YouTube rant

So YouTube has plenty of shortcomings, bugs, and annoyances. Yeah.

First off, you can only report people for inappropriate videos. Inappropriate, hateful, etc. comments I have yet to find a way to report. People make accounts for no reason other than to troll, so it'd be really nice to be able to report them so they can get banned.

Next, what's with this new channel layout they're eventually going to force on us? I've seen a few channels that use it, it's horrible. Look YouTube, pay close attention to what I'm saying here. When I visit someone's channel and click a video link, I expect to be taken to that video's page where I can view, rate, favorite, and comment. I don't want to have to click the video title and then find some other link in the page to be taken to the video's actual page. The current channels are much simpler and cleaner. It's true, they're not filled with web 2.0 bloat, but that's a good thing. They load fast and don't use massive amounts of resources on my computer. That's the way it should be.

Next, I have three videos up on YouTube. From my channel I can see the number of views and the rating, but not the number of comments. Someone was asking me something in a comment on one of my videos and I completely missed it because I didn't fucking know the video had a comment. This could also be solved by the remedy for my next point.

The Inbox. YouTube sends you helpful messages telling you things like "so and so commented on this video" so you can go "lol ok". But it doesn't try to make it obvious that you have new messages at all. There's an image at the top of the page with a number in parentheses next to it, this is the inbox link and the number of new messages. But it doesn't fucking say "oh hey you have new messages" it just sits there looking exactly the same but with a (1) instead of a (0), which with the small font size they chose look almost identical. Make it tell you on login or page load with a nice block at the top of the page "You have a new message in your inbox." with a link so I can go check it out.

The subscriptions panel sucks. The individual channel sections themselves are fine, but New Videos is bugged. It randomly re-inserts videos you've already seen. This bug is only further compounded by the fact that they just fucking removed the text that tells you how long ago each video was added. Thanks for making your pages convey less useful information and misrepresent old things as new.

Speaking of subscriptions, somehow my channel has two of them. I can view lots of statistics about my channel, such as where around the world my video views are coming from and how people are finding them and so forth, but I can't tell which video someone was watching when they subscribed. So I have three videos showing gameplay in three different games and I don't know which one is pulling in the subscribers. I can infer (probably correctly so) that the video with the most views is the one that got me both subscriptions. That would be my Guild Wars shadow step exploration trick video.

Videos autoplay. Seriously what the hell. I don't want this shit, give me an option to make all videos start paused or something.

Some people in their videos have inserted annotations that pause the video for a certain amount of time. I've explored all the available options in the annotation editor but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do this. Their help pages say "oh yeah you can do that" and even go over the finer points of why you'd want to and configuring the amount of time it pauses, but they don't tell you how to make one of the damn pause annotations at all. I get the note, the bubble, and the link. That's it. None of them have any little mystery meat icon in their menu of mystery meat icons that looks like it should configure a pause length.

So there's an option to tell YouTube to prefer high quality video where available. That's nice, but there's a bug and a shortcoming associated with this. The bug: after a while the option resets to "choose based on my connection" all on its own, which always seems to choose the low quality version even though I have a 7 megabit downstream. The shortcoming: No option to additionally prefer HD video over HQ where possible. Even with the option set to "always use high quality video", I still have to hit HD on every single HD video I watch. Or add "&hd=1" or "&fmt=22" to the end of the URL (without the quotes, of course).

In video comments, even if a comment was hidden due to being modded down too low you could still click "Show" to see it (and mod it down further if you wanted to) but now this option is gone. You have to configure it to show all comments so you can see the ones you want to mod. Possibly related to my first point.

I'm sure everyone's encountered this last one at some point during their YouTube browsing sessions. Every now and then, a video will just randomly take forever to load. It doesn't matter if you watched the video yesterday and it loaded fine then or if you've never seen it before, it doesn't matter if you have HQ or HD selected, or any other criteria I can think of. It just suddenly decides "ok this 5 minute video is going to take an hour to load."

Also, touching briefly on Guitar Hero, I finally FCed Hotel California on Expert Guitar. Awesome song is awesome.