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.
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
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!
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.
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.
The search was already so abysmal that this doesn’t change much.
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.
💰
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
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'm really disappointed, was expecting all red videos to be those cringey red arrows pointing at irrelevant things.
I saw it yesterday and thought I had brain damage for a minute.
You interacted with it, which means some ux designer somewhere is going to see the metrics and get encouraged
Nope, I've seen it myself. Cannot imagine a more useless feature.
Cannot imagine a more useless feature.
Especially useless for us colorblind people...
Unfortunately it is not…
Sounds like a new and inventive way for them to push sponsored content on you but make it seem like you had some choice in the matter
You've searched for Red! Here are some funny, relaxing and interesting videos from Coca-Cola, Adobe and Target!
Please drink verification can.
I'm sure they'll also share their information with "content creators" so they can all start using the most popular colors and the site can become even more generic and samey
@LinkOpensChest_wav That is actually why. I've heard creators talk about how YouTube is rolling this new feature now, it gives you the options to add different thumbnails with different colors to target different audience, and see which one performs the best.
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:
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.
I honestly cannot envision a scenario in which I would want something like this from YouTube.
this is for people who arrange their bookshelves by spine color.
you know, idiots.
Let me introduce you to some classics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3pF2jkQ4vc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpLtgcSG08s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJLwidSohO8
Before you ask, no, I don't watch these. I discovered these types of videos only a few months ago and was shocked at the viewer counts.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=J3pF2jkQ4vc
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=zpLtgcSG08s
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=IJLwidSohO8
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Why not? Not you, I mean but why not have it as an option?
Frankly I wouldn't use it either, but I can absolutely see the appeal. Sometimes you want some warm tones, sometimes you want cool tones. Maybe you're having a Green party for 4/20 and you're playing Green Day and watching green videos idk.
Lol dumbness aside, my immediate thought was "this seems like it could be nice for those who sleep to videos" - I know that I don't always want a white-blue heavy video but something darker and red
Okay, but what if your darker and redder video is super loud and obnoxious and your blue-white video is quiet and calm? Or the dark red one is strobing and the blue-white one is calm and soft? That's the problem with just sorting them by color. Color doesn't really tell you anything about the content of the video. I mean I supposed this very out-there idea of a 'green party' could be a weird usage case, but I think that's a very unusual event and doesn't really justify the feature.
The only people I could see this feature helpful for is those with synesthesia.
The ASMR and meditation community sometimes embrace a specific colour aesthetic for videos. They're also all pretty similar in terms of audio level etc so I can see this working well in that niche.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/lziFPKhsJ2A
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
If you ever needed proof they dont know what they are doing this is it...
Or their data tells them the truth and humans don't know what we are doing...
What? You don't go to YT and think "hmm i wonder what color I'm in the mood for today"?
Weirdo.
Color is so stupid. Who the fuck cares what color the video is. Couldve used this to actual good like pick three minor subjects from the video and ask me if im interested in more of those. That would be awesome. And I know they have that data.
Black History Month
Separating videos based off of color.
Never change Google.
Even easier, pick video lengths.
<1min, 1-10min, 10-30min, 30-60min, 60min+.
I'd use that all the time.
They used to have that as a filter. Although for a long while you could pick short (<4 mins) or long (>20 mins) but not medium length videos.
This, too, was a sign they had no fucking idea what they were doing.
This reminds of how Xiaomi introduced sorting by colours of the app icon in their launcher. But that was different and I believe actually helped getting around
I have sorted the icons on my quicklaunch bar (on my desktop PC) by color. Those typically aren't sorted in any particular order so putting them by color was something visually interesting to do. Their titles aren't displayed here, it's just the icons, and there's 12 of them, so actually it does help guide my eye, if I know I'm looking for, the Blender logo my eye tends toward orange.
The recommendation algo is so bad they are testing it against a random bullshit generator....
I fucking hate the algorithm.
I can watch 20 fucking hours of content about a subject, and it wont suggest anything similar.
but I accidentally click a link someone posts to a crazy right wing video, I get nothing but right wing violence and brainwashing fear mongering videos for over a week that I can barely break the fuck out of with hyper specific searches.
Which is the same problem facebook has, in that the algorithm favors right wing extremism and shoves people heavily down that path, and only through very significant and concerted effort can you break out of it.
I've recently started getting the most random, low-view localised content from small channels even though I never watch anything in my native language or any content like what they are producing.
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.
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
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.
One thing that brought back the joy of earlier times youtube for me was
- Disable thumbnails (e.g. "Clickbait Remover for Youtube" on ff)
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?
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!
Has anyone else noticed that if a video says 'like and subscribe' the subscribe button does a little animation to draw your eye to it?
Really wish there was a better way to host videos that doesn't require a multibillion dollar company's backing
Really wish there was a better way to host videos that doesn’t require a multibillion dollar company’s backing
Archive.org. For now. But people keep uploading full copyrighted movies to it and there appears to be no content moderation, so at some point there will be a massive lawsuit and it will be shut down. And that will be an incredibly sad day because it is currently also a source of useful public domain footage like the Prelinger Archives. Without the Internet Archive, we will not have a non-commercial archive of public domain footage.
That was youtube, before it was sold.
There will never be another one again. Storage, Bandwidth, Server, etc etc costs would be too astronomical for anyone but another multi-billion dollar company to spin up a competitor.
There are small scale niche efforts, Like for guntubers, or that stupid members only floatplane thing, but none of them will ever compete with youtube, because they don't have the scale or reach. and never will.
What's wrong with visually indicating the thing being talked about?
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.
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.
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.
Probably another method of gathering user data for their AI training models.
I no longer think that big media corporations are doing stupid things for no reason because they're dumb
I think they do stupid things because they want another way to train their dumb AI and we're all too dumb, mindless and powerless to say or do anything about it all.
It's crazy when you think about it ... humanity is degrading itself from all corners just to raise an idiot AI child that will be just as messed up as we are.
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.
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.
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
I like algorithms giving me suggestions in all sorts of ways, but not shady ones. None of the people around me seem to mind, but I worry about a company like Google strongly influencing what information we consume. Even if they didn't use this influence, it's dangerous to have them in the position where they could.
Alphabet also shapes what content creators are most likely to create by demonetizing controversial or dissenting videos.
Honestly, the only social media i clearly see this is instagram and their comments. They sort by controversial to get engagement and an emotional response and affects my mood negatively tremendously (can't find a single clip with a woman that doesn't have a misogynistic comment in top10). TikTok is heaven for me in comparison, it's my happy place.
shady Hah
You have the correct idea, but it's way too late for most people. This "pre-selection" made by most services have been in place for a long while, and these days people even complains when they are not fed with it.
It is a sad state of affair; thankfully at some point enough people might move away from these automated suggestions, but I'm not holding my breath.
That’ll work great. More SEO to pigeonhole videos that will be abused by creators.
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!
How revolutionaly. How disruptive. How innovative. /s
Nice to see another intellectual Cracking the Cryptic enjoyer. A toast in your name my friend.
Yeah but the guy in the New Rockstars video is annoying as shit, god what a punchable face..
Isn't there another channel that does those? A British guy I think
Wait that's supposed to be for suggesting videos? When I first saw it I thought it was just for customizing the look of the feed and was very disappointed that it changed basically nothing.
Is this yet another "make something new bs feature to get a promotion" at google?
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
...okay.
Use Freetube, people.
their good devs and engineers have left
Never even looked at the home tab before, when I go there it just says watch history is off lol
Youtube seems to base my suggestions on shoots wall of videos with a shotgun style of recommendations.
I do everything in my power to stop Google from tracking me, but when I'm watching youtube videos on youtube, it should be able to gifure itself out.
And "don't recommend this video to me, I don't like it" does nothing. Just to see how long it will keep this up, I keep telling it I don't want to see let's play videos of star trek online. But it sure wants me to see them, dozens of them, daily, sometimes recommending the same video I already told it not to.
And its really been pushing me to watch right-wing conspiracy videos and flat earth videos after whatever I just purposefully clicked on, despite most of my content views being future Sci fi with either apocalyptic levels of devastation on galactic scales, or "post-scarcity utopia where energy is virtually limitless and energy/matter manipulation is easy peasy, usually liberally peppered with anti-capitalist and progressive themes"
And of course "female leads bad because feeeemale".
YouTube constantly suggests right wing side of things. Watch a video about Captain Marvel/Brie Larsen once? Get bombarded by YouTube shorts on why she is killing the MCU. Watch something about Star Wars? Get shorts on Gina Carano talking about "woke" Disney. Doesn't matter that the political commentators that I subscribe to are progressive. Although I will admit to likely being at fault because those shorts tend to have more scantily clad versions of the characters and I am certain I look at them a split second longer while scrolling because boobs.
Hilariously, after watching a channel that did some comedy skits based on "life in star trek" and very clearly, vocally supportive of progressive ideals, literally one being "work unions are good and necessary even in the Federation where things should be great for everyone" I got a ton of reccommended videosafter each one, from red hats wearing oakleys sitting in trucks looking down at their phone to yell, one of which was literally titled "unions are destroying America"
My favorite though has to be a video discussing progressive ideals clearly displayed in the original star trek shows from 30+ years ago (The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, Voyager, and Enterprise) and their tackling of modern socioeconomic and political issues. Non-binary species, white/black patterned species, extremely on-the-nose metaphors for the holocaust and palestine/israel/Gaza, and literally outright showing "fuck your racism here's a kiss between a white man and a black woman with great hair"
And the "up next" video was "NUTREK IS TOO WOKE" by a very angry looking man with a confederate navy jack on the wall.
I can't say I ever recall seeing anything right-wing in my recommendations. No anti-woke rants, no conspiracies, nothing like that at all. I'm glad whatever curse you guys have isn't affecting me.
Only engage with things you want to see more of. Downvoting and Not Interested are both forms of engagement.
Engagement metrics allow YouTube to show advertisers that you're actually looking at the page and not just letting it run in the background
The not interested doesn't work, the don't recommend me videos from this channel works perfectly, and if the first video I get recommended of a channel is so repulsive to me I actually care to do something about it, the entire channel is probably bad anyways.
this is beyond jumping the shark, this is a whole new category of stupid
it's worse than musk-esque stupidity, because clearly there's thought and research behind this, it's all just incredibly cynical and demeaning to the human race
Don't worry. It's destined for an early visit to Google Graveyard.
So this is the pattern of the typical youtube consumer, mindless browsing?
Unironically, yes it is.
But why tho? To know your favorite color now?
My guess is search for toddlers, whose parents handed them a phone to keep busy while they rest or do something else. They're the only demographic that does not know how to spell, or knows too few words to search effectively. But considering the American education system this could also apply to students who are illiterate despite completing the grade every year.
Who asked for this?
Seems great for giving more options for people who want this. I know a few neurodiverse people who would love something like this.
Just because it doesn't work for you doesn't mean it's bad.
I have questions
Seems like an interesting spin on what is basically ’random’. Probably a decent way to get content in front of users that might be outside their normal recommendations.
Is it some essential new feature, no, it’s just a bit of fun to find some new content.
Mate, just make sure you're not getting into trouble with all that positive thinking, ok? Take care.
It seems like a feature that should be implemented April 1,and April 1 alone, and is tone-deaf to the actual problems on the platform.
That was my first thought when I saw this "feature" show up the other day. It actually made me laugh.
I was feeling optimistic about it because I'm always wanting some way to get more diversity into my recommendations. I was disappointed when it mostly presented the same videos I'd been seeing in my recommendations anyway, just only those with a particular color in the thumbnail.
This would've been a great idea as a comedy sketch
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
Colorblind people be like: https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/027/424/joke.jpg
Would someone please tell YouTube that gradients are not colors.
lmao
Ah, a fellow "Cracking the Cryptic" lover, I see.
Lol I’ve always wanted to be able to find videos that contain red, green or blue
Fortunately the other colors don’t interest me
I see a lot of people complaini gbhere, and, admitting that most of you might have Androi based phones, I'd urge you to install Youtube Revanced, they have a Github : https://github.com/NoName-exe/revanced-extended
This is on Revanced, lol. Not sure there is a plugin to remove that yet
I picked charmander.
Wtf
Hello fellow Cracking the Cryptic enjoyer
Gotta respect that
I found myself frantically tapping on the x on your screenshot before I remembered I was on lemmy... I am still too angry at youtube (and myself) for the time I have wasted on shorts to try out anything new it suggests. Plus it tries to recommend right wing crackpot youtubers to me everybso often which is really annoying. /rant
A coordinated effort to stop visiting them until certain features are included, or certain changes made would be glorious, however I just don't see it happening
There's a lot of basic config/features YT needs. I'm a paying customer also. (YT premium family)
Like as a simple example. I don't want to watch shorts. I can X the shorts bar away for 30 days at a time but it just comes back. Why can't I disable shorts in settings permanently? (I mean I know why)
I want to sort channel videos by date, oldest to newest because the content I watch is longer form and generally follows a timeline of events that I want to watch in order.
-
that is all but impossible without manually creating playlists and adding videos in the order you want (a real pita)
-
I cannot easily get back to watch the next video in that series. Doing the above helps, but there's no pick up where you left off. There's some BS continue the video you were in the middle of featuring paywalled in premium that I find mildly helpful but most times if I bail on a video I'm done with it I don't want a reminder/easy continue tile for it.
There's lots more around detailed searching...
I don't want to watch shorts. I can X the shorts bar away for 30 days at a time but it just comes back. Why can't I disable shorts in settings permanently?
There's extensions for that.
Right, and I have grayjay for my phone but the majority of watching is on Nvidia Shield. I realize there's smarttube and others that can do things. My point is I shouldn't have to jump through hoops.
-
Quackery has gone digital, baby!
Ok, you know what, maybe those YouTube layoffs were actually warranted...
Promotion-packet driven development
Always bet on black. :)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://m.piped.video/watch?v=lcg6wekmCRA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Ah yes, blue video mood
I already suspected they did this considering how every single element of videos suggested to me based on what I regularly watch covers the same content, is in the same format, has people on camera that look and sound exactly the same, the sets are similar, the intros and outros are similar, even down to what's on someone's shelf in the background is sometimes identical. The overall color tone is just another thing the AI can reference with other videos.
How about astronomy but with a little more penis please 🙏?
If YT wants to do aesthetic stuff, why not bring back custom channel backgrounds? Or better yet, add more site-wide themes like dark mode.
I don't mind them providing it as a feature because maybe someone has a use case here but I have a problem with them promoting it. Such a niche idea.
"I hate when services actually tell people about new features they're offering"
Pushing people to use it (no I'm not going to buy youtube TV or whatever its called, stop asking youtube) is one thing, but simply proffered the option is relatively benign.
