YouTube: Watch, Listen, Stream 12+

I love yt and have been using it for years, but over the past couple of months, a lot of newer problems have occurred, and preexisting problems that have gotten worse. 1. The things that get flagged. There are plenty of inappropriate things getting posted on yt and in general most are ignored by the algorithm and continue staying up, yet other things that are getting taken down despite there not being any real problems with it. 2. The ads Yt recently started putting up a lot more ads, which is annoying, not to mention pushing yt premium way more, but the most annoying part is at the end of the video an ad will play, and when you’re in full screen you may not be able to tell, meaning you might be watching an ad for literally no reason. 3. The updates. To be honest the updates don’t really seem to be doing anything other than changing the format, which has been getting consistently more annoying, especially as recently they moved where the x button on miniplayer is, which has become severely annoying as I’m used to clicking at the bottom, which means I have clicked a video I don’t want to watch multiple times because this. It’s really only a problem because I don’t really see the point of moving it. In general I still love using yt but I definitely don’t love it as much as I used to.

The way the layout of the video controls and settings has been completely rearranged and changed is either annoying, pointless, or just makes the user interface worse altogether. Every time I double tap to skip ahead or go back, the pause symbol stays on my screen unless I tap the screen to bring up the video captions and time bar then tap it again to make them go away. I’ve also had the time bar just stay on the screen no matter what I tried to do unless I just closed the app. Not having the button to switch from full screen to thumbnail view in the bottom right corner, or at least be able to customize if you want to accommodate left handed users, is very annoying because it’s now on the farthest corner away from where my thumb can most easily reach it. I’ve also constantly had videos randomly pause on me for no reason with nothing touching the screen. These changes and glitches have really made the experience of using this app over the past few weeks very annoying compared to the previous interface beyond just struggling to get used to a new layout

I’m usually in favour of making continuous improvements to apps, but some of the recent changes just degrade the experience and make the app harder to use. Two that stand out are the recent change in the location of the “X” button. It was already bad enough that Google force an unintuitive and friction-laden paradigm for closing a video, where you have to swipe it to make it smaller and then hit the X button. Now the location of the X button has moved to the top left of that minimised picture and the thumb hit area appears smaller, which means way too often I accidentally select the video thumbnail behind it and play the next video, which isn’t what I wanted, so I have to go through that whole process again to close yet another video to finally go and select what I want to watch. The second infuriating change is sticking a circle with the play logo on top of your playing video if it’s not fullscreen? What’s the point of this? I can see the video playing, I don’t need another visual cue to tell me it is playing, so this is nothing but an irritant, distracting from the video I’m watching. Please reverse these changes or at least give me the option to remove them. There are lots of changes that will improve the app that I’m sure will make the experience better. These two were a big miss!