I'm among those who hate it... it's worse than change for the sake of change & not being functional, it makes things less functional. The thumbnails under the video are annoying, but now to get more info on the video you need to click a few extra times to minimize your playlist & then click a few different 'more'... then it's squished in the stupid side column. Just frustrating wonky mechanics. The search results now are less useful too in a single column. If I wanted to use an app, I'd be on a phone or a tablet... forcing the app experience on desktop never works. I've reported it via 'send feedback' every day since it rolled out, lol.
That does sound like a pain. I don't inherently hate moving comments to the side, the narrowness actually makes some sense for that and it's a cleaner way to read comments along with the video playing, but things like moving video detail dropdowns from being below the video to hidden in the side as well are a bit much.
yeah, if it were 'just' the comments... go for it. but put the details back under & give a little buffer between the row of icons. it's not like the couldn't make whatever is under the video (comments or thumbnails) independently scrollable...
One thing I miss from the earlier days of the net is you used to be able to opt in to these kinds of things, not wait for your stuff to all A/B trial rollout. For YouTube there used to be Test Tube and now https://www.youtube.com/new but new simply says "No features are available right now" all the time as they roll out new features. Reddit was the same with with the first redesign where you could opt in early then they started rolling out newer Reddit and it was in a similar fashion. I remember when Google started rolling out native dark mode A/B trials (now an option after the fact) I went hunting down the cookie for it so I could apply it evenly across my devices/browsers.
So, long story short, anyone know how I can try out this new style for myself? I can't get it to kick in on any of my devices, even when not signed into my account.
I can’t be bothered using their crummy, janky, overburdened web interface (new or old), even with ublock clearing most of the dead wood away. I’ll download to view offline using a non bullshit media player instead.
I don't measure my justification of subscriptions from the company's value; I measure it in value to me. We've really stretched the envelope of this virtue, to the point where 3 ads before a video and ad-priority UIs are becoming more and more prevalent AND justified - because people using free services for 6 hours a day can't understand that they should probably pay for the obvious value it's bringing them on a day-to-day basis.
Yawn. While you remain ignorantly poised about your freeloading on products in a post-adtech internet, you'll only find your free plans more bent over a barrel.
How much of your $9.99 does a content creator actually receive? I much prefer to block ads, and donate or buy merch from the creators who I follow with intention. I reckon that the $20 or so that they receive directly vastly outweighs the amount they would get from ads or a Premium sub, even after several years of dedicated viewership.
Nah, but once in a great while they manage to make (and not cancel) a service actually worth the $22.99/m (price of Family for me). Most subscription offerings don't come close to meeting that bar, some I feel like should be paying me instead of the other way around with how difficult and ad ridden they make the paid service.
Same. I used to pay for many (YouTube, Hulu, HBO, Amazon, Twitch, Paramount, Disney, Crunchyroll, Netflix, probably some I'm forgetting) but now I'm just down to YouTube. The rest all managed to do a worse job of conveniently delivering content I want in a convenient and easy to use way than pirating but YouTube has a good selection of content I want in the easiest way to find it, has no trouble delivering said content across all my devices (even 8k HDR in a web browser), lets me manually select the quality, and isn't outrageous for the content hours/month I get from it.
It launched at $35/m but now up to $73/month for the base plan, despite having ads. That's $876/y before you even get to the "addons" like sports and HD. About the only reason it can be worthwhile these days if you're going to get raped on a sports TV package anyways so might as well do it via YouTube where it's actually probably not yet as bad as the local cable company and a bit more portable.
I used to think it was bit much until I started paying and for the price you get all youtube, music, podcasts and more across devices and so on with no ads. For the price - it's actually somewhat reasonable considering I don't need any other subs for this content...
Honestly, no it doesn’t. Google pays creators a pittance and their practices around copyright and monetization are beyond exploitative.
Most creators make their money from sponsorships and stealth marketing, product placements etc, or regular marketing because they might have an actual paid service to offer.
> YouTube tests adding large, bright, and attention-grabbing thumbnails to the bottom of the player.
It seems like some people are better able to handle visual noise. The idea of having autoplay videos on news websites is unthinkable to me, for example. I truly can't comprehend how anybody can stand having a flashing image in their peripheral vision while they're trying to consider a news story. Yet by the lack of public outcry it seems like people are at least fine with them. This YouTube thing seems similar: gaining engagement at the cost of eliminating focus and calm. People complain about environmental pollution but rarely complain about mental pollution.
I like the design. The comments are easily readable on the side and I can just ignore the noise at the bottom of the page. I can read the comments while watching the video, it's way better!
Well, yeah? What are the users going to do about it? Complain forever even though it's not going to do anything?
By the way, I still see it mentioned occasionally, both in YouTube videos themselves (often when someone is talking about YouTube) and amongst my friends. Both as a general complaint about the usability of the site being worse ("I had to wait 90 seconds to realize this video was a waste of time because downvotes are gone") and as an example of a service being able to do whatever it wants without regards to whether users like it or not.
You can’t mute ads while reading comments, now it’s in your face. I noticed other sites that I used to mute mute volume while their ads were playing that if you scroll out of view or change the focus on the window or the tab the video/ad autopauses. Slowly it’s turning into the old TV garbage..
I think they mean you can't, "mute the ad, and scroll down and read the comments (no longer seeing the ad, because one is scrolled down and reading the comments)", not because one can't mute the ad, but because scrolling down now, instead of showing the comments, shows a bunch of video recommendations.
I imagine that this unnecessary redesign is partly caused by YouTube having an army of designers to keep busy, because alphabet is somehow not able to reallocate them somewhere they'd be useful.
I remember when redesigns added features and ease of use, rather than removing features and adding whitespace. When these companies weren't secure monopolies, they felt they had to compete.
With how often people mention increased whitespace I feel like there should be a 5 inch gap between every element by now. Looking back at e.g. Windows 98 the screenshots seem small but back then most users had sub 96 DPI standard monitor setups (e.g. 1024x768 @ 15" would be a decent setup). When you correct for that the actual space used by buttons on e.g. YouTube today vs systems back then hasn't changed nearly as much as one would think and the gaps between desktop icons are pretty big too.
Look at the menu bars in Office 97 it had up to ~25 buttons from left to right on your 1024x768 15” screen. That’s vastly more dense than you see today even adjusted for DPI.
You can't compare it with a 15" screen because that resolution would have been something like a 20-21 inch screen at typical DPI back then.
Nonetheless, number of buttons left to right is a weird metric to pick considering even leaving DPI unadjusted doesn't leave a big difference in the actual number of separate horizontal clickable zones https://i.imgur.com/dETv7wY.png. Usually whitespace complaints on Ribbon focus on the extra vertical spacing e.g. section names like "Font" or "Alignment" taking a line of space that used to just be the next row of buttons. That I'll say is actually a little larger in the last 27 years, even after DPI adjustments, just, again, not nearly as much as one would expect for the number of times you hear about it - considering said Ribbon design has had the same minor spacing difference for 17 of those 27 years now.
> You can’t compare it with a 15” screen because …
We’re at the point where resolution isn’t particularly relevant. People want the same UI on a 1080p vs 4k 15” screen because mouse/touchscreen precision and eyesight doesn’t double when resolution doubles.
> Ribbon design has had the same minor spacing difference for 17 of those 27 years now.
In the Win98 days UI was designed for precision mouse movements not trackpads and touchscreens. That’s ultimately what changed Office’s approach, and people using high precision mice just get the short end of the stick here.
But web UI’s have taken this to an even worse extreme seemingly ramping up white space without considering why it was initially shifted.
> We’re at the point where resolution isn’t particularly relevant. People want the same UI on a 1080p vs 4k 15” screen because mouse/touchscreen precision and eyesight doesn’t double when resolution doubles.
That is exactly why I'm comparing the target DPI rather than talking about how many icons fit in a 1024 pixel row. The 90s were a time when the idea screens should have an effective DPI of > 72 was new. Nowadays we have finished the migration to the effective 96 as the standard DPI. To view an image from a time the effective DPI was supposed to be 72 on a modern screen you need to scale it ~1.33x larger so that you're back to having an effective 96 pixels per inch image to output (for the exact same reason you say you need to scale the 4k to appear the same when it's a 15" output, just from the other direction).
> In the Win98 days UI was designed for precision mouse movements not trackpads and touchscreens. That’s ultimately what changed Office’s approach, and people using high precision mice just get the short end of the stick here.
>
> But web UI’s have taken this to an even worse extreme seemingly ramping up white space without considering why it was initially shifted.
Well it's not a very short stick considering the button comparison image didn't even correct for the above scaling :p. Web does have massive whitespace, but not because design really changed. E.g. here is a side-by-side of YouTube now and YouTube 2006: https://i.imgur.com/tYm0OoU.png and honestly whitespace has decreased with the content filling in those blanks in the "traditional" design. "But wait!" you say "When I look at YouTube I see massive swaths of blank space e.g. on the sides!" and well, sure, you do in some pages https://i.imgur.com/RfzXTeK.png but it's massively less than the legacy design's side whitespace https://i.imgur.com/mDjPFuB.png. The difference here is not that the web started shooting in massive amounts of whitespace into archived YouTube pages it's that the legacy design got to assume most viewers have a small 4:3 monitor and everything will need to fit in that small box whereas nowadays we have big 16:9 monitors but expanding the design to use all of that extra space only goes so far (but still farther in the "use less whitespace" design direction than the "use more"). YouTube also has new designs for certain situations that make it so any screen of any dimension has minimal whitespace usage: https://i.imgur.com/kHBH8Vk.png (vs a linear column list in the legacy design). Despite this people still blame the new YouTube design as having added new whitespace vs the old design.
Filling the screen with two buttons labeled Yes and No is in effect almost all whitespace even if the entire page is clickable.
Consider the modern version of YouTube in terms of separate clickable elements rather than the space between images / giant buttons and it’s mostly whitespace. So from that perspective modern YouTube has 4x the whitespace as the 2006 page even if it’s not as obvious.
This directly shows up in how few buttons you see from left to right when there are buttons and the amount of dead space around the up and downvotes etc.
If things are improved for the user with a redesign, then it won’t get pushback.
If things are redesigned in an attempt to influence user behavior, then they aren’t primarily UI redesigns at all, they are engagement redesigns, and will generally be received poorly.
Opinion about UX changes will depend on who benefits from the changes. It is rarely the user who benefits anymore. That’s all that changed. UX people are not there to improve the experience for users; they are there to design ways to trick users into giving a website the secondary commodity all large companies want after money: attention. Companies are attention farms, now. Attention farms with stockholders.
Some people have always complained about redesigns and always some people have liked them. The proportion of each depends on the redesign in question, but I reject any assertion of a general trend in this proportion asserted without evidence. It is more likely that the perception of a trend reflects the circles you frequent.
Wonder why Youtube and more sites don't just monetize with better user centric designs for paid subscribers. A streamlined no fuss, user centric design + features like sorting subscriptions into playlists. Think they can frustrate a lot of conversions.
I just did an arbitrary search on youtube for 'xcom' and I can see exactly four items, four on my full height window. If this is 'good design' I want no part of it.
Did you read the article? Have you used youtube in the past couple of days?
The change that has people upset isn't border radius. Rather than having the comments below the video and suggestions on the right, the suggested other videos are now below the video you are watching, and the comments are in the narrow slot on the right side of the screen, making it more difficult to read/scan comments.
My guess is by giving suggested other videos the prime real estate, it will cause the user to watch more videos and thus more ads. Reading and creating comments doesn't directly generate revenue. This could backfire because people who enjoy reading/writing comments may come back less frequently or stay less time because they enjoy the site less. It feels less like an ad hoc community and more of what it really is: an ad delivery service.
As someone who pays for ad-free youtube, I resent that not only do I still need to sit through or navigate through in-video ads, but now I find the experience of reading other people's comments and sharing my own more difficult.
Only below the 1000px breakpoint for tablets. Suggested videos probably keep people on the site/app longer than comments. They should have shown 5 videos with a "show more" drawer for the rest. But we know they care more about money than our happieness.
It's hard to tell from the screenshots but is the border radius really any different than the current/previous design already had it? Looks about identical comparing my current view.
