A compilation of mildly infuriating things about YouTube
A compilation of mildly infuriating things about YouTube
- on the mobile app, comments have links to search for fairly random words within them in YouTube search for no discernable reason
- the comment box on mobile shows a preview of a comment, but when clicking on the preview it just goes to the top of the comments and the comment you clicked on is now lost
- YouTube search works terribly and is less than 1/3 actual results
- searching by upload date only shows around a dozen new videos before it completely stops working
- searching watch history for terms in video titles almost never works, even if there are lots of videos with said title
- ambient mode distracts from the video itself and looks pretty bad on Firefox
- the tracking code when sharing links
- how some videos have different caption formatting and there is no central way to turn it off for good
- YouTube thumbnails are big now
- YouTube recommending me a hundred videos on a topic I'm not interested in after I watch two or three videos on said topic
- hover autoplay on video thumbnails
- AI summaries in video descriptions, and AI integrations in YouTube Studio
- The transcript button is now in the description for some reason
- YouTube pushing mobile games in their homepage
- Shorts
- silently adding forced midroll ads
- the slight gradient in the progress bar
- there is no way to search a channel's videos on the mobile app
- There is no way to turn on All subscription notifications in the mobile app without granting the app notification permissions
- no more playlists in the sidebar
- random community posts on the mobile homepage
- live chat button takes up half the horizontal space of the description for some reason
- if you have a large amount of subscriptions, it's difficult to navigate through them
Feel free to share your own.
You can fix at least half of those complaints on mobile with Revanced. I specifically removed all possibilities to view shorts because the flesh is weak and YT shorts ate hours of my day at a time. Without even being particularly entertaining.
I don't use Revanced, but using a mobile browser in desktop mode has produced good results for me.
My toddler enjoys the shorts. Unfortunately my algorithm is well and truly humped now and it keeps showing me variations of sprunky
If you're still sharing a single account between multiple users in 2025, that's kinda on you TBH.
You forgot the sex bots that comment on every single new video that YouTube has decided to ignore
- there is no way to search a channel’s videos on the mobile app
It is baffling to me that they just... never implemented this? Like why???
I'll add that everything about playlists is really dumb, which is a shame because they could be good. Why not treat playlists the way streaming services treat tv shows? Remember which episode I was on, and make it easy to find on the homepage with a "continue watching" option.
Also, the "watch later" playlist is a good idea but why don't the videos automatically remove themselves after I've watched them? Why doesn't the watch later playlist appear at the top of the suggested videos or something? Instead it's hidden in a jumbled mess of playlists that I have to manually find. OH AND ALSO WHY ARE MY CUSTOM PLAYLISTS INTERMIXED WITH OTHER PLAYLISTS I'VE SAVED.
And the progress bar gradient is so ugly jfc. It's one of those things that screams bored middle management decision making. And from a branding perspective, when has YouTube ever been off-pink? I know it's minor but genuinely how did that slip through the cracks.
Pausing video in the Android YouTube app hasn't worked properly for me for like 6 months. It will just not respond to me tapping for pause unless I tap it like 25 times, and I've seen it on other phones too. If I rotate, it will usually work then.
Apologies if this doesn't fall under "mild"
There's no easy way to "mark video as watched" so that Youtube stops pushing that particular video in your feed but keeps recommending similar ones. (You can mark it "not interested" or "don't recommend channel," but those aren't the same thing.) Even if you aren't doing something Google would consider naughty like watching via FreeTube, NewPipe, or
yt-dlp, there are legitimate cases like watching while logged-out or having a friend show you a video on their device that cause you to have seen a video without that watch getting recorded into your watch history.I have to mention the fact that on the desktop version, sometimes when I turn off the feature that automatically plays videos when I hover over them, sometime later the feature gets re-enabled without my permission. I have no idea what could possibly trigger this, and it's ONLY on desktop for me.
Am I just hallucinating? Or has this happened to someone else?
I hate that people is tamed by the "Community Guidelines".