- I got one, "removed the dislike counts"
Yes YouTube, I have my browser set to French, but I read and understand English perfectly fine, please stop badly translating English video titles (or force-enabling french auto-dub, it's even worse).
At least I found an extension for this a couple of days ago :
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-no-tr...
It constantly either translates language-learning videos entirely into english or into the language i'm trying to learn. Despite all settings on my account being set to english, if I include any non-english text in my search query that is enough to get youtube to translate all videos out of english. When it does this, there is seemingly no built-in feature to change this back, other than through addons. And there isn't even an indication that conveys the fact the video title and description are auto-translated, other than maybe i recognize the channel and can tell that its supposed to be in another language.
And part of me thinks, "maybe once i learn enough, such a feature could maybe be helpful in learning a language" But every video ive seen so far thats auto-translated into English is done so quite badly and confusingly. I can't trust the translation.
Search, the ui, recommendations, shorts, all the new ai features (dubbing, translations, upscaling).
It often resumes video at a random location after you paused it, you have to manually rewind it.
Some of these bugs are like boomerang, they come back after a year or so.
From UI perspective, they continue to hide the "recently updated" section, which should list your subscribed content only, and slowly turn it into a TikTok like app, serving you the content they think you need to watch, not the content you subscribed to.
Agree with you about the UX changes. I can easily get to “the end” of my feed and refreshing shows me all of the same videos but in a slightly different order. Definitely feels worse than 3 years ago.
> Most annoyingly it stars playing same video I already watched a while ago after resuming the device from sleep.
Mine does this sometimes too. If you double click the "Home" button on your remote, you can swipe up to close the YouTube app completely, just like you would to close an app on an iPhone/iPad. Shouldn't be necessary in the first place but it does fix it.
Shorts are mixed. Also, the tragedy of the commons where people are encouraged to make obnoxious thumbnails and titles. Video reply removal, usually the replies weren't good. Unlisted videos all went private automatically on some date. Sorting by oldest when viewing a channel's videos was briefly removed but brought back.
Bad changes include
the entire copystrike system, which is more stringent than what the DMCA requires,
community translation removal, where people could submit subtitles,
removing dislikes which gave a great red/green bar to indicate a video's quality just below the thumbnail,
removing video recommendations when logged out or if history is off,
scaring creators with being labeled aimed for kids (pewdiepie stopped calling his fanbase "9 year-old army" for this),
the monetization/demonetization system drastically changed how people make videos. e.g., cutting edge engineering recently had to stop swearing so much in their outtakes section, saying "fuck me" when he made a mistake, as YT considers that sexual. nobody dares say the word "suicide" out loud, people use code words to speak. history channels are virtually impossible to monetize without cutting out mention of terrorism.
the search system by default now shows weird results, I can't quite explain it,
searching for newsworthy topics will result in you only seeing channels from approved news sources and not regular users (related, ChinesePod had a daily language learning channel using the news, YT said they couldn't categorize as news... not sure if they were forced off but they moved to vimeo),
gun youtubers worried about showing full-auto firing or how to reload a magazine... I'm still unclear on what they're forbidden to show,
and the multitude of videos and channels removed for a whole variety of reasons. Just one I'm thinking of is Russel Bentley's channel. "Texas" was his nickname, an American fighting in Petrovski for Russia, showing videos of him talking in a radio station or firing a DShK mounted in an abandoned elementary school. His channel was deleted soon after Russia's most recent invasion of Ukraine. Russia Today/RT's live news was booted too, though that may have been due to US sanctions.
And age-gating now. it's hard to know which songs will be age-gated, maybe if they use the word "fuck" too much, it's very inconsistent. Now, you have to not only log in to see a video labeled this way, your account must be age-verified. If your account is old YT doesn't ask this, but they do for my ~5 year old account. I haven't done it. Asks for ID or face scan or to be able to log in to your email account.
https://github.com/insin/control-panel-for-youtube/releases/...
Basically means no more actual search
SockThief•3w ago
@TeamYouTube responds later that they will reconsider:
> Really appreciate your response, and can see how sorting by upload date is helpful when tracking breaking news. We're sharing this feedback live with our product team
ncr100•3w ago
- how important YouTube is in the real world and
- how disconnected the "Product Team" is, by inference from this reply.
magicalhippo•3w ago
A semi-random recent example from someone else, Samsung changed contacts list in recent update, so now recently added contacts is above favorite contacts, and it's done in such a way I now have to scroll to get to my favorites... like WTF.
Samsung aren't unique though. Microsoft for example has spent the first few years if each release of their OS usable since Vista, with the exception of Windows 7.
7bit•3w ago
ncr100•2w ago
"the market moves faster than the tech" and in this case the tech is not evolved (e.g. to protect the fact YOU want your favorites at the top) because the PMs may never prioritize it.
slurpyb•3w ago