Ask Slashdot: Why Do Popular Websites Have Bad UI Navigation? 235
A while back some "bored developers and designers" started uploading their ideas for the worst volume control interface in the world. But now Slashdot reader dryriver asks a more serious question:
You follow a news story on CNN or BBC or FoxNews or Reuters. The frontpage of the news site changes so frequently that you wish there was a "News Timeline" UI element at the top of the page, letting you scrub back and forward in time (by hours, days, weeks, years) so you can see previous states of the frontpage and get a better sense of how the story developed over time. How many major news websites have this scrubbable Timeline UI element? Currently none do.
Or you go on Youtube. Hundreds of millions of videos for you to browse. Except that there are only 3 basic UI elements you can use -- keyword search, automated recommendations panel on the right, or a sortable list of a specific channel's uploaded videos.
- There is no visual network or node-diagram UI that would let you browse videos by association.
- There is no browsing by category (e.g. sports > soccer > amateurs > kids ) or by alphabetic order.
- There is no master index or master list of videos -- like a phonebook -- that you can call up to find videos you haven't come across yet.
And yet these UI elements are not very difficult to put in the user's hands at all. Why do websites with tens of millions of daily visitors and massive web development resources do so little to allow more sophisticated browsing for those users who desire it?
"Is there a cogent reason to restrict website navigation to 'simple, limited and dumb'," asks the original submission, "or do these websites simply not care enough or bother enough to put more sophisticated UIs into place?" Share your own thoughts in the comments.
Why do popular web sites have bad UI navigation?
Or you go on Youtube. Hundreds of millions of videos for you to browse. Except that there are only 3 basic UI elements you can use -- keyword search, automated recommendations panel on the right, or a sortable list of a specific channel's uploaded videos.
- There is no visual network or node-diagram UI that would let you browse videos by association.
- There is no browsing by category (e.g. sports > soccer > amateurs > kids ) or by alphabetic order.
- There is no master index or master list of videos -- like a phonebook -- that you can call up to find videos you haven't come across yet.
And yet these UI elements are not very difficult to put in the user's hands at all. Why do websites with tens of millions of daily visitors and massive web development resources do so little to allow more sophisticated browsing for those users who desire it?
"Is there a cogent reason to restrict website navigation to 'simple, limited and dumb'," asks the original submission, "or do these websites simply not care enough or bother enough to put more sophisticated UIs into place?" Share your own thoughts in the comments.
Why do popular web sites have bad UI navigation?
Tablets and Phones (Score:5, Informative)
Next question.
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You mean the things I do not use for surfing the web? Makes sense.
Re:Tablets and Phones (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Tablets and Phones (Score:5, Funny)
To be fair, mouse and keyboard were OP.
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Well, you can have good adaptive design that works for all. The thing is, the sites have analytics and realize those who actually use a traditional browser on a PC (desktop or laptop) a small minority. That, and PC design is harder simply because it's often an in-between resolution - a 1080p PC screen is bested by high end phones, and matched with low end tabl
Phone screen physically smaller w/coarser pointing (Score:5, Interesting)
That, and PC design is harder simply because it's often an in-between resolution - a 1080p PC screen is bested by high end phones, and matched with low end tablets. It beats low end phones though, and matched with midrange phones. Higher end tablets have higher resolutions.
Resolution isn't the problem here as much as field of view. A layout intended for a 1920x1080 pixel PC screen will look unusably small on a 1920x1080 pixel phone screen, largely because the phone's screen is physically much smaller with higher pixel density. CSS recognizes this: 1px doesn't literally mean 1 pixel but instead 1/2700 radian* rounded to the nearest half pixel. If something is 270px wide, for example, it's supposed to be displayed about as wide as one-tenth of the distance from the eyes to the screen, no matter if the display is 96 dpi or four times that. Thus a phone screen might still be about 360px by 640px in CSS terms, even if it is a high-density display (such as Apple's Retina displays).
In addition to the physically smaller screen, a phone, tablet, or 2-in-1 in tablet mode has much coarser pointer resolution than a desktop, laptop, or 2-in-1 in laptop mode. Most users of a mouse, trackpad, or stylus can reliably hit a target as small as 12px by 12px, but a finger user finds it hard to hit targets smaller than 48px in the smaller direction.
* Based on the standard of a 96 dpi desktop computer monitor at a nominal arm's length of 28 inches away.
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Slot machine effect (Score:5, Interesting)
Facebook and Twitter long ago got rid of reverse chronological order for their feeds. It's too easy to scroll down and read every post until you get to the point where you see posts you've read previously. It also makes it hard to make people spend money to show up in people's feeds more often as you'll see everything, in the correct order.
The end result of randomizing whose posts and which of their posts you see, is you end up with a slot machine effect. Every time you open up facebook, twitter, etc you get a new, random assortment of new posts you (probably) haven't seen before. That random effect allows you to keep going back for more, allow facebook to direct posts at you that might be more engaging to keep you scrolling past more advertisements.
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I don't know about Facebook (since I refuse to sign up to the Zuckerberg empire) but on Twitter I see posts from all the people I follow and I see them in order so I can see what's new since I last visited. Promoted tweets are another matter but I dont see those thanks to AdBlock Plus :)
YouTube on the other hand, its impossible to get it to actually show me videos I want to see half the time, too often I get crap I have already seen or videos from channels I never want to watch (YouTube needs a "never show
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What I see when I visit the front page of twitter as of right now is a list of tweets in chronological order. This list contains A.Tweets from the 23 accounts I follow. B.Tweets I myself have posted. C.Retweets by people I follow and D.Parent posts of a reply written by myself or someone I follow (even when I don't follow the account that posted said parent tweet).
I do not see tweets from random accounts I have no interest in and do not follow (if I turned my ad blocker off I would probably see more though)
Volume if entries and sharded DBs (Score:2)
It doesn't help also that there isn't a central giant table of all news that is easy to query.
Facebook, Google, Twitter all tend to uses various types of Map-Reduce.
My guess is ads (Score:2)
The longer you stay on the site and try to wade through looking for actual information, higher the probability you will see and/or click on some advertisement or a banner, even if by accident.
It's all about clicks.
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Well, I guess I am in the minority that mostly avoids using this atrocity altogether. Basically I check on 2-3 people that post things I like from time to time but that is it.
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If you subscribe to one of the non-free tiers of Inoreader they let you add up to 30 social media accounts from each platform as feeds in your RSS folders. (30 is a weird limitation, but I'm guessing it has to do with what they're allowed to do with each platform's API as a third party.) I find viewing social media posts like that to be far superior to any of the platform's native attempts to show me content. I can keep important posts unread or save them, and I can blow by new posts I'm not interested in i
Same reason for Gnome 3 (Score:5, Informative)
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Well, after all Gnome 3 is great and they had to find something new to do! Right?
Ads (Score:5, Insightful)
All of those mentioned sites are ad supported. The user experience is not what they are designing the UI for. They are designing it so you see more ads.
They can't all be wrong! (Score:4, Interesting)
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1920x1080 == dual 960x1080 (Score:2)
That or column width limits are an adaptation to the fact that it's a lot harder to read text wider than about 80 columns without accidentally skipping a line or repeating a line. There's a reason that newspapers have been printed in columns.
My computer's window manager has a snap feature. I can split one 1920x1080 pixel monitor into two 960x1080 pixel areas, each of which can host a web browser. In Windows, try Win+Left or Win+Right. In Windows or Xfce, try dragging a window to the left or right edge of th
Youtube has categories (Score:2, Informative)
Youtube has categories, they are not just easy to find. Example [youtube.com].
It is the online equivalent of Supermarkets (Score:4, Interesting)
Staples such as milk, eggs and meat at the back.
Put things that are commonly bought in a single shop at opposite sides of the store so that you wander hither and yon through all the branding and packaging advertising.
If they made things orderly so that personal shoppers could efficiently shop for a dozen people at a time, or standardized their pricing systems so that they could easily be compared with other stores, their profits would tumble.
It is these same principles applied to websites that makes the UI so difficult to use. They are not selling the UI. Thy UI is the tool they harvest their prey with. It is not meant to be enjoyed by the cattle.
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Based on my local Asda, a typical UK supermarket:
1. The checkout areas are indeed filled with impulse-buys. Sweets, bottled drinks. For some reason, also money cards for various online service.
2. Meat, baked goods, are indeed at the back. Though oddly, meat and ready meals is at back-left, dairy and non-meat freezer goods back-right. This means that when you reach the checkout you have a layer of fridge/freezer in top and bottom of the trolley, and room-temperature goods in the middle. Makes packing inconve
Websites are doing alright (Score:4, Informative)
For example, YouTube seems alright. You start one video showing a respected rat by the kids and end up with a parody video made by a troll (this story was told by someone at TED). Users are not engaged on actively looking for the next video, they want the machines to think for them. You are well above the average user, I am afraid.
screw the categories (Score:2)
Rightfully so. World switched from categories (singular tagging) to (multiple) tagging last millennium.
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Rightfully so. World switched from categories (singular tagging) to (multiple) tagging last millennium.
Not porn sites, which unfortunately still consider "lesbian" as a category rather than a description of participants only then that you apply categories to.
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Rightfully so. World switched from categories (singular tagging) to (multiple) tagging last millennium.
Not porn sites, which unfortunately still consider "lesbian" as a category rather than a description of participants only then that you apply categories to.
Question: What does "Gay" fall under in porn sites? Category or description of participants?
advanced search (Score:2)
is all that is missing from these websites.
Bad navigation can be useful (Score:2)
Write must be a DB maintainer (Score:2)
All three items mentioned are present in news web sites.
There is no visual network or node-diagram UI that would let you browse videos by association.
CNN's web site has an entire section called, "Videos", one can use. You can even search in that section.
There is no browsing by category (e.g. sports > soccer > amateurs > kids ) or by alphabetic order
Again, CNN's site has headers for each section such as Sports, Opinion, Tech, etc. That they don't get as granular as the writer wants is not a flaw.
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Is there a cogent reason to restrict website navigation to 'simple, limited and dumb'
Yes, there is a very good reason...simple websites are very usable. Ever visited Google's homepage? Or for the other extreme, try Flickr.
tags (Score:2)
What is the incentive? (Score:2)
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BINGO! If keyword search works for 90+% of users, why add layers that will break? Categorization is much tougher than it sounds -- uploaders will miss-classify.
Besides, YT is now owned by GOOG who built their business by ignoring classification (remember Yahoo!?) and refining PageRank. If you don't like it, use a different search or do your own advertising. There are probably also advanced search options (tags) to do some of what you want.
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We had it (Score:2)
Why was it lost? Ads.
Competing goals (Score:2)
Simple, their goal of monetization competes with your goal of a simple easy to use interface. And since they own the website their goal trumps yours.
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It's like why supermarkets are badly organized. (Score:5, Interesting)
You spend more money in a supermarket where you have to hunt for what you want. The more time you spend in the supermarket, the more impulse buys you'll make.
In the Orwellian language of Internet marketing having your time wasted is called "engagement". If how long you spend on a site is the metric that increases the ad revenue of that site, there's no economic incentive to make things easy and convenient for you, is there?
This is the diabolical bargain we all made when we decided we never wanted to pay for content. If we don't pay for content then we aren't the customer, so we shouldn't expect systems to be designed to meet our needs efficiently. We should expect them to be designed shape our behavior in ways desirable to the people who are actually paying. The problem of time-wasting interfaces is ubiquitous, from the design of websites to the implementation of search functions on smart TVs or streaming services. They're uniformly flashy but inefficient, because they are supposed to draw our attention and then waste our time.
Bad design from a usability standpoint isn't a bug, it's a feature.
Nothing's changed (Score:2)
Non-tech people are in charge of tech stuff (Score:2)
Subject says it all. Why doesn't my library have a single option I can check in the search filter to search for all ebooks? I can filter by epubs or kindle but not both. Answer, because whoever is in charge is an arrogant prick. It looks good to them, and the people telling them it's not good enough are techies to whom they believe they are superior, because if they weren't they wouldn't be in charge. But we don't live in meritocracies.
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Tech decisions should be made by techies. Not all decisions, because techies don't understand everything, but tech ones, because they do understand those.
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They had to work very hard to make every part of the hardware and software work well to get GUI perfection.
Now RAM, ROM, CPU, GPU just "work".
Easier described than implemented and featurecreep (Score:2)
Those sound great, easy, etc . But as a developer some of those "easy" features are not so easy to implement. Sounds like simple, but there's usually a lot of data processing going on to make stuff just work right. Articles just don't fall into place by category/subcategory, you have to not only implement the categories you have to as you create each article determine which categories apply. And for old articles you will have to have someone go through each one to categorize (or in the case of new categ
His YouTube suggestions mostly don't work (Score:2)
I don't think he appreciates how many YouTube videos there are. There are, quite literally, billions. Any "master" list, alphabetized or not, would be utterly unusable. Browsing by category would require the videos to be sorted by category--which would either be an unsupportable expense if YouTube did it themselves or would have the uploaders categorize their own videos. The latter would be a really bad idea. And the categories would still be unusably huge lists.
You're doing it again (Score:2)
You're asking for someone else to put in more work, that you won't pay for. The newsflash (for you) is that no one's working for pride.
If you want to see really great stuff, that makes sense, and that is impressive in any way, then you get to look for the starving artists. You get to look for the poor inventors. You get to look for the 12-year old trying to make a name for himself.
I've been each of those three. I made very impressive stuff in multiple industries -- including web interfaces.
Then I wanted
Historically grown. (Score:2)
Next question.
Builders vs. Decision Makers (Score:2)
The answer probably lies in a combination of factors, but one that leaps to mind is that the people who make the decisions and approve the paychecks are not the people likely to think of improvements like those you describe, let alone see much value in them. Managers are often focused on whatever deliverables they have been asked for, and developers are often kept on a short leash.
Re: been asking this question myself for years (Score:3, Insightful)
They don't want you to find stuff you like, the want you to find stuff they like. And they spent millions to figure out what you have to like to make more money. The rest is collateral stuff they are also hosting for claiming they cover everything ...
Re: been asking this question myself for years (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. The idea that news sites (or TV news channels) are there to inform you is a joke.
They're there to earn money. They'll do whatever it takes to hook you (and nothing more).
Re: been asking this question myself for years (Score:4, Insightful)
Some online stores have abysmal search functions, some so bad that I needed Google to find out if they had the thing I was looking for. That costs money every day but still I know of one that hasnâ(TM)t changed it in years.
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They're there to earn money. They'll do whatever it takes to hook you (and nothing more).
Well, it's not working for me. I never go to news sites for news. I go to Google News, or social media first. From there, I may end up on a news site, read only that page, and then go back and find another angle.
If the news sites want to hook me, they need to provide better information and structure.
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Google News changed their format some years ago (I want to say five, but probably more). There was a *huge* uproar among the users, with tens of thousands of posts complaining. (I saw one post which on the surface seemed to be in favor, but it was clearly--and I mean that seriously--sarcasm.) This went on for weeks, with the Google moderators occasionally surfacing to say they heard us. Eventually they made some minor concession which satisfied almost no one, and said it was proof they listened.
And I ha
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Yeah, same experience for me with google news. They're like a clickbait aggregator, they just take the least newslike crap that gets published on all the news sites, and show you that.
I switched from Google News to Reuters for a basic current-events feed. Imperfect, not as good as what google news originally was, but I know when something blows up.
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Nice theory, but how do you explain the fact that things that don't serve ads frequently have shit UIs too.
Netflix is the same way (Score:5, Insightful)
The Netflix UI has gone backwards in terms of utility at finding what you want. It's all about finding what THEY want you to want.
Back when Netflix was physical mail delivery of DVDs, there was advanced search, which wasn't really advanced, but it did help find, e.g., all movies released in 2012. Helpful since I don't go to theater and want to not miss movies I wanted to see but had to wait for the DVD release.
Try that now...try finding things that are not Netflix originals (and I like some of the Netflix originals, but c'mon). Especially on a device like Apple TV or a Netflix app embedded in a smart TV.
Re:Netflix is the same way (Score:5, Insightful)
Totally agree with you. I wish you'd be able to mark movies "Do Not Show". These would be listings of stuff you've already seen or never want to see. This way they'd only appear at the end of search listings with something like a large dog ear in the corner.
This would make it much easier to go through long listings of shows.
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It's also a bit obnoxious how, after watching a documentary on, say, the D-Day Normandy landings, Netflix says "Hey, you know what I'm going to cue up for you next unless you intervene in the next few seconds? Stranger Things 3!"
I mean, it's not like they have anything as convenient as a list of shows I'd be interested in watching next, right?
Re:Netflix is the same way (Score:5, Informative)
The Netflix UI has gone backwards in terms of utility at finding what you want. It's all about finding what THEY want you to want.
Back when Netflix was physical mail delivery of DVDs, there was advanced search, which wasn't really advanced, but it did help find, e.g., all movies released in 2012. Helpful since I don't go to theater and want to not miss movies I wanted to see but had to wait for the DVD release.
Try that now...try finding things that are not Netflix originals (and I like some of the Netflix originals, but c'mon). Especially on a device like Apple TV or a Netflix app embedded in a smart TV.
Netflx search (and ratings) have become bad.
I recommend a third party search site like
Flicksurfer
http://flicksurfer.com/#/ [flicksurfer.com]
or
Instantwatcher
https://instantwatcher.com/ [instantwatcher.com]
Informative (Score:2)
I would mod this up but I've already been commenting on this thread.
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flicksurfer appears to be dead and not updated since 2016
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Therein lies the answer. Good UI design is all about letting the user control the experience. They are vehemently opposed to the user controlling the experience. They do not want you to find what you want to find. They want you to only be able to find what they want you to find.
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Most stuff shown to me are not Netflix originals or produced. It seems to base it upon what you have watched previously. Probably though for a newcomer the Netflix stuff is going to dominate.
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Yeah, well I've been a Netflix customer sine their second year of existence. I've seen their UI become less and less useful and more and more biased toward Netflix Originals.
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Music streaming is horrible for this. Originally, I preferred music streaming over generating my own lists and fussing about, but each service did the same stingy shit, substituting cheaper
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Why even give them money. Just use torrents and https://flickmetrix.com/ [flickmetrix.com]
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Because when all is said and done, I still prefer to pay for services rendered rather than to steal them. When the services begin to suck beyond the utility derived, I stop paying them and do without or find a better service.
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I believe this is right. They're more interested in shaping your perception of their content. If they provide tools for effectively searching/categorizing, you'll quickly discover that the only content they have is shitty content.
Plus you wouldn't get lured into watching the content they want to push, either to inflate the ratings (Netflix originals) or because it's cheaper for them to show (some Netflix B movie vs. a Hollywood title).
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there is obviously an underlying reason for its exclusion because the guys running these online behemoths are anything but incompetent...
I thought that for a long time too. But I have doubts now. It may just be that they believe they are so important and invulnerable that they do not need to care. People _have_ to use their service (they think), so any barely functional UI will do nicely. On the other hand, it could also be plain incompetence, for example by management deciding on the UI that "looks better" without ever using it.
On a related note, has anybody found a convincing reason yet why so much of the GUIs done by Microsoft are so abys
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Interfaces are so bad because they are not technical whizzies that have little to do with training of the people who build them. And those people have it in their heads they will decide how their interfaces are to be used. Interfaces require those "softer" disciplines that techno-phobes have convinced themselves are worthless.
Re: been asking this question myself for years (Score:2)
Always remember the Surveillance Valley Razor:
Never attribute to incompetence that which can be adequately explained by malice.
Re: been asking this question myself for years (Score:2)
Dreams of profit, maybe.
For an obvious example take Uber. They perfidiously exploit their workers. Yet every quarter they manage to return a very handsome loss.
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Because F5: Fuckwits forgot form follows function.
Re: been asking this question myself for years (Score:2)
First, most research is continuous and evolving. UI/UX isn't an exception.
None of those things you said are any less relevant today than they were 50 years ago. KISS is as relevant today as it was decades ago. Maybe you mean some software designers don't know their users?
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And as you point out, this stuff is constantly evolving. Up the chain people have pointed out that now we have a population who has been using apps their entire lives, but are forgetting that this is taken into account and the majority of users
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I know there's research, but I think it must be messed up somehow. How else to explain how hard affordances have become to find? There was the great Windows 8 debacle, which supposedly relied on a lot of research. And now the popular thing to do on websites and other UIs is to make buttons not look like buttons (supposedly that's too skeuomorphic), with the result that I (at least) can't tell where/ when/ whether I'm supposed to click, as opposed to just typing something in to a box. It seems obvious to
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there is obviously an underlying reason for its exclusion because the guys running these online behemoths are anything but incompetent...
I believe you've hit the nail on the head here.
Re: been asking this question myself for years (Score:2)
Lotta sites try to annoy mobile users enough that they download duh app. Gotta get more of that sweet sweet data from the users.
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Sheer mass of uploads (Score:5, Interesting)
there is obviously an underlying reason for its exclusion because the guys running these online behemoths are anything but incompetent...
Yes, there is a very obious reason: the ginormous amount of videos that are uploaded every second on YT.
Combined with the fact that YouTube is a relatively not-so-recent website.
For example, regarding the category tagging:
heck, allow uploaders to tag their uploads in category keywords and open those main categories up for search...
for this to work we need every single of these uploads to be correctly tagged.
Remember Rickrolling? Such a system is ripe for somebody to reupload the video while tagging it under every single category.
And that's ignoring the trolls who are going to tag hardcore BDSM porn video snippets under every possible "kids" subcategory.
Same goes with alphabetical sorting: with umpteen gazillions of videos, you're looking for an "index" which begins with 1378 pages of various combinations of "aaaaaa" (and that's only the begining).
And that's assuming that there *exists* a single central inventory of all video. It might surprise you, but there is not. There is no single machine in the entire Google Cloud that is simultaneously aware of every single last video. (among other, such a machine would be a single point of failure).
Google is big on subdividing large datasets into redundant shards, and using map-reduce to query them and create some semi-consistent results.
Which means that the aforementioned section of "aaaaa" titles might randomly spread 637 or 1982 pages, depending on whether the relevant information was propagated to the shards servers reached by your request, wether the servers answered on time (or got delayed due to momentary overload and got timed out) or if the servers are even up to begin with.
See similar weirdness on Google Searches giving you "results 1 to 50 out of 23", due to the exact same underlying mechanics.
Search results are actually a good metaphore because, due to the insane amount of content on YT, it would be similar to wanting a categorized interface of all websites and an exhaustive index of every single last webpage back in the early 2000s Era - hint: there is a reason why Yahoo struggled and eventually Google took over the search space.
The best solution for YouTube is to count on a method that doesn't rely on retro actively re-tag every single existing video, doesn't rely on a giant army (litteraly sized like a country's army) of moderators to check, that can work on partial data and that can be implemented with to today's tech.
Thus you get strings/title keyword swarch (basically what Google Search was doing in the oast to index all the web), channel (self-curated lists by authors), and suggestions (based on viewing logs and simple logic like "others like you who have watched A, B and C have then also subsequently watched X, Y and Z, so these might also interest you" which more or less works with current ressources. And with all of it's own problems - it will automatically lock you into a search bubble (will never suggest you the other W, U and V videos) and due to how the human psyche works - this will progressiveky lead you to more extreme content, eventually every suggestion leading to either batshit insane conspiracy theories, or violent hateful extremism, etc.)
Eventually as deep-neural-nets tech progresses, YouTube mught become able to identify and be aware of the content and we might revisit the "category keyword concept" or at least for some subdomains (I vaguely remember reading on /. that YouPorn or some other such company had managed to train an AI capable of recognizing and categorizing sex acts)
But until then, suggestions for YouTube interface fall into the category of ideas which look nice on paper, but when you give it a though, won't work and aren't even technically possible.
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Tags already exist, you can add a series of keywords for each uploaded video. Under the Advanced tab you can select a category (I use mostly Gaming) and if you chose Gaming, you can choose a game title for the video. Hell, you can even choose a video location and caption certification among other things.
Also, much like the Google Search engine itself, Youtube contains operators which you could use, including wildcards. Here's a good resource: https://tubularinsights.com/ad... [tubularinsights.com]
The UI is kept simple because Yo
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for this to work we need every single of these uploads to be correctly tagged.
Remember Rickrolling? Such a system is ripe for somebody to reupload the video while tagging it under every single category.
Tags already exist, you can add a series of keywords for each uploaded video.
What process ensures that the uploader adds no irrelevant keywords?
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Ask Youtube.
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Oh, no, not at all, I am one of those simple people. Almost never used operators, my Youtube usage is very light and straightforward: click here, subscribe to that, nothing fancy.
Also, simple people does not mean stupid or anything, just light users who never need anything more complex than Youtube already offers.
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(among other, such a machine would be a single point of failure).
Oh come on, making a read-replica of a database is the easiest thing in the world.
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"for this to work we need every single of these uploads to be correctly tagged."
Seems to work OK for the pron sites ...
You obviously don't use pron sites.
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youtubes db can't handle it.
they max out at around 600-700 for any search term and search options, after that the computational cost goes up too much for them to do it.
what this means in practice is that there's plenty of videos with generic names and description that will not be found by any means from the ui and for them to be found by the api you would need to know exact timeframe for when it was uploaded to pinpoint it down a bit more.
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Searching by tags or alphabetically would require the people who upload videos to possess a certain amount of intelligence. .... As long as YouTube consists entirely of videos uploaded by the unwashed masses, that's never going to happen.
I use Youtube for things like demos of watch and camera repairs, and searching does bring them up. Most of those guys certainly do have an amount of intelligence and are capable of relevant tagging; looks like they wash too. Maybe people who upload videos of clowns etc don't have any intelligence, can't tag correctly, and don't wash, but that does not matter because I don't search for clown videos.
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"You're so elitist, nobody that elitist is good enough for me."
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Explain where the OP is wrong ....
See my post above for my own explanation.
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This just reflects the difference between normal magazines and those for idiots, in more of a picture book format with brief one paragraph tidbits under each as a sort of extended caption.
The only time "long form journalism" appears in such a rag is as of a picture of a lot of text, with the caption, "This is long form journalism, which we don't provide for you."
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Web sites from CNN to bigger chans post controvesial stuff to get you to click and maybe rage post. It's the exact same business model for both.