- 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
Would you like to engage in a polite and collected conversation about the YouTube Shorts UI?
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_dBw
You could make a greasemonkey script that does this automatically.
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.
- 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!
…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
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
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.
UX has seemingly disappeared across the web unfortunately. Sites just change things for the sake of it.
I’m convinced that almost all of the frustrating shit that corporations dump down on us comes from weekly staff meetings where some suckup climber just wants to tell the boss hey look, we did a shiny new thing! A thing nobody wanted or asked for. Line must go up.
That’s literally how google works. They want everyone “innovating” and changing shit constantly. Got a new idea for a thing? Roll with it. Gmail is a different name now? Roll with it! Massive UI change for no.discernable reason? You’d better believe you’re gonna be told to roll that out, and someone else will take your place and change shit again shortly.
Google is very annoying at times. I’m fine with constantly trying NEW stuff out but I hate it when they break (or make worse) popular stuff that’s widely used and people have come to depend on it. I feel like Microsoft is the absolute worst in this regard, but Google is really up there, too. I wish there could be a sea change where the “culture” (or whatever it’s properly called) shifts back towards putting a lot of value on reliability and resilience and less on gee-whiz crap. I don’t think it’s likely to happen, but I can dream. I’m old enough to remember when people really demanded this from their vehicles and that’s why Japanese cars started kicking American carmakers’ asses.
They don’t change things just for the sake of it. They change things so they can point at it and say, “look what I did! I deserve a promotion!”
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.
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?
