So, instead of getting the ability to search for videos properly, with negative search terms, user defined video length spans, exact dates, sort by reverse date order etc… we get ambient mode and color search? Can someone please, for the sake of humanity and my sanity, erase this company and its parent from the planet.
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.
Arent there like Ralph from the Simpsons originating jokes about how like, this crayon tastes like yellow?
Congrats YouTube, thank you so much.
I can now enjoy green flavored content, fuck having a working suggestion algorithm that actually recommends interesting content, I guess I can use YouTube for what it seems to be intended for these days, as an ambient noise and color generator for my monitor and room while i actually do something else.
Ralph from the Simpsons is the best analogy for how I see Google now. Brilliant.
Stop being so chartreuse! Would it kill you to be a little more periwinkle?
You made me search the internet to rid me of my confusion! I’m all vermilion now!
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
The fact that Google started as a search company and yet search in their own apps sucks is boggling.
It’s not boggling; it’s very simple: they discovered that having shitty search apparently makes them more money than having good search.
I feel like maybe the term “search” when applied to digital services should be regulated. What Google et al do isn’t search, it’s recommendations. Recommendations can be useful, but they sure as hell don’t replace search. Someone call the EU.
if they won’t regulate what ‘news’ or ‘organic’ or ‘private’ means then good luck with ‘search’. waiting for the government to get wise and save us, still?
“Organic” is absolutely a regulated term in the US, not sure about elsewhere. You might be thinking of “natural.”
Which “the government”?
Bingo!
Don’tBe Evil.It was obvious they would enshittify, they literally told us they would.
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.
With all the absurd turns YouTube and Google have taken, I’ve been looking at this for five minutes trying to figure out if this is a shitpost
Nope, I’ve seen it myself. Cannot imagine a more useless feature.
Cannot imagine a more useless feature.
Especially useless for us colorblind people…
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:
I don’t have the official app, so I choose to pretend this is a shitpost.
Haha A++ shitpost
In my defence I use Revanced and not Newpipe only because I like to have my subscriptions and watchlist synced up between devices
Understandable
I’m really disappointed, was expecting all red videos to be those cringey red arrows pointing at irrelevant things.
You interacted with it, which means some ux designer somewhere is going to see the metrics and get encouraged
I saw it yesterday and thought I had brain damage for a minute.
Does that come with app update? I still have normal categories up there:
I have 19.03.35 Revanced; may be a regional trial?
I have the official unmodded YouTube app v. 18.46.41.
Anyway, it would probably show up since it’s not a client-side thing. Could be a regional thing. Or just random testing.
Why do you have the official app? I can never go back to normal youtube with all the in your face ads. Soon I’ll stop using pixel phones if Google doesn’t stop forcing me to buy google drive/photos subscription.
Google AB tests every tiny detail so you might not see it.
Never even looked at the home tab before, when I go there it just says watch history is off lol
This is a data collection strategy, not a feature
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
Colorblind people be like: https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/027/424/joke.jpg
Holy crap, the amount of hate in here, and no actual description of what it does. It’s essentially your normal home feed, but only the videos with thumbnails of the selected color. It’s also way over at the right of the home feed filters, so it isn’t like it’s being shoved down your throats.
Doesn’t stop it from being a dumb, pointless feature.
Why bother caring? Doesn’t make a difference to me.
I care because it shows YouTube is more interested in wasting resources on dumb, pointless features rather than fixing various problems that have been plaguing content creators over the years
The resources used to implement this aren’t the same as the ones that would be used to address some of the other issues, as the ones I know of are more social/legal ones.
I bet this was mostly done by a single coder who showed it off and management thought it was a fun thing so added it to the main site.
At this point I feel like it’s intentional, and either way, am not surprised. Unlike a lot of other commentors here, I don’t see the point in wasting mental power on worrying about it.
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).
Fun quirky features are things you make when you have a good product.
These types of features added to things with genuine ongoing problems will always piss off users.
Most people love YouTube, I know it doesn’t feel like it when you’re inside the Lemmy bubble but the big tech companies are far more popular than anything we like
I love the videos on it, and fist off I liked the site too, but they have been enshittifying it pretty hard lately
For me it was embedded in my feed, not in some remote setting
Yeah, it shows up there once, then is buried to the right of the filters afterwards.
Who asked for this?
That is stupid. I wish it would just let me block channels for real in search. Also, I wonder how that works if you’re colorblind?
If I want something news related, that doesn’t mean I want to see Fox News or other random right wing nutjobs who scream into the camera about “wokeism” every day for 4 hours.
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.
Add “autoplay the next episode of the podcast I’m watching if it’s available.” Yeah, youtube, I really wanna watch Well There’s Your Problem #138 immediately after Well There’s Your Problem #43. Idiot.
“Let’s Play Dumbcraft! Ep. 1”
Then get every other Episode except Ep. 2 listed, so you have to go to the channel and manually find it…
I’d also like them to fix the search. It only returns a small handful of results and then the rest is just recommended stuff not relating to the search
I know it’s been said many times, but I truly miss the old internet. Fuck this homogeneous, corporatized, spyware ridden, ad infested, data harvesting, soulless, pile of fucking dogshit called the modern internet.
With terrible UI on top. Like seriously YouTube let me hide videos after I’ve watched them.
Not only that, let me hide whole dumbass channels. Then apply a similar function at Google search so I can spare my eyes from seeing a 1000 temu ads with each result.
Just let my choose which sites I want to block from showing me search results and ads.
One thing that brought back the joy of earlier times youtube for me was
- Disable thumbnails (e.g. “Clickbait Remover for Youtube” on ff)
Disable holding left-click to fast-forward a video
Oh god yes I hate this so much. If I want to control the playback speed of video there is an option in the settings for that. If they wanted to make it an option to fast forward by doing something rather than just changing the setting globally, it would have been better if they had picked literally anything other than me having to keep my finger on the mouse button. It should have been if I hold down the right arrow key.
Holding left click to fast forward is the best feature they’ve d added in a long time
Currently the set up that makes youtube somewhat tolerable for me is, Ublock Origin (obviously), sponsor block, Return youtube dislike, Youtube-shorts block , and UnHook. Another option would be to use invidous, Freetube, or NewPipe, but all of them are not perfect and have their own limitations.
Also, I wonder how that works if you’re colorblind?
It’s orange, blue, and yellow fyi.
That depends on the type of color blindness, there are different types
Woosh…
Well that’s what I see.
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.
Very interesting - my job involves a lot of Excel and charts, so I recently took a training on how to make those more accessible for colorblind folks. So that’s good to know!
I just used it and I thought it was kind of cute. It’s obviously “useless”, but as a small (I assume temporary) change I thought it was interesting to see how different “genres” of videos tend to color code themselves in the thumbnail.
I’m all for small, fun little things in websites. Like anytime google has an interactive daily theme
This is just farts and whistles, though
Fair, but so are most of the little interactive google things. I still like them.
There are millions of youtube videos uploaded every single day. Why do I always get the exact same stuff in my recommendations? And why does YouTube shorts keep playing the same clips over and over again? Even the ones I disliked.
uBlock - copy the template in the link below, add it to “My Filters” to completely remove Shorts from YouTube:
OMG thank you. I fucking hate shorts.
Oh man I needed this! Not the stupid extensions that play it in a normal YouTube window or something. I just wanna remove that crappy short form video stuff altogether.
The UI for shorts is terrible. You can’t double click to fast forward, as that likes the video. Why are they inconsistent with their own player?
That site is amazing! Thank you!
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.
Good to know. I need to see of there’s a way to do it on youtube shorts.
Check out @Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world comment above
Because those videos give Google the best ad revenue. Who cares what the users watch all long as Google gets rich along the way.
What is the mechanism for that? What do you envision makes them more valuable?
Google gets more money if the video has more ads. Google also pays more in bandwidth and storage if the video is really long or high res. Also, advertisers don’t like drugs, violence or guns, whereas makeup and mobile phones are totally fine, so those videos are a suitable background for ads.
All of these variables go into the calculation that determines the sweet spot for Google, and the search results are ranked accordingly. You may be looking for an hour long video essay on the torture methods seen in the Hellraiser movies, but Google really wants you to spend more time on 5-minute crafts instead. Actually, 30 s shorts would be even better, as long as they keep you preoccupied.
I just want the videos i’ve subscribed for to actually show up in my sub feed. That’s really it, man.
People are Google are being paid upwards of 200-300k a year to do this. It’s a prime example of doing something just to fulfill your quota on the kanban board
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.)
I don’t really want recommendations for anything. I just want my subscribed channels to appear in my subscriptions page. More than half of the videos from these channels are missing, because the algorithm decided they’re not what I want to see. If a channel I’m subbed to posts something, I want to see it in this list. No exceptions
Ah, you don’t see videos from non-subscribed creators, but you don’t see 100% of videos from 100% of subscribed creators.
Not very intuitive.
This would’ve been a great idea as a comedy sketch
I wonder if they are doing something worse and just overshadowing it with this weird change. Like we are using your data for training AI with no opt out BUT look at this random color picker! Don’t mind the first part, LOOK! COLORS!
Can I get a feed that’s not insisting that I watch the same small selection of garbage for months? Thanks.
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.
They should do it on texture instead.
- Your red velvet cake is missing this one ingredient.
- Ten Seinfeld quotes about wearing velvet.
- Your mind will be blown by this analysis of “Blue Velvet”
- All the Easter eggs in Velvet Underground album covers
- The terrible origin of the phrase, ‘iron fist in velvet glove’
All with thumbnails of the narrator with a shocked face & an illustrated arrow pointing at something vague