I noticed on the youtube homepage that I cannot hover over a video thumbnail without it getting big and auto playing a portion. Does anyone else find this annoying as hell?<p>I understand the argument about how people don't like change (which will probably be the first counter to my complaining) but this is somewhat overstepping a line for me.<p>What say you, HN?
I've blocked these popups and the suggestions overlay at the end of videos by using these rules:<p><pre><code> www.youtube.com##.ytd-thumbnail-overlay-loading-preview-renderer
www.youtube.com##.ytd-video-preview
www.youtube.com##.ytp-ce-covering-overlay
www.youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element
www.youtube.com##.ytp-cards
www.youtube.com##.ytp-cards-teaser
www.youtube.com##.ytp-cards-button-icon</code></pre>
I quite like it, after having seen it in the, ahem, <i>adult spaces</i>. But seriously though, it's a good enough feature for just checking out whether a video is interesting enough to watch or whether the title and thumbnail are just clickbait, which they often are for making the creators money. It saves me a click or new tab which is even more annoying than hovering over a video.
For me the delay on the home screen is long enough that I don't do it accidentally. It happens when I search as well and it's really useful when seeing if it's what I am looking for. I appreciate that it's muted. I have gotten used to resting the mouse cursor outside the thumbnail. I guess I changed my behavior without realizing, I can't remember when that feature was enabled for me.<p>I personally find it useful as long as the video stays muted while autoplaying. I love the mobile search even more where the subtitles on videos work in preview mode, I wish that feature was brought to desktop.<p>There is a "Send feedback" option in the sidebar. I am unsure if you need to be logged in to see it, I don't think so because YouTube in incognito has the the option send it too. I recommend you send feedback.
You can disable it with the "inline playback" toggle here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/account_playback" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/account_playback</a><p>If you don't happen to be in some or other test group, that is. No guarantees :)<p>Absolutely maddening that feature.
If I remember correctly, this has been there for a while. You can disable it at<p>[YourProfile] > Settings > Playback and performance > Turn OFF the "Inline Playback" Button.<p>The weird thing is, this settings do not seem to stick when logging off and then in again. I remember setting this off few times.
Do they actually do any user testing before launching a feature? Or did someone important at YouTube think it was a cool idea and greenlighted it.<p>How about doing a poll before a video asking people if they like the feature? If they answer no then ask if they'd like it turned off? Beats moving on to the next new feature.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/account_playback" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/account_playback</a><p>> Inline Playback -> Off<p>What exactly is overstepping about it? Just turn it off lol
This reminds me of when they introduced the autoplay when scrolling on the mobile app. I'm fine with getting an audio-free preview, assuming I'm not on mobile data, but they originally started kicking the videos they'd preview into your history. I had a moderately well trained profile that kept my junk to a minimum but boy-oh-boy, all these "useless" (as in no value to me) YT shorts started invading my recommendations because of the feedback loop it gave itself.<p>I think I either finally found the option to not, or they reverted the change that put them into your history. Or maybe it's still happening. I've also noticed while scrolling on mobile (android) app, I found myself seeking the video preview, instead of scrolling up, because they enabled the ability to scrub these previews and my scrolling digit would often just land on the 5 pixel tall scrollbar element. Weird choices. Am a premium subscriber - I like to tailor my account to videos I want and take the time to deny suggestions and describe why in the hopes I get recommended less TikTok > YouTube repost junk.. did a pretty good job until they messed with it.
I have switched to Piped as a frontend alternative to Youtube, and Libreddit for Reddit. I don't understand why are they so adamant on making the UI worse every passing day. I absolutely loathe the reddit redesign.
This is "growth inwards": when a business unit can't keep growing outwards, it turns to this pathological mode where it squeezes out all value from its users and reputation. In practice, the corporate peons must find new ways to extract this value, regardless of whether it hurts the org in the long run.
Another long standing annoyance is those links to other videos that pop up before my current video has ended. It always interferes with the last portion, usually when something important and climactic is being shown. There used to be a way to block these “annotations” but they removed it.
I'm getting tired of the proliferation of "tooltip" style popups recently. It seems as if every other pixel triggers a popup and every time I want to read actual content, it becomes obscured because my mouse touched a hot zone or was parked on a trigger
If you could scrub through the video by hovering over the play progress bar it'd be useful. Like it is it's kind of pointless, since I usually don't care about the previewing the intro of a video.
Edit: Oh I completely misread it. Yes the autoplay on front-page was annoying as hell but it was only on for a few weeks and now it is off. They must be doing A/B testing.<p>I had not idea why I read it as thumbnails in player. I leave the original comments below in tact.<p>--<p>Interesting to see comments here so far.<p>I like it, <i>a lot</i>. I can now glance at the thumbnails and jump to section I am looking for. And the thumbnails are so fast it is near if not a native experience. ( I mean the thumbnails, not the actual playback experience which is far from native ) To be point I wonder how it is done. But I never had time to look it up.<p>Things I want would be Bitrate for Video and Audio in "Stats for nerds and better Skipping Video performance. Not sure why video experience in browser are always subpar. Especially considering most of my video are now consumed in browser.
I use the YouTube app more than any other app and there is so much I absolutely hate about it.<p>But the main thing that triggers me is that in the settings there is a place to suggest a feature or report a bug. And in that "form" it doesn't come up with a text box like the I am writing in now, it has choices for functionality that they are just choosing to not add in. "No way to select don't show this video" .. etc. I still can't believe that to refresh the videos on AppleTV my only options are to restart the app or login into guest and then back into my account real quick. Kicker here is with a custom remote on the AppleTV for whatever reason the YouTube menu side scroll breaks and won't let me select 1 spot over, it goes over two spots. So inevitably I have to have the Apple remote on hand too to get new videos.<p>But again, I use the app a lot. I fear updates to it like the plague. They have never ever added enjoyment to the app. Only taken away features and made things worse.
I like the autoplay feature(already existed before this recent change), but I'm not a fan of it making it bigger.<p>The biggest problem I have with it, seems to be a bug, middle/command clicking the video, will often(not always) open the video in both a new tab, and the existing tab, when what it should be doing is only opening it in the new tab.
I usually scroll through YouTube and add videos I want to watch to "watch later". Before this change I could just hover on the video and click the button to add it to WL playlist. Now I need to hover, wait and click this unnecessarily big and ugly "ADD TO WATCH LATER" button
"Does anyone else find this annoying as hell?"<p>I find it annoying that an unpleasant user experience is generally viewed solely as a problem of the particular website and not a problem of the software available to access websites. For example, the user cannot simply switch to a browser that only supports a subset of the HTML protocol, e.g., one that does not support autoplay. Instead users must expend energy to try to modify the default behaviour of the browser or add functionality that does not exist. Here, the website operator is also a browser vendor. I find that troublesome. To avoid the repercussions, I do not use a browser to interact with YouTube. I do not use an app either.
It's definitely a bit annoying. I use the "add to queue" button a lot, and now the time between when that button pops up after I hover on a video and when that button disappears as hovering over the video causes it to autoplay is pretty miniscule. It's also a little less pleasant to have to actually be careful about where you leave the mouse pointer as you navigate a search.<p>There's an option to disable it though, and you can always use something like ublock origin to just kill the offending elements.
I didn't even notice it until now. I went to check after reading your post. For me it takes one or two seconds for autoplay to start. Now that I've seen it, I must say that I don't mind this feature. I think that it could be useful.<p>The reason why I like is the fact that thumbnail image is not necessarily the accurate representation of the video. Short clip should reveal much better what is the real content of the video.
I find it useful, ymmv. It's a better preview for me than the thumbnails they used to use, or the slideshow they were using before this change.<p>There's also a certain format on YT where a person says they are going to discuss X in the title, then wastes minutes belaboring on tangents and details before spending 5 seconds discussing X proper. This scrobbable preview helps me evaluate prior if their videos are worth watching.
I don't mind that it autoplays with captions, that's actually pretty useful. I can sometimes get the gist of a video and not need to watch it at all.<p>But it is annoying that videos I've hovered over show up as watched, since I definitely haven't watched it yet and I might end up skipping it later if I think I've watched it already.
I don't really mind it, but what I mind more is that autoplay no longer pauses if you've scrolled down into the comments. YouTube used to wait for you to scroll back up to the top of the fold before allowing autoplay to advance.
Love it<p>I already have the extension which changed the thumbnail back to a random point in the video<p>This lets me quickly skip around the middle of a video to see if it's something worthwhile or clickbait
Autoplay should be banned. Period. Also, hover menus should be strongly discouraged (they should really be banned as well but people must have the freedom to make mistakes).
People do quite a bit of complaining about the YouTube main page but I can honestly say that I have never once intentionally used it. Why would people go there?
I think it's a pretty innocuous change and I'm not sure it's worth anybody's energy to complain.<p>Why is it bad that the videos now get slightly bigger when you over over them? The auto-play on hover is not new.