In mid-October, YouTube debuted a new UI design that makes a number of seemingly small changes: icons look a little altered, comments work a bit differently, and the way you save videos to playlists has been tweaked. It’s nothing earth-shattering, but you wouldn’t know that by the way some folks have reacted.
YouTube is the biggest streaming platform in the world, so whenever something is modified even a little bit, people are going to notice, and some of those people are going to hate it. We’ll get to them. Happily, there are some changes that pretty much everyone agrees are for the best.
The newest update changes the way comments are organized under videos, specifically replies to comments. Before the update, if you replied to a comment, your reply would go at the bottom of a long list of replies to that same comment. The same held true if you replied to a reply. So, say you were responding to a particular person who replied to a comment, because you have an opinion and it must be shared; your reply would appear under those of everyone else who had either replied to that reply or replied to the original comment. If you wanted to find out if anyone had replied to you specifically, you’d have to go hunting through the list. It made having conversations within comment sections difficult.
But after the update, comments are nested. That means that if you open a comment, see what people are saying, and decide you just have to respond to one of them, your reply will now create a separate little conversation tree you’ll have to click to expand. Within that space, you can talk to other people who are discussing this particular reply without cluttering up the long list of ongoing replies to the original comment. Check out how it looks in the image below:
Folks on the YouTube subreddit seem to like this change, as well they would; this is a lot like how comments work on Reddit. And if it keeps comments sections more organized, I’m all for it.
The new look is very divisive
Do rounded edges make you furious?
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Easily the biggest change is in how the YouTube player itself looks. The icons — the play/pause button, the volume control, etc — look a little bigger and more rounded, and they take up more space at the bottom of the video field. That said, they’re also slightly transparent, so you can see through them to the video beneath. Also, they vanish even if the video is paused and your mouse isn’t positioned over the video, whereas in the old version, the icons never vanish if the video is paused. Finally, the “like” and “dislike” buttons have also gotten a revamp: before, the thumbs up and thumbs down icons had little cuffs on the wrists, and now they don’t.
Personally, I feel like this is neither a big step up nor down. The old version looked fine and the new version looks fine. But YouTube’s own official announcement for the redesign is flooded with messages of hate.
“This new UI is absolute garbage. Readability is gone, the charm of the UI is gone and it’s way too corpo looking,” writes one respondent. “Bring back the old UI. Nothing was wrong with it, it did not need fixing, and you broke everything…Put this new UI in the trash where is belongs. Nobody asked for it. Roll it back.”
That is a pretty common sentiment, and while I may not see that big a difference, YouTube would do well to mind how passionately many people seem to hate this new direction.
Playlists are broken now
Or at least, saving videos to playlists is less convenient
This next change seems like an unforced error that nobody likes. In the past, if you were watching a video and wanted to save it to multiple playlists, you hit the “save” button, clicked on all the playlists where you wanted that video stored, and that was the end of it. After the update, if you want to save a video to multiple playlists, you hit the “save” button, and then you pick one playlist you want to add it to. Then the “save” tab will close, and you’ll have to hit the “save” button again, choose the next playlist you want to add it to, and so on until you’re satisfied.
I don’t know how many people keep a habit of storing the same video in multiple playlists, but clearly, some do, because they have made their hatred known online. And it does seem pointless to take this functionality away. This feels like it would be an easy change for YouTube to make, and they should get on it quickly.
The case of the mysterious “like” animation
Some new features have yet to be fully explored
Let’s end on a feature that is neither universally liked nor universally disliked, but just sort of odd. Under the redesign, when you click the “like” icon on select videos, you will see a little animation. For instance, if you like a music video, the “like” icon will briefly turn into a little music note. If you like a trailer for a movie or TV show, it’ll turn into a clapboard. Harmless and fun, right?
Mostly yes, but while I was playing around with it for this article, I discovered something confusing. I liked the trailer for the upcoming Apple TV+ show Pluribus — which is a sci-fi series over which you should be deliriously excited — and the “like” button did not turn into a clapboard like it had for every other movie and TV trailer I’d liked. It turned into…a smiley face, and I have no idea why.
Is this specific to Pluribus, is there a greater logic to when the animations play that I don’t understand, or has YouTube simply not ironed out this feature yet? It’s hard to be sure this soon after an update, but it’s nice to discover something new.
YouTube is always changing something
This isn’t the last time people have had strong feelings about a YouTube redesign, and it won’t be the last. Often, people get used to the changes and move on, as happened after YouTube got rid of public dislike counts. And people often figure out small fixes that tamp down on YouTube’s most annoying tendencies. My bet is that if YouTube doesn’t find ways to address what people don’t like about this latest update, users will.
The new changes are still being rolled out — you might see them on some accounts but not on others, or on mobile but not on desktop — but sooner or later, they’ll be everywhere. You’ll know them when you see them.