Opened YouTube and was greeted with this abomination:
This is on a 32” 1440p display. There are five (5) videos visible, and 1/6 of
the page would have been an enormous ad.
For reference, here is YouTube as of January 2019:
There are 30 videos visible and zero ads.
I really, really hope that this A/B test fails.
Un
63 Comments
blahaj
> Unfortunately, using an advanced analytics package I’ve projected that around May 2026 the YouTube homepage will just be one video, and by September there will be no videos at all on the homepage.
Doesn't exactly that already exist with TikTok?
anentropic
Yes this change is super annoying
herpdyderp
You can insert (and tweak) this into uBlock Origin filters:
(source: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1g5l9mc/comment/ls…)
puttycat
The YouTube abominations keep piling up: Vertical videos on a desktop, endless ads (thanks to the Chrome manifest change that disables decent adblockers), useless feed.
I highly recommend installing an extension that hides the home feed and sidebar recommendations, which at least makes YT non-distracting again.
datax2
I'm not a fan of this trend either. My suspicion is this change is to increase scrolling to pump more ad space; it makes sense from a business standpoint. But this combined with the Algo changes makes it hard to keep coming back looking for new content VS just consuming the people/content I know and enjoy.
jessyco
I wish we could go back; A lot of googles UI/UX is based on the next billion users experiences. I'm unsure how much influence this has on a day to day design choices they make. My experience right now on a 1440p monitor is 5 visible videos, 2 video ads, a ton of tags that I can't turn off for finding videos.
There are a ton of great UI/UX choices they've done over the years too; I just wish we had more options as a users.
shanehoban
Glad I'm not the only one who noticed and hates this change!
mmmlinux
Doesnt doing this make youtube impressions go up, since they are showing you the video with less immediate competition around it.
qoez
This https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-remove-youtu… and yt-dlp to download things from only subscriptions that interest me (and watch later offline) changed my life.
iMerNibor
What gets me the thumbnails are now so big, they're blurry since the images need to be stretched to fit now!
The preview is 530x300px on a 1920×1080 screen vs the image shown being 336x188px
How this passed any sort of QA is beyond me
jeffbee
[flagged]
geuis
Their mobile site is also terrible. It's like the designers forgot that people watch videos in landscape mode. For example, comments won't load unless you rotate to portrait mode first. I mean, come on.
dmart
My guess would be that this is in support of the preview hover feature. For a while now, you can watch an entire video just by hovering over it, complete with captions, scrubbing and audio. This wouldn't be very useful if the thumbnails were still tiny like in the past. Personally, I like this feature and don't often need to look at tons of thumbnails at once, but to each their own.
voytec
FYI: YouTube provides RSS feed for every channel. The URL is as follows:
And without downloading with yt-dlp, videos can be watched from youtube-nocookie.com in full-window mode (no distractions) under:
brendanfinan
YouTube is removing videos and moving to Shorts-only in a couple months, so this shouldn't be an issue for long
insin
I make an extension which lets you fix this to your liking (choose the minimum number of videos you want per row, while also fixing the spacing issues overriding the underlying –ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row CSS variable causes), plus many, many more annoyances and what I felt were missing options and features for YouTube, like being able to completely hide Shorts:
https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
Edit: for comparison with the screenshot in TFA, this is my Home feed on a 14" MacBook. No Shorts, no Mixes, videos which are 85% (configurable) watched or more are hidden, stream VODs from channels which also stream, Movies and TV, and any channels "Don't recommend channel" refuses to work on, can all be hidden for you:
https://imgur.com/LUnpz9e
markus_zhang
I actually didn't notice until recently. Guess I'm also in the test group.
I wonder what's the purpose of this A/B test? Definitely has nothing to do with revenue, right? So what could it be? More engagement? I doubt that few seconds added upon more scrolling won't be much. Retention? Hard to tell.
Twirrim
As a subscriber, I get 6 algorithm suggested videos (even split 50/50 on subscribed vs suggested).
Then of course the content is also routinely interrupted by rows that take up more space than a row of video suggestions:
* Premium movie suggestions, which also manages to take up half the width with just two sentences: "Discover your next favourite movie. Watch without ads, included with your Premium membership"
* Shorts, despite me continually pressing the triple dots and saying "Stop showing me this crap".
* Interactive Apps (same, I keep saying "not interested" or whatever variant message it shows me).
I think I'm more irritated that youtube gives me the choice to say "don't show me this" and ignores it, than I would be by not having a choice in the first place.
eraviloi
[dead]
sailfast
So who is building their competitor? Any shot in hell at this because of their huge library?
lukaslalinsky
The nastiest trick for me is that no matter how times I tell YouTube not to show me shorts on the home page, they always sneak back in.
Starlevel004
It used to be 12 videos until about a year ago. If you zoom in and out the thumbnails don't change size!
The worst casualty of the current design is the search. You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations. No? Fuck off? Do what I tell you to do!
mirrorlake
I quite like the 2×3 grid of videos. No complaints, actually.
vinnymac
I can't speak for the desktop experience lately, but just last weekend I opened the YouTube app on iOS to this peak user experience:
https://files.catbox.moe/vzo65c.JPG
gh0stcat
This reminds me of Pinterest, a platform I used to love for finding art and inspirational content as an artist myself. Without ad blockers, I would say 1/3 to 1/2 of all “pins” or images are actually ads, some of which are the nefarious “shopping” ads which look just like images and when clicked, take you directly to the sellers site. With the ad blocker, it is full of weird holes that just make the page look terrible. It feels honestly terrible as a consumer to have the experience degraded this much, its like having a storefront and half of the items on display are actually garbage you need to toss aside. And unfortunately there isn’t an obvious better choice or option. Also don’t even get me started on the scammy ads that are ai generated images or just all of the pins that are ai generated slop…
rozab
For a long time the grid of videos on the homepage has been slightly misaligned. I imagine the different rows belong to different teams. This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over.
I find the autoplay so annoying because it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage. Often the video gets inexplicably added to my watch history, and if I do choose to click on it I have to go back to the beginning because I missed the start of the audio
mitthrowaway2
I noticed this exact same thing! I looked in every menu for the setting to change it back. Nothing.
InMice
Thank you for writing this post! I opened youtube a few days ago to this as well. On a 24" 1440p monitor its ridiculous. It's incomprehensible there's a UI/UX team that gets paid millions of dollars per year and the result is changes like this. Thank you again for writing this post. After searching it seems like they've been "testing" this in segments for a while now.
As a result I installed the "Control Panel for Youtube" chrome plugin and Im able to fix it back to 6 videos per row. I also found I could make shorts play in the traditional youtube player by default – which is an added relief.
the_other
Vote with your attention.
dcchambers
I am BEGGING someone, anyone at Google/YouTube to let me permanently disable YouTube Shorts.
I HATE Short form video content and no matter how many times I select "show me less of this" I still get them front and center when I open the app or website.
meltyness
Yeah this is late-stage 'growth.' Hamstring your other products to reconcentrate activity, 'rebalance' usage to Shorts content by making the original offering, long-form content less usable, lower quality, less interesting; and so shall it remain until some congress finally forces these players cut a dividend instead of this moronic buybacks situation, hysterical that <well-liked female northeast senator and presidential primary candidate whose policy positions had been featured here> abruptly stopped talking about this for no apparent reason.
It's kind of conceptually like a Shepard's tone, though, which is maybe interesting.
presbyterian
I've stopped using YouTube directly. This is only for Apple users, but I started using the app Play[1]. It manages my subscriptions, keeps a watch later list (with smart tags and filtering, if you'd like), and you can even play videos directly in the app (and it remembers your place, better than YouTube itself does sometimes), though I still open it in the browser so I can use SponsorBlock.
[1]: https://marcosatanaka.com/#play
II2II
On the extrapolation to zero videos by September 2026: it is already here.
Seriously. Clear your cookies or open a private window. All of the videos are replaced by the message "Try searching to get started". Granted, as someone who clears cookies regularly, I like the change.
troupo
Here are more screenshots/data points https://x.com/nikitonsky/status/1916085438915150006
radicality
If you have a FireTV stick or something Android based for your TV, I can recommend SmartTubenext for browsing/watching YouTube.
I still use AppleTV for pretty much everything else, but got a firetv stick just to use that. https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube
bravetraveler
List view, gang
pimlottc
It's because they want you to get hooked when the videos auto-play on hover, and that's less likely with small thumbnails.
asdfman123
Fun thing to open first thing in the morning as I wait for my coffee to brew at YouTube
segphault
The quality of the content on YouTube has declined so aggressively that the terrible UX almost doesn’t even matter anymore. They optimize to promote the most cancerous, low-effort, viral clickbait trash and the algorithm makes it incredibly difficult for anything else to survive or be discoverable. The culture of YouTube is absolutely vile.
jszymborski
Another reason to use FreeTube.
https://freetubeapp.io/
kelvinjps10
Idk but I prefer the modern one as the other one I feel there are too many videos and I'm unable to see them well
Alifatisk
That advanced analytics package for projection gave me a good chuckle
guywithahat
> I miss YouTube before they turned the pain dial all the way towards money.
The worst part is everyone who tries to compete quickly turns the pain dial up to 11 as well. I realize YouTube existed for many years as a Google subsidized product, but Rumble is the best competitor we have and they can get quite annoying as well.
bunderbunder
And on the iOS app, I can now only see 1.5 at a time because the thumbnails are so huge.
Which is somehow still an upgrade over the last version of the UI, where the titles of the videos were getting clipped off after about 16 characters.
ringeryless
almost like they think a desktop monitor is a portrait mode phone screen…
it's not like we dont have media query API, google, but hey, it fits with the general dumbing down and phonification of all interfaces that should have stopped by now.
it's not like they don't have 3 layout sizes already enshrined, it's that they are forcing the desktop layout to act like a portrait mode phone screen for no apparent reason other than trying to be on trend with enshittification or somesuch.
loosescrews
A 32” monitor should be 4k. If anyone needs glasses, it might be the author of this blog post as that is the typical market for low pixel density displays.
pizzathyme
I always laugh at these shots from the hip criticizing YouTube and Google. As though Google doesn't have a entire team of data scientists and top tier engineers managing this experiment and driving it to optimal results. (Spoiler: they do)
If you don't like the service, you can stop using it. And if you do, they have already factored that into their metrics guardrail, and it was the right decision.
constantcrying
Also disturbing is how absolutely awful it is at basic design. You can even see it on the screenshot that the Videos on the third row aren't properly aligned.
This is one of the largest corporations in the world and they make one of the most visited sites on the entire internet look like it was someone's hobby project and they just couldn't be bothered to align things correctly. This is insane.
The YouTube Startpage is incredibly bad in so many regards. Low in information density, full of things people do not want to see and fails at basic design. Even a basic, low effort redesign would be a major improvement.
chao-
My YouTube changed recently from 6-wide to 4-wide. I wonder why I get 4 across instead of everyone else's 3?
Still annoying, and I still much, much prefer 6 videos across.
pier25
Absolutely. It's like they only test youtube on small laptop displays.
So many websites are not tested on large monitors ffs.
From the top of my head I remember the previous Gumroad marketing website. It looked terrible. Everything was huge. Even the new one doesn't work that well on a large monitor:
https://gumroad.com/
hkchad
This happened to me last week, used uBlock origin to set it back to 8 video's per row.
Yizahi
My homepage on 14" laptop has degraded from 12-16 previews (4 in row) to 9 (3 in row), lately since around late 2024 has a whopping 4 (four) previews. Amazing evolution. Such courage.
Also there are bugs there, and after some magic combinations of clicks I sometimes see 9 grid, or even rarely a 16 grid. Though it lasts only for one session and I can't ever reproduce the bug. So the support is there, they made it shitty on purpose. And I even pay for that crap :(
schnable
This inspired me to check out my YouTube.com home page, and I have zero videos. I just see a message telling me I should turn Watch History on.
alex1138
One thing that made Youtube work well in its early days was a robust and interesting recommendations system (for those who are old, like me). There was also a robust Trending section
They chipped away and chipped away at the usefulness of Youtube and the recommendations got worse and worse (and sometimes blatantly corporate), then they lied about what was trending, and now it's just a mess (some of the recommendations can still be good). And I'll forever maintain they absolutely do regularly remove videos (or demonetize channels) for reasons of 'misinformation' (which they aren't, at least some of the time); they've taken an ideological stance. And there's a reason why the default homepage isn't your subscriptions page
Companies do not listen to their users. I guess in part it's because if you did you'd have to take on board every asinine suggestion under the cover of "the customer is always right" but there's a middle ground, y'know? They just really don't seem to care, giving any sort of feedback is like screaming into the void
rambambram
I thought it was just me experiencing this last week. I thought I accidentally changed some setting, even checked my browser's zoom mode, and then just lived with it.
Also the lack of 'gutters' to lay my mouse cursor to rest while scrolling is annoying.
But hey, I subscribed to your RSS feed. That's at least some good news.
soegaard
FWIW – the YouTube app on Apple TV has a similar issue.
The video previews are so large, that one can't get a proper overview.
musesum
My chain of thought:
1) Aaron Marcus – who found optimal menu count to be 5 +/- 2
2) Magic number 7 +/- 2
3) Fitt's Law selectivity (bigger is easier)
4) Shared layout for mobile + desktop
5) I hate short form
6) Is 5) a non-sequitur?
7) No! I now have the attention span of a goldfish.
8) Maybe I should read a book
jaggs
I hate to be that guy, but how many of us are actually paying for this service? Yeah we pay with ads and attention, but is there another company that's prepared to store over 500 hours of new content every single minute? Yeah it sucks, but free is as free does.
fernvenue
Exactly, and maybe YouTube have a plan, have a god damn plan…By the way, I use https://github.com/KcodeGG/UserStyles this to make YouTube back to old style :)
npteljes
Honestly, this, and the other reasons in the thread (like the resetting preferences) is the reason why I don't invest emotionally into platforms anymore. Been burned too many times. In most cases, I won't fight the system at all – I'll use the defaults, and if I don't like it, I'll go elsewhere. This have freed up so much mental energy for me.
SO much stupid bullshit is going on that boggles the mind. But they are only bullshit from "our" consumer perspective – they make perfect sense from other perspectives, like the creators, the platform providers, and so on. Most just boils down to the participants having different priorities. And to the power dynamics between them. For example – yeah you might not like YouTube (addressed to the creator or the consumer), but where else will you go?
WorldPeas
>zero thumbnails on the homepage
I have this manually enabled, but also consider it could be true if they take the instagram/x approach where you just have no thumbnail and are just dropped down the video flume right out of the gate. Don't worry. We know what you want.
micromacrofoot
It's painful, but every single person in this comment thread is no longer part of youtube's target demographic.
iorekz
>Presumably by then we’ll have our mandatory NeuraLinks and the YouTube algorithm will be able to inject real-time ML generated content (and ads) straight into our brains
exactly what happened on a black mirror episode. Recommended!