It was the evening of March 31st, 2010. I was just surfing Youtube for random videos because I was bored. But as I was searching videos, the video page was changed. And in my brain I was screaming WTF! At first I thought was another one of Youtube's April Fool's Day pranks. But then I remembered that April Fool's Day didn't officially start for a few hours. In short, this change was planned out.
Right now, I've only described what I thought about the new video page. I haven't explained how it's bad. Well then, let's take it section by section. If you want to follow along, then just watch Youtube's "tour" of this god awful piece of crap. Now I'll be talking about each change as they're presented in the video, so pause frequently.
Masthead:
There are only a few things I can say about the masthead. When you scroll over your name, you now have to click on it to show options. On the old video page, just scrolling over it gave you options. The home, videos, channels, shows, subscriptions, and history options have also been removed. This makes it harder to look for certain videos or channels. In order to find shows, channels, and viral video, you now have to use the "browse" option. Subscriptions are still present, but now you can only access them by clicking on your name and then pressing subscriptions. As for history, you have to click subscriptions and search for the history option. Wouldn't it have been easier to just, I don't know, leave it unchanged? Finally, there's one thing that I've noticed on Youtube's masthead. They have an "Old Youtube" option. So this is what I'm getting? These greedy bastards at Youtube and Google can use the old video page whenever they want, but we, the lifeblood of Youtube, cannot? That's just being an ass right there.
"Information spread all over the page":
In the video, they say that they've grouped information together. What they failed to realize is that the old video page did the same damn thing. On the old video page, you have one section for subscriptions, one section for related videos, and one for playlists. Although all of them have been retained, the way Youtube has organized can be considered a downgrade. They placed subscriptions above the video player, and when you press the option to see more videos made by whoever made the video you're watching, then it moves the video player down, which interferes with the Youtuber's video viewing experience. On the old video page, the playlist, related videos, and more from this user option were to the right of the video player, and presented no problems whatsoever.
Seeing Statistics:
I don't remember much about video statistics on the old video page, but I'm sort of conflicted by how the new video page presents them. To view video statistics, you now have to click on the number of view. Clicking on it will reveal how many times a video has been added to favorites, the number of comments, how much attention the video received based off of consecutive views from related videos, how many times the video has been rated, the honors the video has received, and a demographic chart that determines which age group and country the video appeals to most. I'll give the new video page this, it does do a good job of presenting the stats, but there's just one little thing that makes me think. Does anyone other than the poster of that video care? I understand why Youtube would want to see the statistics, but not everybody else. The only thing that I find necessary are the number of times the video was rated and how it was rated. Unless you're writing an article about a video, this can be pretty useful. Anything else, not so much.
Video Queue:
What if we don't want to view another video directly? What if we want to rate, favorite and comment on the video before watching another one? The video queue just gets in the way. At least Youtube gave us the power to turn it on or off when we want to.
Comments:
This area is where Youtube screwed up quite a bit. To post a reply to a comment, mark it for spam, delete it, or rate it, you have to hover over the comment to show the options. For me, I find it easier if these options aren't hidden, just like the old video page. Youtube also added a highlights view, showing the highest rated comments and comments made by the video creator. These two features I find to be useless. I don't care about what the highest rated comments are. And I don't see any reason why I would want to read the comments the video creator makes as long as they're related to the actual video or a flame war going on in the comment section. I've also noticed a flaw in the highest rated comments section. It updates weekly to show the highest rated comments of the week. For example, let's say I make a comment that received a rating of 12. This ends up in the highest rated comment section. One week later, my comment is no longer up there and the highest rated comment shown has a rating of 8. In short, this addition should really called the "highest rated weekly comments" section. But wait, it just gets worse. The comments are now smaller than they were on the old video page, which makes the comments harder to read. and finally, there's the comment rating. There are a few flaws with this as well. On the old video page, when you rated a comment, its rating is immediately updated. On the new video page, it doesn't update immediately. Even if you refresh the page it doesn't update. It usually takes a few minutes or even hours before the damn comment is even gets an updated rating. Youtube has also hidden one feature that was previously invisible in the comment section, and that's the video response option. To post a video response, you now have to click on the comment box and scroll over to the video response option. Do you know how hard it was to figure out where that option went when this page was released? Pretty hard. It would have been better if this option was in plain view. Finally, on the old video page, you could give comments a positive or negative rating. This is present in the new video page... except the negative rating button doesn't work. I've tried pressing that button on comments that deserved a bad rating, waited a while, and nothing happened. I even waited a full day and still it didn't update. It's been 6 months since this page was introduced and this glitch still hasn't been fixed. FIX IT YOUTUBE!
Hunting For The Channel Name And Subscription Button:
Epic fail on Youtube's part. On the old video page, the channel name and the BIG YELLOW subscribe button was in a yellow sidebar. This sidebar also contained the video's tags, description,and honors. HOW THE HELL CAN YOU POSSIBLY MISS THAT? There's also one thing that Youtube has removed that was once in this sidebar. That sidebar showed your profile icon. On the new video page, the profile icon is gone. And the only way you can have anything close to a profile icon be displayed on the new video page is if you're a Youtube Partner. So in other words, on the new video page, Youtube only grants a few hundred people the ability to have an image displayed on the page, but not the other few million?
Actions Bar:
What can I say about the actions bar? Not much to be exact. The flagging and embedding hasn't changed much as far to my knowledge. On the other hand, Youtube has grouped together the favorites option with the playlists option. On the old video page, they were both separate, so it was easier to add a video to either. On the new video page, let's say you want to favorite a video. Your hand slips and you accidentally save it to a playlist. This accident would less likely on the old video page due to the amount of space between these options. The new video page just makes this blunder more likely to happen if your hand slips.
Ratings:
HOLY SH*T THEY MESSED THIS UP! For a video viewing site, the new rating system is not meant for Youtube. On the new video page, Youtube has replaced the 5 star rating system with the like/dislike rating system. As for why they switched around the rating system, this is why. Researchers at Youtube came to the conclusion that about 90% of Youtube users rate videos 1 star or 5 stars. The other 10% rated 2 stars, 3 stars, and 4 stars more often than the other 90%. I see a lot of problems with Youtube's decision. First off, videos are a lot like movies. There are some parts of a movie that you like, some that could have been better, and some that you absolutely hate. With the 5 star rating system, you can properly rate videos based off of the quality of each part of the video. With the like/dislike rating system, you have to say that the entire video was good, or the entire video was bad. Nothing is perfect, and nothing entirely sucks, so this means that for a video viewing site, this system is completely useless for rating videos. If they added something like a "not bad, but not good either" option, then it could work. But since Youtube hasn't made that option yet, the new rating system sucks.
Final thoughts:
The way I can sum up this entire redesign is like this. Imagine a stoner and a super genius working on a science fair project. In this case, the super genius would be the old video page, and the stoner would be the new video page. The super genius lays out his data carefully, made it easy to see everything, and had nothing on the final project display that interferes with his observations, evidence, etc. He gets an A+. The stoner on the other hand got high on meth, and rushed his project at the last minute. Plus the fact that meth makes you super fast doesn't help. It just makes things like these a hell of a lot worse. Everything was cluttered up on his display, his observations made no sense, and he failed to present his project to meet the requirements. He gets an F. In short, the new video page sucks, it should have been optional, and it should have been supervised efficiently.
New Layout = Fail
If you want me to talk about something that pisses you off, leave a comment on either this blog or on my Youtube page http://www.youtube.com/user/Pianodeity08 You can also email me at pianodeity08@yahoo.com and now you can talk with me over Skype. My Skype name is Pianodeity08 (if you couldn't figure that out yourself.) Thank you for your time and I'll see you in another blog.
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