Seriously, there was a time when Google was lauded for all kinds of awesome innovation, and joked about that you needed a PhD to even be a janitor there.

Look at them now. They can’t even do basic search functionality anymore, and are so misguided that they put out color filters for video.

I 100% agree they need to just stop existing at this point.

Stop being so chartreuse! Would it kill you to be a little more periwinkle?

The fact that Google started as a search company and yet search in their own apps sucks is boggling.

In YouTube Music, when you’re building a tuner to create a station, you can’t search at all. Instead, you get an endless scroll off bands and have to find the one you want that way. The order is random.

Like … Pandora let you do the same thing with search back in the 00’s

Yes it’s super weird that porn sites had that functionality for over a decade and one of the world’s largest tech companies still can’t implement those.

I absolutely hate the ambient mode. I mean, I get it, it’s kind of my problem if I am trying to use ancient desktop, but it’s also pretty unnecessary.

Trying to view YouTube videos on many school computers became a pain in the ass. Some are so laggy that I can’t even get to disable the ambient mode without which it would still be somewhat usable. (But hey, piped.video works.)
Hell, even my HP 255 G7 (a fairly average office laptop with Ryzen 3 3200U) struggles with it. It gets laggy and turns into hairdryer.

Secondly, it’s distracting.

This sounds like they made a cheap feature from data they already had, but didn’t stop to think why anyone would ever want it.

💰

The search was already so abysmal that this doesn’t change much.

Nope, I’ve seen it myself. Cannot imagine a more useless feature.

It is not, there are actual colour categories at the top of the page which allow you to filter by thumbnails. This is what the Red page looks like for me:

Remember the old days, when your aunt would send you an invite to a facebook game that would predict which celebrity you’re most like based on unrelated and harmless pieces of data, like: (1) Your favorite color, (2) Your first pet’s name, (3) The school you went to, (4) Your mother’s maiden name (5) Last four digits of your social security number (6) Birthdate

This sounds similarly comical if it was intended for data collection.

EDIT: I’ve reconsidered. Knowing color preferences is very useful for an advertisement company.

you know, I shouldn’t be surprised but I didn’t even think about that

Doesn’t stop it from being a dumb, pointless feature.

Yea, seems like a fun and quirky feature, but unfortunately I don’t think there’s anything big tech companies can do at this point to turn things around with public opinion given how utterly egregious their other sins have been (and continue to be).

For me it was embedded in my feed, not in some remote setting

Things I wish YouTube would let me do:

• See dislikes
• Disable Shorts (uBlock lets me filter them out, at least)
  • At the very least let me control the fucking volume on Shorts instead of muting/unmuting them only if you’re going to force them down my throat (seriously, it makes the entire video format unwatchable on Desktop because every fucking Short video is so god damned loud)
• Disable holding left-click to fast-forward a video (I do this thing where I’m about to pause a video and hold down the click until they’re done talking and this change is just so fucking stupid, I don’t understand who needs to hold down left click to fast-forward)
• Actually block channels I’m not interested in
• Block videos based on keywords
• Recommend videos based on the one I’m currently watching if my watch history is disabled
  • Seriously, since disabling it YouTube does nothing but recommend “trending” crap that has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m watching

If they’d implement even half of that, my user experience would shoot up through the roof. But, you know, they couldn’t give a rat’s ass about user experience.

Also, I wonder how that works if you’re colorblind?

It’s orange, blue, and yellow fyi.

Also, I wonder how that works if you’re colorblind?

This was probably a joke but I can actually answer that for you.

First of all, afaik there is no scientific consensus that people see the colours the same way. In fact, we most likely don’t. The visual colour interpretation is mostly likely merely added on by our brains basing on the knowledge of wavelengths. In other words, there is no such thing as “absolute blue”. There is “a blue” which is the colour each one of us’ brains was taught to call blue by simply showing the sky. If I were to look through your brain (but not through your eyes, eyes understand wavelengths), we would probably disagree on each and every colour.

Second of all, there are different kinds of colour blindness. It is in fact an umbrella term for different disabilities. My understanding is that they usually involve a spectrum between two hues. So most colourblind will simply be unable to tell a difference between objects of two colours: for example red and green. They see them as slightly different versions of the same colour. However it would be wrong to say that the person in question sees red as green or vice versa, because, again, there are no “absolute colours”. Their eyes cannot distinguish between these two ranges of wavelengths and the brain interprets them as the same colour.

And finally, colourblind people, when diagnosed, are fully aware of being colourblind, and furthermore, they DO NOT see in black and white. Even if a person cannot distinguish red and orange, then they still are aware there is a difference that most people around can tell and that there are concepts and feelings associated with them.

What I am trying to say is that a colour-blind person would probably still be able to, for example, associate “red” videos with action and blood, and “green” ones with nature and calmness, even though this distinction is not palpable to them.

Either way, this filtering with thumbnail colour is fucking stupid.

This is just farts and whistles, though

uBlock - copy the template in the link below, add it to “My Filters” to completely remove Shorts from YouTube:

https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts

You should never dislike on YouTube. They just view it as engagement and will give it you more. To actually get rid of content that you don’t like, you need to use “not interested” in the context menu.

This drove me crazy for a long time.

Because those videos give Google the best ad revenue. Who cares what the users watch all long as Google gets rich along the way.

Your sub feed?

The Home tab is where they seem to mix videos from subscribed and recommended creators. I highly suspect payments influence the frequency of subscribed recommendations on the homepage. (Subscribed) Colbert used to show on Home, then NEVER EVER did again for YEARS until a few weeks ago. Now he gets top placement, several days in a row.

You see random videos on the subscription tab? (Admittedly I don’t use it.)

Or the videos you watched years ago and still remember. There is more youtube video than my lifetime why the hell would i watch the same shit over and over again?

The “not interested” button is your hero. Really, just hit “not interested” on a few of the offending genre and it should get right out of there.

If you also remove them from your history - even better

Disable your viewing history. I don’t go on YouTube deep dives like I used to, but at least my suggested videos aren’t all related to some previous dive I’ve done anymore.