YouTube’s latest update is the most hated change in the seven-year history of the video-sharing website. The design change, which focuses on smaller fonts, and a mix of subscribers versus partner videos in the timelines of viewers, and other small changes like putting the video title at the bottom of the video and not the top of it as before, has been so panned that YouTube took to Reddit to explain the alterations.
Not sure that was a good idea.
As this is written, YouTube reps are being hammered by the notoriously trolling and nasty Reddit users – many who aren’t YouTube Partners. Here’s a sample:
YouTuber of over 6 years here. I come here for the videos of people I’m subscribed to. If I wanted to know what videos my subscriptions liked, I’d check their Facebook/twitter. I don’t need YouTube to do that for me.
Your “recommended videos” are almost always ones I’ve either seen, or promoted ones from partners I care nothing about. I want to be able to go to my home page and go right to my subscriptions without having to click another link. I want to be able to go to a person’s videos and see their other videos from there without having to visit their channel. I want to be able to see at a glance whether I have messages in my inbox. This update specifically removed functionality that made YouTube easy to use, in favor of a style that doesn’t even center itself on the page.
It shows borderline incompetence. Get yout shit together, stop trying to turn YouTube into Google+ and give me back my YouTube.
The note is also an example of the rampant incivility that plagues America today. This is the YouTube response:
Great way to kick off the AMA! There are a lot of questions in here so let us tackle them one at a time.
First, the comment about having likes, comments and other activity types on the YouTube homepage. There are a number of channels on YouTube that don’t actually upload videos and just curate videos instead. BuzzFeed is a great example as is the Reddit Front Page channel that we auto-generate based on Reddit’s RSS feed (http://www.youtube.com/channel/HC8x43Y3JC3mo). Many users subscribe to these sorts of channels and if we only showed uploads on the homepage, they would never see the curation work done by these great channels. Of course, we’re still figuring out the right balance for users that have lots of subscriptions with uploads and we’re working to better tune the homepage or the default state of the homepage depending on what we know about the viewer.
We’re sorry to hear that the recommended videos for you on the homepage aren’t working out well. For what it’s worth, we find that across our user base, recommendations perform best from the homepage, but again we’ve still got work to do to better tune the home page for the given viewer. As an example, you’ll see us updating the homepage soon to either start choosing a default view that’s different based on how much you watch from uploads from your subscriptions.
As for the inbox, we’ve heard you loud and clear. Look for improvements for how we handle notifications and messages in the near future.
And as for the last comment, we’re happy that you think we’re only “borderline” incompetent. We’d feel extra bad if we crossed the border into “complete” incompetence.
Stay tuned.