks.
Ultimately, average engineers are not a valuable resource they can be replaced within hours.
Even a few actual good design talents is going to have a much bigger impact on product success than an entire room of average engineers who’s skill tops out at react spaghetti.
I often think about how much more cost effective some companies' products would be if they would decide their product is "done" and that they accepted moving on into a cash cow type of phase.
There are major websites and web-based products like Craigslist, Wikipedia, and Steam that are handling insane Internet traffic with comparatively tiny levels of staffing when compared to YouTube or other giants.
I think those companies have accepted that there is no rush to make major innovations or changes and that hiring a large army of talent is far less cost effective than having teams that are small enough for everyone to know each other.
> There are major websites and web-based products like Craigslist, Wikipedia, and Steam that are handling insane Internet traffic with comparatively tiny levels of staffing
Hacker News. (Not "planet scale", but very impressive traffic/staffing ratio.)
There's a lot that goes that you don't notice, or that you easily forget about when you make a comment like this.
The introduction of a gradient and accent actually enables and makes it more natural to use more eye-catching effects on the platform. For example, when a YTer says "subscribe", a rainbow (IIRC) animation plays on the subscribe button. When you like or subscribe, an animation plays that now has more color to it. These animations feel satisfying and I dare say have measurable impact.
At the same time, the changes are so subtle that users hardly notice a change that they will have difficulty getting used to, and also already present components do not look out of place if they don't get refreshed.
That is what an experienced design team is paid to do. Complaining about seeing no drastic change here is like complaining about engineers making no user-facing effect when they refactor the underlying systems in preparation for future developments.
A comment I made when I started noticing the magenta gradient at the end of the progress bar: it's a bit anxiety-inducing for those who remember needing to degauss their monitors, because it looks almost exactly like when you mess up a CRT with a magnet.
(Aside from that: not a fan, it makes the chrome of the video player more distracting.)
Oh, thankyou for finally naming it. I've had a vague sense of anxiety for months seeing that gradient - like something is wrong and I need to fix it somehow. I just had no idea why I felt that way until I read your comment just now.
I know I sound silly and dumb for feeling so strongly about something so small, but the gradient really gets on my nerves. It is indeed so subtle as to make it feel like something is wrong with the display, but not subtle enough that I don't notice it _every time_.
Similarly, the "glow" they introduced a while back makes it feel like I'm getting the worlds worst backlight bleed.
Mercifully I use FreeTube to watch YouTube which saves me from these design choices.
That glow I think you're referring to is "theater mode" and fortunately it can be disabled on the gear menu. It's incredibly distracting, especially in Firefox it can sometimes be laggy.
I think you mean "ambient mode". Theater mode is like the halfway point between normal-size an fullscreen-size.
As an aside, does anyone know of any good YouTube settings extensions? I usually open YouTube in incognito tabs to avoid the personalization "features", but this means none of my preferences around ambient mode and "stable volume" are saved.
These designers are grasping hard to justify their existence. Second part of the article harps on the importance of contrast yet the background is so overtly salmon it's almost impossible to read.
I literally can’t read this blog post because it keeps jumping to the top of the page to play the video again and again.
Maybe take 10% of the time you spent dreaming up new colors to just make your blog function like a regular page instead of adding a million weird animations?
Same here. It took six designers to change the color of the YouTube logo, but the design department of a company that built its entire existence on the web can’t build a functioning website.
Design is how it works. And your website doesn’t work.
They're professional designers, not HTML code monkeys, you insensitive clod!
Seriously, there are designers whose entire work output is PDFs or, more recently, stuff in L^HFigma, which lesser beings (read: developers) are expected to turn into functional HTML.
Nah. Every other website on the internet can figure out how to overcome those allegedly insurmountable challenges, so how about I continue using Safari and they do the same.
Perhaps spend less time worrying about changing the color of the YouTube logo for no tangible reason.
> Robyn: To give YouTube a sense of motion, we created a dynamic red-to-magenta gradient. For the second color, orange and yellow were strong contenders, but magenta felt like the most natural pairing with our new red. Interestingly, magenta doesn't often appear in the natural world, so it symbolizes the imagination and evolution that YouTube embodies. We also placed the gradient at a 45-degree angle with magenta on the right, signifying forward movement.
> There will be rich debates about the socioeconomic implications of Helvetica Light, and at some point, you will have to decide whether serifs are daring statements of modernity, or tools of hegemonic oppression that implicitly support feudalism and illiteracy.
any time i read quotes like that, i immediately start rolling my eyes that people actually believe the words being uttered. "symbolizes the imagination and evolution" yeah, that's what a color says to me. these are essentially Rorschach level tests where it says more about the person than anything factual
on no, it's definitely award nomination level for the effort/effect, and we all know it's just an honor to be nominated. i'm not sure if it's a "you really like me" level or not though
After reading justifications like that, I find it hard not to feel cynical about people who suggest and promote such changes. Am I missing something important, or is this really just a fig leaf covering busywork, promotions, and internal politics? Every time I’ve had to implement a "fresh redesign" as a developer, it always seemed to be about scratching an itch for a higher-up or a designer.
During the golden age of the Romantic period, it was not uncommon for writers to employ almost ludicrously UV-level prose to the works of famous composers.
I'll leave you with this particular critic's review of a piece of music by Gottschalk (a famous 19th century American composer). They are like "chants of the New World, chants which bring tears to our eyes, so much do they breathe of sadness and simplicity. One transports us to forests. . . another represents faithfully the indolent Creole swinging in his hammock. .. and what shall we say of the third? Does it not seem to be overwhelmed by that solemn silence and that solitude which one feels traversing those vast prairies at the foot of the Rocky Mountains?"
IMHO the reason LLMs are so proficient at these kinds of vapid flights of fantasy is that they must have ingested the entire fanfic library on Wattpad.
Also, in the Renaissance, scientists and writers often wrote ridiculous and over the top praises of their patrons who funded their work like Galileo did for Cosmo de Medici. Of course the way scientific funding is going, we might have to go back to that system.
In my masters, I took a few courses from design degrees.The assignment of the semester was to create a generative display in Cinder. I cobbled something together based on what I thought looked good.
A project partner took the task of retroactively assigning an "intention" to my result. "The lines meeting in the center symbolize a conversation between people...".
To my surprise, the examiner bought this and we ended up with a good grade. I feel like I learned a lot from this course.
I'm not saying that's what happened here, but if it did, we probably couldn't tell.
Doesn't sound like a good design teacher if they cared at all about intent, or even how long it took you.
I heard an anecdote from someone whose mom went to art school, about how she (the mom) would spend days and days painstakingly processing materials and meticulously conceptualizing and constructing pieces, and always felt sour when a party girl did nothing but get drunk/high for weeks and then just "poured paint on her tits" for her assignment, and got a better grade. But maybe pouring paint on her tits was actually more profound, even if unintentionally, than whatever her mom was up to. Effort, intent, is meaningless in creative practice.
The thing though is that neither the intent nor de post-hoc made up intent are relevant in the real world. Neither is he time/effort spend on needlessly elaborate processes. What matters is if the average user thinks it looks good or not.
I noticed this gradient and knew it didn't used to be there. I thought for a long time there was something wrong with my TV. I would walk around the room looking at the TV from different angles and would move the progress bar to different points in the video. I was looking at the color settings and other known-color images. Ultimately I'm glad I saw this article and I can stop thinking I've gone crazy out that my tv is broken!
I like the new colors tbh, but it's a very very very minor update and can't avoid speculating how much that thing cost Google, 5 x 300k/year salaries x ... 2 years maybe? Lol.
For the longest time I thought being an artist rarely paid. now, it seems that all you have to do is work for a tech company and market your "innovative" re-designs to the right people and you'll get paid big bucks for what amounts to little work.
I’ve never met an artist who would prefer to make money by making a mockery of their art. Only people who are already dead inside do this (which, admittedly, some in poverty are).
The page's background turns to fairly unpleasant pink once you scroll past the middle point. Is that the norm for design.google blog posts or is it some kind of subtle messaging about the new gradient?
Also the replacement of the mouse cursor with that negative-color circle is visually interesting, but it suffers a lot from input lag which gets on my nerves.
YouTube is such a horribly designed site. The best feature they've added in ages is the queue option, bet even that is busted as hell. Half the time an "add to queue" button appears on the thumbnail of the video, but the other half of the time it doesn't and you have to click the ellipsis menu. Even when you can click the button, it will select element of the page which leaves the video auto playing unless you hover back over it to stop. The queue itself disappears if you close and re-open the tab which is plain annoying. The video player itself sometimes breaks and requires me to reload the page. Ambient mode is annoying and I dislike it being on by default. Sometimes I click on a thumbnail but it has an on-hover action that spawn a link to their "about sponsored content" page right over the thumbnail where I wanted to click on the video, then when I hit the back button the home page has refreshed and the video I wanted to watch is gone.
I sense that, albeit slowly, big companies are moving back to more complicated skeuomorphic-like designs.
Here YouTube’s adding a (very subtle) gradient. Better examples may be: compare the newest macOS icons to those from the Sierra (?); and the new Reddit logo has a slight 3D effect, while I remember the old one was flat.
Allegedly styles and fashion go in cycles, so maybe minimalism is going out of fashion. I doubt we’ll get old YouTube or OS X Snow Leopard, but we’ll get something different.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadWhy does anyone ever implement JavaScript that tries to mess with your scroll position? Like, ever? Can we stop this madness?
2. There isn't a big opportunity really. The current alternatives are reflective of that lack of opportunity.
Yes, obviously YouTube does still wield enormous power over what shows up on the home page and in the "watch next" queue, but it's still overall far less invasive than the tiktok/reels/shorts model, and gives me way less cause for anxiety about the political motivations of whoever is pulling the strings on that algorithm behind the scenes.
- When I search for recent news e.g. "australian medical staff jewish" (current topic), all the results are left leaning responses. I would mostly prefer to see the original video without commentary and uncut, and also would like to see more right wing responses. (A lot of issues over the years that were right leaning would just surface late night comedians mocking the right wings perspective on such issues)
- Looking up medical or scientific claims that are "indisputable" e.g. climate change, covid. I was curious to see Kari Mullis speak about his claims around hiv/aids correlation but only one or two videos exist, I had to go to the alt-youtubes to find speeches and lectures he did.
For the second example: Mullis is literally insane, and you can still find his opinions on YouTube, as you yourself found. Did you try uploading those lectures you found yourself? I’ll bet money that they won’t be take down (except maybe for copyright).
To be a little less charitable: this is a persecution fantasy. The right wing is not being silenced by YouTube.
Free debate on covid-19 and the vaccines were suppressed and banned on YouTube. Maybe still is, I don't follow that.
Those are probably the biggest censorship issues with YouTube. And more are probably to come, as the world spins around.
They were very open about it: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/13813322
Now you know why everybody loves the great leader. Because they make sure that the people who don't love him shut up.
I was born in a place where everybody agrees with everybody else on every issue, because if you don't agree in every detail you are shunned and shamed as a heretic or suspected enemy spy. Then you cannot have open discussion of anything except of discussing how much you hate people who don't think like you.
As for Covid videos, it is official YouTube policy: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/13813322
I will agree with you that the ban on RT comes selectively. The cited reason is that RT trivialized the Ukraine invasion, but the same criticism can be levied against the many news outlets that trivialize the Gaza genocide.
People have been allowed to post crazy nonsense on YouTube for many years. For a short period they censored quite heavily (2020-2023ish) but theyve backed off. It has never been as bad as Twitter or Facebook were where milquetoast 2008 Obama would have been banned ten times over.
Maybe I’m too curmudgeonly for my own good, but that is quite underwhelming.
https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...
It immediately makes me think of the song "Redesign Your Logo" by Lemon Demon. Pure comedy.
It is clear they worked hard for their salary.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fu3ETgAvQrw
https://lemondemon.fandom.com/wiki/Spirit_Phone:_Commentary#...
A whole lot of nooks and crannies of the AWS console are missing major convenience UI features, and usually when a console is redesigned it solves some reasonably major pain points.
After reading this, I feel like Arthur Dent having an unshakable sense of the color magenta level of snark.
The console is inherently a GUI product. A lot of times what it needs to be “fixed” is for the design to be completely changed.
Even a few actual good design talents is going to have a much bigger impact on product success than an entire room of average engineers who’s skill tops out at react spaghetti.
There are major websites and web-based products like Craigslist, Wikipedia, and Steam that are handling insane Internet traffic with comparatively tiny levels of staffing when compared to YouTube or other giants.
I think those companies have accepted that there is no rush to make major innovations or changes and that hiring a large army of talent is far less cost effective than having teams that are small enough for everyone to know each other.
Hacker News. (Not "planet scale", but very impressive traffic/staffing ratio.)
The introduction of a gradient and accent actually enables and makes it more natural to use more eye-catching effects on the platform. For example, when a YTer says "subscribe", a rainbow (IIRC) animation plays on the subscribe button. When you like or subscribe, an animation plays that now has more color to it. These animations feel satisfying and I dare say have measurable impact.
At the same time, the changes are so subtle that users hardly notice a change that they will have difficulty getting used to, and also already present components do not look out of place if they don't get refreshed.
That is what an experienced design team is paid to do. Complaining about seeing no drastic change here is like complaining about engineers making no user-facing effect when they refactor the underlying systems in preparation for future developments.
To make matters worse for some optimizing reason or another reader isn’t able to capture the whole page text
(Aside from that: not a fan, it makes the chrome of the video player more distracting.)
Similarly, the "glow" they introduced a while back makes it feel like I'm getting the worlds worst backlight bleed.
Mercifully I use FreeTube to watch YouTube which saves me from these design choices.
As an aside, does anyone know of any good YouTube settings extensions? I usually open YouTube in incognito tabs to avoid the personalization "features", but this means none of my preferences around ambient mode and "stable volume" are saved.
Nailed it. At first, I thought my eyes were going bad. Or the monitor?
Maybe take 10% of the time you spent dreaming up new colors to just make your blog function like a regular page instead of adding a million weird animations?
Design is how it works. And your website doesn’t work.
Seriously, there are designers whose entire work output is PDFs or, more recently, stuff in L^HFigma, which lesser beings (read: developers) are expected to turn into functional HTML.
Perhaps spend less time worrying about changing the color of the YouTube logo for no tangible reason.
Edit: Nevermind, seems related to how far you scroll. Scrolling further got me past the first few paragraphs that kept jumping back. Ugh
Kinda reminds me of this quote
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf
> There will be rich debates about the socioeconomic implications of Helvetica Light, and at some point, you will have to decide whether serifs are daring statements of modernity, or tools of hegemonic oppression that implicitly support feudalism and illiteracy.
(For newcomers with limited time, scroll to the last 2 pages)
Tropicana lost 30 million dollars in sales and had to revert the change.
They also spent 35 million on a campaign to advertise the redesign (also ran by the Arnell Group)
https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-fro...
I'll leave you with this particular critic's review of a piece of music by Gottschalk (a famous 19th century American composer). They are like "chants of the New World, chants which bring tears to our eyes, so much do they breathe of sadness and simplicity. One transports us to forests. . . another represents faithfully the indolent Creole swinging in his hammock. .. and what shall we say of the third? Does it not seem to be overwhelmed by that solemn silence and that solitude which one feels traversing those vast prairies at the foot of the Rocky Mountains?"
IMHO the reason LLMs are so proficient at these kinds of vapid flights of fantasy is that they must have ingested the entire fanfic library on Wattpad.
A project partner took the task of retroactively assigning an "intention" to my result. "The lines meeting in the center symbolize a conversation between people...".
To my surprise, the examiner bought this and we ended up with a good grade. I feel like I learned a lot from this course.
I'm not saying that's what happened here, but if it did, we probably couldn't tell.
I heard an anecdote from someone whose mom went to art school, about how she (the mom) would spend days and days painstakingly processing materials and meticulously conceptualizing and constructing pieces, and always felt sour when a party girl did nothing but get drunk/high for weeks and then just "poured paint on her tits" for her assignment, and got a better grade. But maybe pouring paint on her tits was actually more profound, even if unintentionally, than whatever her mom was up to. Effort, intent, is meaningless in creative practice.
"Oh, my boy, I fought with the Arial Resistance Corps."
I like the new colors tbh, but it's a very very very minor update and can't avoid speculating how much that thing cost Google, 5 x 300k/year salaries x ... 2 years maybe? Lol.
Also the replacement of the mouse cursor with that negative-color circle is visually interesting, but it suffers a lot from input lag which gets on my nerves.
Here YouTube’s adding a (very subtle) gradient. Better examples may be: compare the newest macOS icons to those from the Sierra (?); and the new Reddit logo has a slight 3D effect, while I remember the old one was flat.
Allegedly styles and fashion go in cycles, so maybe minimalism is going out of fashion. I doubt we’ll get old YouTube or OS X Snow Leopard, but we’ll get something different.
Thesis = full skeumorphic 2005 YouTube logo
Antithesis = flat 2015 YouTube logo
Synthesis = "Material" design. Light 3D effects.