You'd think they've done it on purpose so you don't watch Youtube on TV. I tried but it's so bad you'd never open it a second time. And that's the platform where there are no ad blockers, so it must be good for them ...

You’re meant to use the dedicated pause button on the apple tv remote to pause without any overlay. Anything that uses the apple built in player has ui appear when you hit the center button. Same for Netflix.

I know Prime did this for quite some time, unaware if they still do. The main YouTube web app also suffers from this same issue, though at least the play button disappears.

Everytime YouTube gets an update it gets worse. This has been true for years. It's like their design and product team is run by second-graders.

Is it a real app anyway on that platform? I doubt it.

Last time I checked, the LG webOS app was just running tv.youtube.com which only expects a TV-specific user agent.

Agreed the interface is clunky.

> you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame

You can press up on the D-pad to dismiss that overlay, if you want to see the full paused frame.

> How do you start it again? By clicking the same button, right? No! By clicking up.

Maybe we have different remotes? On the latest model, you play/pause with the same button.

One issue I’ve noticed in the app is there seems to be no way to move the cursor “up” to the channel button when the video is in the last 10% of the playback bar. If you rewind it a bit, then you’re able to move the cursor up there.

Only in the last few days have Shorts appeared at the top of my home page. I fear it may be the end for me.

It’s so bad. Last time I tried to use it I was unable to fill in my password for my account because Google had implement some custom input element and custom keyboard which did not contain some of the characters I have in my password. And of course there was no possibility to paste or use keychain.

> The YouTube app is easily the worst app on Apple TV.

The YouTube app is a walk in the park compared to the app for Hayu which is like torture sometimes it’s so buggy.

> The YouTube app is easily the worst app on Apple TV.

I would've agreed until Netflix did their redesign and started pushing wrestling for whatever braindead reason. Some executives should just quit.

The YouTube app is the worst on its own site too. I don’t login to any Google account and I turned off site history, and now the homepage is completely blank. Yup. Google won’t even show me a single video on the homepage because I refuse to turn on history. Which is actually kind of nice for preventin distractions

This is intentional on Google’s part. It’s anticompetitive behavior, to make YouTube service’s app shitty on Google’s competitor’s ecosystem. But no government seems to care—-and what will you do, stop watching YouTube?

Except that those two things are fantastic indicators for videos / channels you should be avoiding. Hiding their foolishness and then watching them anyway rewards their behavior.

Neither of these are available on Apple TV. Otherwise, you make a good suggestion; install them where available.

"Watch the world explode as I try to make a table!!!!!!!!!!!!" is unlikely its more like "Watch the world explode as I try to make this thing!!!!!!!!!!!!".

Your comment is past tense - does that mean they’ve stopped doing this? Please, Lord. I had to set my ATV to go to screensaver in a ridiculously short amount of time to preempt the YouTube one.

It’s different on Apple TV.

I assume you mean all the snake oil pre-playback ads? Mostly dangerous medical advice, solar scams, or wellness quackery.

This week, an instructional video I was watching on how to repair my water heater was suddenly interrupted by a campy ad for pussy-hair razors.

It was so ill-timed, bizarre, and inappropriate I burst out laughing.

The other one I was seeing a lot of, until very recently, was pornographic static ads that were implemented as an optical illusion. If you viewed it at full scale it was an innocuous image of a closet or chair or something, so it passed all checks, but when scaled into a thumbnail, it turns into a silhouette of a woman giving oral or something else obscene. Not sure what this technique is called or how it's done. (It's not a schooner, it's a sailboat.)

That's just... every ad. I mostly avoid products that I see in ads (like TV, radio and internet ads) ironically.

When ai slop makes it cheap to churn out the ads this is what you get. What does YT care, they get the money either way.

Enshittification continues

Are they the PMs' preferences? Or are they A/B tested "optimizations" to hit their KPIs?

My iPhone running Safari and uBlock Origin lite is able to do this. I don't have the youtube app installed. I don't even think the ad blocker is necessary for background audio, but I don't want to see ads.

1. Go to youtube.com in the browser, play the video, switch back to the home screen. Video playback will stop, which is a good default behavior.

2. Swipe down from the top of the screen which brings up "Notification Center" which somewhat strangely contains a playback control for the browser.

3. Press play. Audio resumes. If it's part of a playlist, you don't have to manually advance, it will play automatically.

No ads, no youtube premium subscription, no "desktop mode", no sideloading, no additional apps other than the beloved ad blocker.

I'm fairly certain if you use a browser and the desktop version of the site you can listen with the screen off/locked.

Firefox Android can play audio even when the phone is locked, and I use it regularly.

If you're on Android, YouTube Revanced does this (+many other premium features)

You can open youtube in the phone's web browser and install an extension that blocks a site's ability to tell when focus has left the page/app. This is how I listen to some music on my phone while working out.

Ad blockers help with the constant nagging about "open in the app!"

NewPipe

I also use Brave on all my devices - it also works on Amazon Prime. Prime frequently made me offers to upgrade to an ad-free experience that I didn't understand... surely this is a bug, I already have an ad-free experience. Then I installed the Prime app on my TV and realized the constant barrage of ads that Brave has been protecting me from!

I stopped using apps like this because they were always getting broken by youtube. Obviously it's intentional sabotage but still. It felt like I had to update those apps every time I used them and sometimes there was no update at that time at all. The mobile site never breaks and you have full access to extensions if you use firefox.

I never managed to install it

it complains about youtube app being separated into parts or smth like that

It also contains more ads then you tube itself.

Counterpoint: it works, you just have to wait a bit, since now the server will not actually send you the video until the mandatory (pre-skip) ad’s length has elapsed.

Which is fully in their right, I’m not complaining, it’s not like I’m any worse off (waiting on a black screen vs waiting while some bullshit ad tells me to CoNsUmE PrOduCt!!!)

Firefox + uBlock Origin + Sponsor Block + YouTube Redux on Mac has been working well for me for quite some time.

Have you tried "uBlock Origin Lite"? It is by the same author, Raymond Hill (gorhill). It has been working fine. I use "optimal" level for the filtering mode. (Note: I use Chromium on Linux)

I had the same problem. Updating uBlock Origin fixed it.

Make sure to update and restart Firefox.

Youtube's censorship is one reason I won't pay for it. Rumble is a legitimate site even as people decry its existence (it would be less necessary if Youtube didn't decide on being the world's opinion police)

uBlock Origin continues to work well, on both desktop and Android.

> Which adblocker are you currently using?

I’m really shooting myself in the foot right now aren’t I.

1Blocker and Wipr on mobile. Plain old Orion by Kagi on my Mac.

Like another poster mentioned, I use Orion on my iPad with ublock origin installed as an extension. It’s a really great browser, only a few bugs here and there.

I use Brave 99% of the time just for Youtube.

Even on Safari with Apple’s braindead “content blocker” API, AdGuard manages to successfully block YouTube ads.

Blocking ads is hardly "pirating" content

You still get the autogenerated dubs by default, the comments moved to end of the earth, and many other stuff (shorts etc.) people get pissed about.

At this point ads are just one of the annoyances amoung so many others.

For me, and many people, advertising is a mental health issue. I don't enjoy those ads, they are very disturbing and jarring. It causes me anxiety and I don't like the things that those ads normalize. I don't think most people, especially americans, realize how far off the rails our society is in terms of our normalization of insane shit.

So, for health reasons, I block nearly all advertisements. It is a HUGE mental health win. There is a ton of research behind this, as well.

I'm not going to pay extra money to disable a health concern. I'll block ads instead. I should not have to PAY MORE for a product that doesn't damage my health.

I will always happily directly support content creators. I will not watch ads.

I pay for YouTube Premium too (probably not much longer) but can only 'comfortably' use the site through a series of increasingly hacky extensions for Firefox. On non-web apps, there is no recourse from the UI enshittification.

The general theme is the same as the article: less real estate dedicated to actual videos you might want to watch. There were two rows of completely useless garbage that I had to add to my uBlock Origin filter just now: one for Shorts (which I have blocked in the past) and a new one for some sort of Youtube Games thing (?) that looked like the worst AI generated slop you'd never want to play.

If this is the premium experience then I don't want it.

I also pay for premium, and have for at least 15 years since it was called Red, and the experience is complete garbage.

If you turn off history, you get zero videos on your home screen. This is not because the history is needed to generate the suggestions, because the blank home only started a few years ago.

I used to never subscribe to any channels, I just got reasonable feed of suggestions based off of whatever I happened to search for explicitly or if I got there by clicking a link, or by what I chose to click on even if the list starts out totally random, except of course it never was totally random because they still have ip address and other fingerprnting signals.

After they blaked out the home screen and started showing the "you're not logged in, go here to fix this error", I subscribed to a bunch of channels to provide data for generating a feed. They still don't provide any. You can take extra clicks (which is agonizing on the Roku since it just doesn't react well and misses button presses all the time) to get to the subscriptions page, which will show recent uploads exactly from those channels and no others.

I also still get several other forms of ads in the form of the embedded/native ads and the irrelevant suggestions that come from youtube's interests instead of my own, like shorts. I also still get ads simply because I don't get to use my own account all the time. When you watch youtube anywhere but your own laptop by yourself, you are at the whims of someone else's account and some other platforms app limitations.

And even on your own machine, I absolutely resent having to tie my viewing history to my identity and have someone else log all of that. So there is reason to intentionally use no account even if you otherwise have no problem paying to support not only the content producers but even the delivery system.

Why can't I disable shorts? There is no amount I can pay to hide all shorts, but I can have it for free i=on a pc with a tampermonkey or ublock script. But that only helps on a pc. I watch mostly on a TV and I have no ability to hack the roku app. Maybe if I switch to a google tv I could use newpipe or something.

Paying for premium does not make youtube good. It does not resolve much of anything. It is not remotely the touche this smarmy comment attempts to suggest.

Paying for premium takes youtube from being like pulling out 10 of your fingernails to only pulling out 8 of your fingernails.

That 2of10 fingernals relief and for the sake of the creators, that's the only reason I still pay for premium.

The massive overlays of what-to-watch-next hiding most of the video much too early, ie. before the very end, of the video you were trying to watch until the end but now just ragequit and downloaded instead... are very ugly

As a premium user I'd like to block shorts.

Just here to say thank you to everyone arguing/explaining why ad blockers are not piracy using interesting arguments better than my own.

You will never walk alone.

I do pay for YouTube Premium - and I still get ads when someone has YT Videos embedded on their website. YouTube knows who I am, the cookies are set, there is no reason to give me ads.

It is not yet painful enough for me to invest time and energy to research less convenient ways of UX improvement. Not ... yet.

It's not piracy.

If it weren't for piracy, there would be nothing on Youtube except highschool dropouts lobbing accusations at each other, and AI-generated slop.

Wipr, Adblock Pro, Ghostery or uBlock Origin Lite. I've used all four and they perform about as well as you need them to for an adblocker. I'm currently using uBlock.

AdGuard Pro.

And I pay for Premium, because each premium view is more valuable to the creators than the ad supported one.

Vertical videos with much shitter UI. Inability to skip ahead or turn back may be understandable for <30 second videos, but not more.

All vertical videos I've uploaded have automatically turned into shorts and there doesn't seem to be a way to toggle this.

New prophecy just dropped

You could just not let your kids go on YouTube.

There's a long history of people not using it. Most people today don't use it.

maybe there will be another tier of youtube premium in a few years that removes shorts, and people can try to guilt you for blocking them using browser extensions like they do for ad blocking.

I honestly think that at some point, there will be no recommendations page. You'll open YouTube and it'll start autoplaying the video that they (or the advertisers) think you should see. You'll be able to skip to other videos from there, like on short-form content platforms. Likes and subscriptions will dictate how likely it'll be that you'll see a video by that creator in the future. Search and other "outdated" features will be tucked away and purposefully made even more useless than they already are.

I’m still using Amazon as much as I was before, it’s just a more miserable experience now which I can feel and the annoyances are compounding. I’ve not yet done anything that would show in their numbers, like cancel my prime or start trying to shop elsewhere or even boycott them altogether, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy as I was and would say they’re pushing me to a point of defection. All to say, they should be smart enough to not just do uninformed numerical analysis. They need to hone a gut feeling for how pleased people are or build metrics around that. They should see satisfaction is waning. In fact, it may be what’s driving this behavior. If satisfaction is down, people leave, sales slump, then they make more user hostile changes in hopes to cover the sales gap with existing customers, but results in satisfaction going down at every pass. It’s a vicious cycle.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

> If these changes are not hurting user metrics

I suspect there is no metric specifically answering the question "do users want [enshittification of the day]?"

There are probably plenty that measure success with dark patterns however, like viewership and engagement.

If it happens to me again, I will have to find my content elsewhere. It's not even a conscious decision, I just got genuinely fatigued from the experience.

On the bright side, maybe I'd be better off. There are probably better things I could be doing with my time.

There's an old adage that if you follow the tech that porn adopts, you'll generally be ahead the average consumer curve.

I think there's another version that if porn adopts a tech that means that the tech will work. Like, a lot of VR adoption early on was porn. By a lot, I mean most.

Google "Ethical Capital Partners."

Operates:

Pornhub

RedTube

YouPorn

Brazzers

Digital Playground Men.com

Reality Kings

SpankWire

Because they fired a bunch of engineers, fired/reorged the PMs and whoever is left is working on the AI shlop.

Oh, are we talking about bad YouTube UX? How about the "feature" where the right and left arrows seek the video 5s forward and back, while the up and down arrows increase and decrease the volume? That is, unless the last UI element you've touched was the volume bar, in which case the side arrows will also change the volume, and you'll have to use the mouse to clear the focus away from that volume bar to be able to seek the video again. I still wonder how they managed to break this despite it having had a sane, consistent, defined behavior for probably over a decade before that point.

There's no little great in embedded videos or, at least, my local newspaper actively disables it.

This is not always available for some reason

Yeah ElevenLabs had this over a year ago where you could just upload a 30 second clip of someone's voice in another language and hear what it was like in English and it worked really well.

Finnish to the rescue:

Change your Youtube language to Finnish, which isn’t supported by auto-dubbing (and probably never will), and all audio will be in original language.

The setting does not persist, not even within the same session.

Not on web mobile frontend

Is there a setting to disable it globally or has every video to be switched?

Often times there is no setting to disable this

and they are often good videos (if you like watching extreme sports related things), given the partial second video this seems likely for the account who made the screenshot

but given that half a video is not a full video this still means we are at one single full video

and an AD which is deceptively pretending to be a video

I still think regulators should ban deceptive ads and require ads to to clearly different from the main content _on the first take/glance_. They way YT, Google and co handle ads is IMHO deceptive to a point its reasonable to say they try to deceive the user into clicking on the ad when they wouldn't have done so if they new it was an ad.

And "systematically deceiving a user/customer to their detriment (wasting time) and your profit" isn't just shitty but on a gray line to outright fraud.

Was just talking with my son about how some YouTubers who made short videos long ago started making longer and less succinct videos because they thought the algorithm favored long videos and then TikTok happens.