Genuinely curious what parts of the UI have gotten worse. Open video, video plays, move on.
It’s obvious that Google would rather try to make money than bleed it into one of the most expensive websites out there, so the ads are a moot point. Pay or become the product.
Two big things I’ve noticed:
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They removed the Chromecast queue feature. So if I’m casting to my TV, I can either play one video at a time, or I can enable autoplay and see what the algorithm decides to serve me - I can’t queue up a few videos and just watch those, like I used to be able to.
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Playlists are becoming harder and harder to use. Finding the button to add a video to a playlist, moving videos from one playlist to another, and managing playlists in general has all become more difficult recently.
“Why isn’t one of the most expensive to operate websites free?!”
There’s a reason there are zero actual competitors in this space (maybe TikTok but it’s full of its own problems). Only a company as big as Google can afford to run at this scale. Feel free to add your business plan on how to make YouTube free without ads and without it shutting down in 3 months.
Well you say that, but I feel entitled to free shit. - Common take on lemmy
Not a business plan because business=money, but how about creators host their own videos and share them through BitTorrent. No need to deliver real time video, users just download what they want to watch then watch them as they become available. Funding occurs through Kofi or Patreon etc. They’ll need to publish the magnet links somewhere but that’s a whole load cheaper than publishing RT video.
The vast majority of what YouTube does on a technical level is ingesting a ton of uploaded user video, encoding it in dozens of combinations of resolution, framerate, quality, and codec, then seamlessly choosing which version to serve to requesting clients to balance bandwidth, perceived quality, power efficiency in the data center, power efficiency on client devices, and hardware support for the client. There’s a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, and there’s a reason why the user experience is much more seamless on YouTube on a shitty data connection than, say, Plex on a good data connection.
No, it doesn’t need to be realtime, but people with metered or throttled bandwidth might benefit from downloading just in time video at optimized settings.
I’ve been stewing on making an “unpopular opinion” post about how neckbeards ruined the internet by demanding everything be “free” (meaning ad-supported) and then using ad blockers (meaning the normies had to pick up the slack).
Ads and subscription aside, any time there is a feature I like on YouTube, they remove it or change it. More often than not when they add a new feature, it makes the experience worse for me.
I understand they need to make money. I’m willing to sit through ads or pay a subscription for that. But the ads are constantly getting worse. Mid-roll ad breaks that are auto-generated into the video (for older videos, content creators would have to go through their library to manually change them, from what I understand). A push for censoring content to avoid demonetisation, even content not intended for children.
Yes, part of it is that I got used to YouTube in its early days when it was operating at a loss. When it was a wild west of content creation. But it just feels like it has become so unfriendly to users and content creators alike. It has become corporate and sterile, while trying to squeeze in revenue everywhere it can. (Likely to barely break even, sure, but they don’t have to make it crap to use to do that.)
The problem with the “free” part is that hosting videos isn’t free so there needs to be monetization in some form.
Just because it is a free innovative video hosting platform … it still doesn’t mean it is useful or beneficial. Thousands and thousands of hours of just useless junk content of idiots showing to everyone in infinite detail how stupid they are … and the worst part is, everyone loves it.
There is also a lot of educational content, including lectures, interviews, popular science channels, investigative journalism, and tutorials on anything from how to apply nail polish to how to fly an actual Boeing 737 from real airline pilots. This list is endless. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with junk content either, sometimes we all need to unwind and watch something silly. Don’t take YouTube for granted.
Oh no, I didn’t pay and have to watch an ad! Literally slaves.
