They didn’t oversize the recommended video thumbnails in the old UI. Either they couldn’t figure out what to do with the whitespace resulting from stacking recommended videos horizontally so they just made em bigger. Or they just want persistent ads in your peripheral vision (the first recommended video will always be an ad for users not blocking them)
Immediately biases the reader before any actual information is given about the change
As someone who has the “pleasure” to be selected as beta tester for YouTube changes all the time, I fully agree with the headline because I also have immediate bias when they change something. Every single time it has been awful and more often than not I get outright broken changes which is why I have a user agent changer installed to switch to an ancient Edge user agent when affected because YT’s legacy UI often doesn’t get the same changes.
Also, I’m a YT Premium subscriber. I’m not paying to be a beta tester.
Maybe by setting the expectation that the user will hate the update, when it becomes available to everyone it won’t be as bad as expected and thus more easily accepted.
I use Firefox on android with YouTube, and I made FF th default to play YouTube videos. I might not even have YouTube app installed, I forget what I did with it.
I just got sick of ads and took action to not see them anymore
I've got this design already. It's fine, honestly. The actual video is still as dominant on the page as before, everything else is kinda secondary to that.
Great way to communicate directly with the person who posted the video. Also a good way to answer questions when viewing educational content (like cooking shows).
Driving engagement. They don’t care if it’s full of trolls or spambots. As long as it entices users to engage on their platform, it’s a plus in their books
Judging by the seemingly overwhelmingly negative response, we don’t see YouTube moving forward with this design. But tell us what you think. Let us know in the comments below.
This is a misunderstanding of how google works I think.
A few months ago they required that you have a watch history to display the homepage.
This week they’re showing up next popups even when you have autoplay turned off.
Using an Apple TV I probably watch more YouTube than any other platform and was given a gift of a premium subscription. It removed all ads, gave me YouTube music, but the shitty experiments continue and there’s no way to tell YouTube to sod off.
A few months ago they required that you have a watch history to display the homepage.
I’m actually glad for this change. I hated the random junk they always suggest on my homepage. I spent ages clicking on the menu on each video and selecting “don’t recommend this channel.” It took a few years, but I actually got a clean, empty homepage. Then they changed their website and all the videos came back. I had to start over, cleaning out my feed again.
Now with this new change, my homepage is always clear. Thanks, YouTube!
For the record, I only watch my subscriptions. If I learn about a new channel, it’s through another site/person recommending it. I don’t let YouTube recommend me stuff to watch. And I definitely don’t watch YouTube Shorts or whatever they call their vertical video nonsense.
You might want to look in to FreeTube if you ‘only’ watch subscriptions. It currently only does subscriptions and play lists, and doesn’t use a google account, or any account if you want.
You’d have a better experience than the browser ‘and’ google doesn’t get the metadata on what you’re subscribed to and watch. Win-win.
You’re out of luck for Apple TV, but not for iOS. I uninstalled YouTube from my phone and use Orion browser as my default now. It lets you install extensions from the Firefox or Chrome store, so I have ublock origin installed on my phone now and YouTube ads are gone.
In some ways it’s not terrible. Putting chat to the side makes sense. What I can’t stand is polluting the viewing area with the top edge of the recommended videos, and not even the whole frame of the preview. It feels like the page isn’t scrolled completely up or down and it’s super distracting. Thankfully it’s easy blocked with ublock.
It’s not too bad, looks like the Twitch interface of having chat/comments be on the side. That said having to scroll through videos horizontally seems like a pain compared to scrolling through them vertically.
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