Someone at YouTube needs glasses

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Homepage Layout & Information Density

  • Many users report YouTube home now showing only 3–6 giant thumbnails per screen on desktop/TV, making a 1440p–4K monitor feel “claustrophobic” and forcing more scrolling.
  • Thumbnails appear visibly upscaled and blurry; zooming or resizing often doesn’t change the grid density in a sensible way.
  • Some see misaligned rows and gaps, especially when adblockers hide promos, making hover-autoplay harder to avoid.
  • A minority say they like the 2x3 / 3-wide grid and find older dense layouts overwhelming, especially on smaller laptops.

Ads, Autoplay & Dark Patterns

  • Multiple complaints about autoplay previews on hover: they obscure thumbnails and titles, add “views” to history, and are hard to permanently disable (setting is per-device, cookie-based, and reportedly resets).
  • Users describe frequent preference “backsliding” (autoplay, Shorts visibility, feed sort order, video quality) as deliberate engagement optimization.
  • Mid-roll and overlay behaviors (e.g., sponsored-content overlays hijacking clicks) are widely seen as UX-hostile.

Shorts, Vertical Video & TikTok-ification

  • Strong hostility to Shorts: they’re hard or impossible to disable permanently, reappear after “show less,” and flood home, search, and subscriptions.
  • Some view Shorts and infinite scroll as attention-hijacking “slot machines,” with short-term engagement trumping user wellbeing.
  • A few defend vertical video as natural for phone-first regions and note that much of the world uses phones as their only device.

Workarounds, Extensions & Alternative Clients

  • Popular fixes include: uBlock Origin filters/CSS to restore 4–6 videos per row and hide Shorts, Unhook/Enhancer/“Control Panel for YouTube”, Stylus/Tampermonkey scripts, and custom CSS managers.
  • Many route around YouTube entirely: RSS feeds + external readers, yt-dlp + local playback or mpv, Invidious/FreeTube/NewPipe, SmartTube on TV devices, or dedicated “watch later” apps.
  • Some disable watch history to blank out the homepage and rely solely on subscriptions or direct links.

Search, Recommendations & Algorithm Incentives

  • Search results are described as polluted: only a few direct matches before unrelated “algorithmic” rows, broken “sort by date,” and resurfacing already-watched or low-quality sensational content.
  • Several argue YouTube now optimizes for maximum watch time and ad impressions, not “what the user wants,” and that discontented power-users are an acceptable casualty of metric-driven A/B testing.

Browser & Adblocking Context

  • Manifest V3 and Chrome’s treatment of uBlock drive recommendations to Firefox or Brave; Firefox’s extension policy and cookie behavior are praised.
  • Others work around Chrome limits by sideloading unpacked uBlock or using “lite” variants, accepting reduced power.