The change is so they can now implement the 38 hour ad before every 30 second video. And then another 21 hour ad every 7 seconds while watching the video. The ad can’t be stopped, skipped or muted and automatically plays full screen on all your devices and monitors at the same time.
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Black Mirror Episode
The heck is this title?
YouTube says goodbye to decade-old video player UI, but users hate the new design
Meanwhile, the article itself just cites a few tiny aesthetic changes and like four random Reddit comments. Doesn't seem like they even tried it themself... That's justifications for 460 upvotes?
Is it really a decade old? Feels like they redesign it every three years.
Redesigning familiar UIs is a great way to give elderly, neurodivergent, and/or computer illiterate people a hard time.
neuroatypical
I propose we start calling normies "neuroadivergent."
haha. My bad, sorry. I think people used to say this but the language changed. I'll fix it.
I hate to be that guy, but it's neurodivergent. :) neurodiverse is another thing. Everyone is diverse but not everyone is divergent.
Ah! Thank you again! Honestly in my mind I was thinking that "neurodiverse" didn't make any sense. Okay now I'm interested to see what the next 'that guy' is going to say :)
The removal of the black gradient at the bottom is a plus.
Putting the controls in their own grey capsules so they still standout is a plus.
The moving of the volume button to the right is a negative.
I dont like change just for changes sake, but in fairness some of this is a good idea and a welcome design shift. I just hopebthey move the volume button back as having on the left with the main controls is pretty widespread and common design.
A rare, levelheaded take.
The changes are fine. Nothing earth shattering, nothing wildly or fundamentally broken, just a visual update to better fit with Google’s new material design language.
The articles mentions that scroll and the arrow keys no longer adjust volume. Nothing could be earth shattering because it's video streaming software, but it does seem to come with some functionality loss at this stage.
That's always the case.
I mean, they could stop messing with things that aren't broken for once...
Eh, it’s a fine line tbh. Not that I enjoy defending Google.
You get both “this UI hasn’t changed in a decade” and “this UI is perfect never change it” in relatively equal amounts. The rest honestly don’t care either way.
Imagine if they actually brought back "options" and let you choose between changes rather than force them on you.
Because the seek bar overlaps the video as it is playing, and because the drag button is huge whenever you mouseover it, it is much harder to locate chapter marker visually.
Change for the sake of change is not good.
That's *always* the case.
Maybe there’s a reason for that. The word “enshitification” doesn’t exist in a void.
In their defense, I'm not sure I have ever seen a major UI redesign of some piece of software that the users of that software actually liked, at least at first. Inertia and muscle memory are powerful things.
exactly one comes to mind: blender
Hence the reason why you make small gradual improvements over a long time. YT has been around a long time, and Google should know better.
Well the old Google development company would know better, the new Google advertising agency doesn't give a shit
The adverts on youtube have become so unbearable so no amount of UI change will convince me to use it as intended. If there's a long video I want to watch, I download the video first and watch it using VLC
My ad blocker stops all the ads except for the sponsorships that are in the video... Y'all watching YouTube without blockers?
Try adding SponsorBlock.
Looks the same to me on a PC. Up/down arrows still adjust the volume. Scroll wheel on my mouse scrolls the entire screen as always. Do the changes only affect touchscreen devices?
ugh, this is so much worse. takes up more space, is more distracting.
I want to be able to skip around in videos and not have the screen covered by ugly pill buttons
I'm not defending google here, but I'm sure a decent chunk of the complaints are just bitching because "change bad!"
I haven't seen the change yet and I'm sure there are legitimate complaints as well, but us online folk tend to detest even the smallest changes and go a bit overboard in our complaining sometimes.
"you can no longer hover on the volume slider and scroll or even use the up/down keys to adjust the audio"
Apart from the key bind loss, which would be asinine to remove permanently, this looks like a straight upgrade. Better readability and more in line with the rest of the UI design.
People literally always hate changes to ui. It's to the point that this article could have been written and just archived somewhere to pull out whenever something changes.
YouTube can do whatever they want, you think that give a damn about the people? Noooopppppeeeee
I'm indifferent to it. The jarring years were 2006 up to about 2015. It would shift between better and worse until it reached the point where the front page was all clickbait/ragebait/advertisements and you had to rely on your own subscriptions page. Every social media site should default to subscribed/followed stuff for logged in users but got to selll paid to promote content
Neat, didn't notice since they perma banned me for watching without ads via freetube I believe.
Ive just been downloading videos direct with yt-dlp, but I think I'm going to extend it into a bash script which fetches the RSS of the channels I want, downloads them if they haven't been downloaded, and then deletes them after they have been watched and after a certain amount of time has passed, or if I have marked them for deletion.
as always with corporate shit
The huge Thumb nails on the home page are ridiculous. Makes it harder to find content I want to watch. If you zoom out it will only show 4 horizontal thumbnails, Max.