YouTube Tests Bigger Thumbnails

YouTube is experimenting with making video thumbnails much larger on its homepage, according to several screenshots that appeared on Twitter and Reddit this morning. From a report: The new homepage design changes quite a bit about the current setup. Videos are no longer grouped by categories, fewer videos appear in a line for people to scroll through, and, yes, the thumbnails are noticeably larger. It's unclear just how many people have been served the new layout. So far, it's not going over well with users. People are complaining that the bigger thumbnails make the homepage more difficult to scroll through.

1st World Problem

[phalse phace]

People are complaining that the bigger thumbnails make the homepage more difficult to scroll through.

1st world problem

I've been getting this new layout for a few weeks

[alzoron]

and I still hate it. There's no organization and it takes longer to scroll through. Looks like a random mess of pictures someone puked onto a wall. It doesn't even give you customization options like "Show less of this" to curate what shows up anymore.

Re:

[cayenne8]

In safari, I'm also seeing a LOT of thumbnails that are just black...no image just a black square.

Re:

[Misagon]

I use a TamperMonkey script to set a cookie to get the old look back (... until Google discovers that they have still not removed the old interface from servers). It works fine for me:
http://greasyfork.org/en/scrip... [greasyfork.org]

We need a bigger boat

[nospam007]

...but not bigger thumbnails, we would have an O.J. Simpson glove moment.

Meh...

[That YouTube Guy]

YouTube tends to fix things that don't need fixing.

Re:

[NewtonsLaw]

And in the process... breaks stuff that used to work.

How many wonderful elements of the original YouTube have been lost to progress?

  - Nested comments (ie: subthreads)
  - Video responses
  - ???

And the advertising!!! Yesterday I had my first ever experience with no less than THREE unskippable ads in a row, just a few minutes into a video. Less and less like the YouTube we loved, more and more like broadcast television :-(

Re:

[tepples]

The replacement for video response is making your own video and leaving its URL in a comment. The only reason why YouTube had video responses in the first place is that it prohibited posting URLs in comments as an anti-spam measure prior to the Google+ era.

Without advertising, who would fund production of videos with a scope bigger than a hobby alone can cover?

How about...

[Kokuyo]

How about taking inspiration from Pornhub and the rest and finally make the thumbnails animated gifs? Ya know, actual previews?

Google's Motto

[DickBreath]

If it ain't broke . . .


. . . then fix it 'till it is!

Just why?

[iampiti]

Users in mobile devices usually use the app so why punish desktop users with another touch-first low-information-density design?
Desktops/Laptops usually have a big amout of real estate and precise entry devices (mice and keyboards) please make UIs which take advantage of these capabilites (as it was done until a few years ago where smartphones took over the world and everyone decided to make lowest-common-denomninator UIs).

Re:Just why?

[Falos]

Users aren't supposed to see more options, they're supposed to click what the algorithms want them to click. Consume as you're told, we'll do the thinking for you, and you get to still enjoy the illusion of being someone who chose.

this is why game steaming needs to FAIL BIG TIME o

[Joe_Dragon]

this is why game steaming needs to FAIL BIG TIME or we will be stuck with it's dumb downs.

Re:

[overnight_failure]

As far as I can tell this is a shift towards a video "news feed". Which seems to be the mainstay of most social media platforms, users hate it but algorithms love it.

what is the problem

[renegade600]

if users want different sizes, just use the ctrl - or the ctrl + keys and adjust it for themselves. the change is really no big deal as long as the shortcut keys work.

slow implosion to nothingness

[eastjesus]

It's sad to watch YouTube's slow implosion taking place. It WAS a wonderful idea and a great implementation. After becoming successful and killing the cable companies with something unique and better using the sweat and labour of thousands of small video creators, Susan and her cohorts are now slapping those same loyal and hardworking creators in the face and shutting them out of what they created over many years and BECOMING a cable company, the most hated businesses in the country, and only catering to their advertiser's and a few select channel's desires. This is a direction that they have been on for awhile now with their subscription and cable channel offerings and incremental impediments to their creative base. Even their AI, which used to recommend many interesting videos is now dishing up lists that have little appeal or interest, at least for me, and I find I now have to dig pages into search results to find what I am looking for. The result is that I spend much less time watching YouTube than I used to and much more time looking for and at alternatives. There was a reason I used YouTube but that reason is fading quickly. The company that used to say "Do no evil" has completed its transformation into that evil. They are becoming an impediment to what I want to watch and an insult to the very people that made them successful. They can coast on their inertia for awhile but it will catch up eventually and someone else will pick up the slack. Creative people remember and help their friends.

Might explain uBlock Origin issues lately

[ArghBlarg]

A few days ago suddenly Youtube stopped showing any preview images above the titles of vids. They come back if I check "Disable cosmetic filters for this site" in uBlock.. but that also brings back the HUGE ad videos at the top. I guess uBlock noticed the bigger thumbnails for me.

Sucks, but hell if I'm going to unblock their top ad videos, they take ~50% of the window real estate! .. Can someone automate mirroring Youtube channels to peertube.social or something? The sooner we ditch Youtube the better.

And in even bigger news. WTF Slashdot just blocked me from posting as Anonymous Coward w/o logging in! We're required to log in now??

This might just be my last /. post... farewell! It was good while it lasted.

Re:

[fafalone]

Can't post AC from a logged in account either. Now that's really stupid, you could at least code it to still be enabled for at least accounts that aren't new/negative karma. Hopefully it's just temporary until that psycho dude finds somewhere else to spam or gets a life sentence for shooting up someplace.

Re:

[_merlin]

I can understand why they did it. The crapflood from APK, "Shanghai Bill is a liar", "Ken Doll", swastika shitposts, etc. was getting out of hand. There were stories where you had to dig way down to find any non-spam posts. I'd still rather they allowed anonymous posts from logged-in users - there's stuff people can't talk about with their name attached to it.

The end of AC posts really does feel like the end of the old Slashdot. ACs have contributed a lot to discussion over the years. But the old web o

Re:

[Malays Bowman]

" But the old web of the late '90s and early '00s is gone. It's not going to come back. This place has slowly degenerated over the years. We've just got to move on." Usenet became a total shitpot in the mid 1990s. And don't blame "Eternal September". I'm talking about 'leet cliques who had no life and loved nothing more than to trash any 'newbie' they came across, not to mention all of the hate posts, endless spam, and sock puppets battling out with other sock poppets. The web now is what Usenet was 20

Why do companies love bad ideas?

[Malays Bowman]

"The new homepage design changes quite a bit about the current setup. Videos are no longer grouped by categories, fewer videos appear in a line for people to scroll through, and, yes, the thumbnails are noticeably larger" And what made them think any of this was a good idea, and how come the moron who pitched this idea isn't scrubbing toilets and sinks? Tell the young, stupid 20 year old to shut the fuck up! How hard is this for the older and supposedly wiser people in charge to understand this?