- 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!
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.
All the lemmy clients I’ve tried do this.
I see a thing, try to get back to it, and it just refreshes the whole thing from square one.
I’ve built react apps before, I get how that’s kind of easier because “when in doubt, goto 10” (I’ve written code from BASIC through jsx) but damn.
Jerboa doesn’t do that in my experience.
The UX team is almost never to blame for this shit. It’s almost always the monetization folks and PM forcing the UX team’s hand.
You can quit if you don’t like it, but the market for UX is shit right now. So you grumble and draw the dark patterns so you can pay your mortgage while you casually browse LinkedIn for a new gig.
Contrary to popular belief among creatives, it is creatives job not only to do their own work, but also to keep everyone else’s hands off it.
I was a developer once, and when I was complaining that management just didn’t understand why this thing was needed, a very successful coder friend of told me “It’s your job to make them understand”.
This is why everyone needs to know politics. Part of your job, whether it’s documented or not, is to keep your boss from giving you stupid orders.
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.
Piped or Invidious
it’s not that they’re “completely incapable of making a functional website”. It’s that making a good website might take traffic away from their apps, where they have more power to collect metrics and bypass ad blocking.
Wouldn’t that require the app the a better experience?
According to the guys down in analytics, the worse the app is the more money we make
- NewPipe
- Tubular
- GrayJay
- YouTube Revanced
- Firefox for mobile with ublock origin.
- Brave browser mobile are all options you can use instead of Google’s garbage.
- Those are mobile apps
- They have no effect on the website
- The issue is present on the desktop website
- Adblock does not remove the button in question without a custom cosmetic filter
- I’m already using Newpipe and Revanced, and block all ads on mobile and desktop (rude of you to assume otherwise)
There is a similar desktop app: https://freetubeapp.io/
My apologies then. I misunderstood the issue. What button are you talking about if you could elaborate a little more!
When you hover the mouse over the thumbnail of a video that contains sponsored content, the preview starts playing (which is another separate gripe I have) and new buttons slowly fade in. One of those is a hyperlink to an information page about sponsorships that takes up the upper half of the thumbnail’s area. The problem is that those buttons are present and clickable as soon as the preview starts, but invisible for about half a second. Clicking on what appears to be the thumbnail might take you to a different page, and navigating back to the front page refreshes the suggestions.
This sounds new to me. I’ve never actually seen this. I do know about the hover over the video makes it play, but that’s all I know about. Nothing else happens when I hover over the thumbnail beside the video playing. Maybe because I use UBlock Origin and “Enhancer for YouTube” extensions on Firefox?
It’s not on every video, only those that have sponsored content, and it’s entirely possible that it only happens in jurisdictions where disclosure is required and enforced.
The one that drives me insane is using the touchscreen on my Surface:
- Go to a channel’s page
- Click on the video tab
- Scroll through and find the video you want to watch
- Click on the video and YouTube slides to the playlist tab instead of starting the video. Every fucking time.
Piped
