I’m not in the habit of ranting about free online services, but I really want YouTube to become a better website because I think it has a lot to offer me when I’m looking for something to watch.
So what’s wrong about YouTube’s front page? You can add and remove “modules” but most of them are completely useless:
- Most Popular shows one video from each category and can’t be customized to show more or less videos from a specific category. A quick glance tells me non of those videos interests me, so I have to click “view all”, for which I don’t need this module at all.
- Spotlight is a periodic module currently showing videos with the theme “Merry Christmas”, blatantly ignoring the fact that I’m in Israel and have never taken interest in Christmas videos.
- Recommended for You is based on a sub-standard recommendation engine. I honestly expected more of Google – this module shows videos based on the titles of my previously watched videos. I can do string searches for my favorites myself, thank you very much. What I would have expected is same-genre kind of recommendations, which would expose me to new performers/comedians/bands, not ones I already know.
- Featured Videos is the most irritating module and it cannot be removed! Right now it’s showing me four different Israeli videos even though Israeli videos comprise about 1% of my YouTube activity, and despite the fact that I set my location to “Worldwide” instead of “Israel”. Even more upsetting is that YouTube chooses news-related videos and I try to avoid news as much as I can.
The only useful modules for me are Subscriptions and Recent Activity because I have total control over them and are the “social network” features of YouTube, which actually make sense.
Here is another one: if you have a playlist which you want to add somewhere (e.g., quicklist), or simply delete, then you can only pick 20 at a time and there is no option to pick *all*.
Maybe we should write our own videotube and design it much better. Then we could share it with our friends, and they would share it to theirs. And then we could put in advertisements, you know, just to cover the financial burden, nothing more.
Check out my new page: https://researcher.ibm.com/researcher/view.php?person=il-ARIELC
(now there is a link to it, lol)
I agree that playlists suck as well.
And I think starting our own YouTube from your IBM researcher page is a good idea. I think it draws a big crowd.