honest.knave

Lately, I’ve been wondering what the hell Google has been doing with YouTube since they bought it. The site is awful; I always forget how to use the simplest features. Example: Where is the link to my favorites? Oh, right, it’s hidden under the Account popup menu (which I always notice after I’ve already clicked Account, a downside of those stupid hover-over Javascript menus). To be fair, favorites is also at the very bottom of the page, in a tiny little footer, and it’s in a box I just noticed for the first time today titled “About Your Videos”. (I wouldn’t think to look there for my favorites, personally — they’re not my videos.)

The comment system is particularly painful. Now, given the quality of discourse on YouTube, it’s perhaps of debatable importance that the comment system is horrific to use. On the other hand, perhaps the system is to blame for the poor discussions it fosters.

Example: A couple days ago I was watching M.I.A.’s music video, Paper Planes, and I noticed a comment where someone asked what song she sampled for the beat. Trying to be helpful, I clicked the Reply link for that particular comment, and answered, “The Clash - Straight to Hell”. YouTube helpfully took my comment out of context, and placed it at the top of the comment stream, instead of below the question it answered. (Why it did this, I have no idea. It seems like sometimes replies will be in context, other times they’re treated like normal non-reply comments, and placed at the top.)

Great, now I posted a pretty useless comment, in light of the new placement. It makes no sense as a standalone comment. I notice shortly later that my comment has been given a thumbs down but another user. (Which makes sense, given how little it contributes out of context.) A couple days later, I have this in my inbox, from a miffed M.I.A. fan:

wow seriously….Name a god damn band that hasn’t used a melody or beat from a different song and her representatives must have paid shitloads to use it….dont talk its a very good song not a rip off

YouTube set me up to fail in this instance, and then subjected me to abuse, primarily by having a terrible user interface. Their user experience is so bad that it is actually causing its users pain, in the sense that being sent an angry reply like that is hurtful. Sure, I can laugh it off as a misunderstanding, but, for what it’s worth, it aggravated me enough to write this entry.

But of course, that’s only one problem. In fact, that barely scratches the surface of the mountain of flaws is YouTube. I could detail a lot more problems, but as it turns out, someone else already has, and did a far more thorough job than I could have. If it wasn’t such a damn useful site, I could just, you know, stop going there.

So Google, what’s up? You’re known for being the king of simple, usable applications. When are you going to fix this insanely popular, but badly broken service?