This happened suddenly yesterday. I don’t think I saw any notification about it.
Now the thumbnails are bigger (4 across instead of 5) which has its pluses and minuses. But annoyingly, all the groupings have gone, the thumbnails are just scattered and mixed up together. And there is no longer a heading for “from your subscriptions.”
I’m always way out of step, is this happening to everyone, or anyone but me? I don’t see anything in Settings to change it back, is it possible to change it back?
It’s unchanged for me on Firefox, but yesterday on my phone it did look different than other times. I don’t use it through my phone a lot though, didn’t dwell on the details.
I found something called the YouTube Blog wherein they breathlessly announced all these “improvements” based on users inputs. They didn’t ask my input, and they don’t offer a way out (at least not publicly). Oh well, small cheese on the pizza of life.
It’s awful. It’s being rolled out in stages across the YT audience for the last few months. If you want to go back to old Youtube, use this link: YouTube
I’ve had a bunch of slow changes over the last few months. First, the front page started getting populated with a lot of videos I had already seen and I’m hesitant to hit the uninterested button for fear that it’ll mess with my subscription or some suggesting similar things to me.
More recently it started autoplaying when you hovered over the thumbnails, much like netflix. Luckily I found an adblock/ublock filter for that. A few days ago the annotations popped up and can’t be turned off permanently, but only on a video to video basis.
And one of the biggest annoyances for me, as someone that can’t stand videos playing when you’re not interacting with them, is about halfway down the main screen is a section called “latest youtube posts” because, for some reason, YT thinks I need to see what some of my subscribed channels have said in comments around the platform. And it’s often accompanied by a video that won’t stop running.
Unfortunately, I assume many of these are ways that can really only make money for them so I don’t see them reversing their decisions unless people are really loud about it or stop using youtube as much.
I use yahoo at work for my home page, just because I get a few headlines everytime I open my browser. They also changed in the last few days, but, so far as I can tell it’s only cosmetic.
They put me on polymer a long time ago, but I opted out. The main annoyance for me is that it made my text enlarging extension not work. But it still had proper categories on the Recommended page, last I checked. The main advantage was that it didn’t have black bars when the video’s aspect ratio wasn’t 16:9.
I had a problem with YouTube on my phone awhile back. Links would open YouTube, but the linked video was nowhere to be found. There was an ad running at the top, then a bunch of suggested videos below. And if I scrolled down and back up, the ad would start from the beginning. I think some folks around here tipped me off on how to fix it – I deleted the YouTube app, and then it would just open in my browser.
The only thing I’ve noticed lately is that videos are automatically muted, with a little “tap to unmute” message in the upper left corner.
All of these ‘kewl’ features that Google and YouTube keep rolling out are beyond annoying: auto this, auto that. I keep archiving mail because whenever I try to open it, I accidentally click on the archive icon, which appears before you even open the mail. I digress, as I realize this is about YouTube, not Gmail.
But yeah, YouTube is really in a free fall at least in terms of user experience. I think the idea is that they’re going to make free YouTube so incredibly annoying and intermittent that you’ll feel compelled to sign up for a subscription. They’re going the Hulu route. Not that I care but their content creators are apparently getting squeezed.
Reviving this thread to note that this has worked for me up until yesterday. If there is a new way to opt out of the new Youtube, I hope someone will explain it here.
Having been back on it for two days, I remember one of the things I hated when it first started. When I am browsing through the feed and seeing what is being offered, woe betide me if I find two videos I want to watch, because if I watch one and then hit the back arrow to find and watch the other one, chances are good that it’s no longer there and a different set of videos, or a partially different and re-arranged set of videos, are waiting for me. Under the old system if I wanted to shuffle my videos around and get some new ones, I would just hit the Reload button. But that was my choice, and we can’t have users making choices, now, can we?
You’ve got the option to add the videos to your queue, so the 2nd one will start when you finish watching the first. There’s also a “watch later” button that pops up when you hover over a thumbnail.