- see cool video on front page
- click
- “Haha, fuck you, you’ve just clicked on the invisible button that takes up half the thumbnail like a fucking moron!”
- redirected to the sponsorship info page
- go back
- video gone
why are you completely incapable of making a functional website you wet dildo
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- go back
- video gone
That part is the worst. I am sick and tired of websites breaking the back button! When I click back it’s because I wanted to see the thing that was there before. If I wanted it to just refresh from scratch I would reload the page instead!
It’s not just YouTube, by the way. Even Lemmy does that shit too!
I still see websites doing that shit where you click back and end up on a page that redirects you to where you where.
That’s why I always middle click the links.
…and it drives me insane when it is not real links but some javascript/button/div-with-onclick/etc and middle click won’t work
JavaScript frameworks give front end devs enough rope to hang themselves with
YouTube had a solution not too long ago, when you hovered on a thumbnail it would show a little button that queues up the video on a temporary playlist while you keep browsing. But for whatever reason they hid that in a menu.
That’s not really the issue. The issue is that it doesn’t give you a proper URL with enough information to uniquely identify the set of results it loaded for you, so if you reload the page it re-runs the query and you get a new set of results instead of the same set you had before. That fundamentally breaks how the Internet is supposed to work: any particular URL should always go to the same resource.
The fact that Youtube also does lazy-loading infinite scroll bullshit makes it even harder to show examples about, so I’ll switch to Lemmy now. Take this URL, for example:
https://lemmy.world/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&pageCursor=P115f329&sort=TopSixHour
(That’s from navigating to page 2 of my feed, which is set to “all” and “top 6 hours”.)
If I go to that URL now, and then I go to it again, say, six hours from now, it ought to still show the same list of posts. But it doesn’t. Instead, it re-runs the query and shows me the new results from six hours in the future, which is an entirely different result set. That’s not what I want! I want to be able to keep navigating back and forth through the old result set until I explicitly ask for a new one e.g. by clicking on the instance logo or choosing a new search from the [posts|comments], [subsribed|local|all], and [sort type list] controls.
Just generally speaking, I think of this as “concreteness”.
Software should seek to mimic real spaces, in the sense that one step back takes you to the place you were one step ago.
One pattern that breaks this in my opinion is when a menu appears as soon as you scroll up. It’s just a minor inconvenience, but 95% of the time I scroll up on an article, it’s because I want to re-read a line of text that just disappeared under the top of my screen. This menu reappear crap means I have to scroll up like three inches to get something that’s only a quarter inch under the upper edge.
I think it’s a matter of mental health to have software that faithfully mimics real world causality.
It’s all very vague in my head, but I would love to articulate this fully into a design spec.
It’s kind of like Google’s Material Design spec in its idea, but it’s about the effects of navigation rather than just how UI elements behave.
It kind of relates to the concept of a State Function in math and science.
They could cache the results you receive on your last visit of the home page which would fix this
It would not fix it. I also want to be able to do things like send the URL to someone else and have confidence that it would load the same content for them, too.
I mean of course that would be nice, but that’s just not realistic. You can’t store that info in a link without it being monstrous.
Why do you say they couldn’t cache the results and instead of re-fetching everything just use the cache results?
You can’t store that info in a link without it being monstrous.
Sure you can, if your backend is designed reasonably.
How? You put a timestamp (or equivalent) in the URL and filter the search to only operate on the records that existed at that time. Assuming your search algorithm is deterministic, it should find the same results.
I agree with your point, but our algorithms are not deterministic and I doubt they ever will be again. Perhaps they could use a set of tags to create a deterministic result for a certain “genre” of results.
Would you like to engage in a polite and collected conversation about the YouTube Shorts UI?
Best I can do is unhinged and passionate, take it or leave it
perhaps the best feature of the enhancer for youtube extension
Not even just the fucking UI. I have bad internet so it takes several minutes to watch a short, presuming jt ever works. And it’s just shorts. A full video loads no problem, but a short requires so much to even try to start playing.
I just hate the fact that when I open the youtube app, it just starts playing a random short. I have to stop the short to go to the search field which is the reason I opened the app.
I can strongly recommend not using the app, and just using a browser with ad block for YouTube mobile.
You can take the video ID of a shorts URL and paste it into a regular video URL to open it in the less dogshit UI. Like this:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fxJicOO_dBw->https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxJicOO_dBwYou could make a greasemonkey script that does this automatically.
I have a ff plugin or script or something that does it. It’s the only thing that makes shorts bearable and usable
I’ll do you one better: just replace the “shorts” with a “v”, and it’ll redirect you to the video version as well.
Bonus: since the “shorts” part of the URL is between two slashes, double clicking it will mark just that part.
They’re just doing what they’re paid to do.
What they’re paid to do is increase ad exposure to drive as revenue and YT premium subscriptions.
General public UX is a distant tertiary goal, in terms of what’s actually on the Jira board (or whatever they use).
How the hell does getting redirected to this page drive any kind of exposure?
You need to understand that most software engineers are treated like code monkeys these days, and very often get overruled by product people going “idgaf just do the thing I said in the ticket”.
Source: am software engineer, and have been for about a decade and a half
I worked at Lowe’s and our method of searching for products was the same as a customer’s: the website.
But the website’s search is designed to always return something.
This means if you search for something we don’t have, it would just show you some random shit.
For some reason this infuriated me. I was always apologizing to customers for our terrible UX.
Not just the web UX unfortunately.
I’ve given up on YouTube because of its terrible interface and just use tube archivist + Jellyfin.
I have literally never experienced this.
Pretty much all of google products do that. I have to work with gsuite, and when you go to chat, you click on the person you want to talk to, start typing as you see the box, but then, for whatever reason, it switches to a search on the right, or bring you back to the chat home page.
On YouTube, you see a video, you click on it and then for whatever fucking reason, the video moves right and you click on a dumb ad or a video you don’t want to watch. Go back once and the video isn’t there anymore.
It’s a shit show
YouTube UI/UX in general is total trash. The Apple TVOS version is probably the worst but I haven’t seen a good one yet.
One of the worst pieces of UX is when you turn on subtitles in the phone app. It will pop-up a banner that says something like “Subtitles turned on” that appears on top of the fucking subtitles and stays there for about 3 hours, making it impossible to read the subtitles. Why is there a banner for this in the first place, I know the subtitles are on. First of all I was the one that turned them on. No need to inform me. Second of all I can tell by the fact that there are subtitles on the screen.
What bloody UX genius came up with that crap?
You can slide the banner down. Still annoying af
The TV UI is worse, especially the search. It only shows 10-12 videos related to what you actually searched. The rest are suggestions.
The TV UI is horrible and has negative development: Less features and more bugs every release.
Do you want to go to a video’s channel? Well, that depends on where you are:
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Go to Home.
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Long-press on a video.
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Press “Go to channel”.
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Go to Subscriptions.
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Long-press on a video.
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Fewer options because fuck you.
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Start the video, press down, up, right, select.
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Oh, it was a short video? You fell into the trap! Down goes to another video. Go back, select the video again, press right, right, select.
And that’s just one example.
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