5 YouTube problems & bugs that bother Torley

I appreciate the cheap 'n' cheerful service YouTube provides: they, after all, are the most popular host of my Second Life video tutorials. However, at the same time, I'm surprised and disappointed that there hasn't been more progress made on certain YouTube bugs. I don't care to speculate mindlessly, but for being a Google company and arguably the most popular video-sharing site on the Net, perhaps lack of greater competition has left them less active to action improvements — whatever the reason, it's caused a lot of trouble for me, and other YouTubers, I'm sure.

Here's what's bothering me at YouTube right now:
 

1. Intermittent changes to the interface without a heads-up — then breaking stuff in the process! I can understand cosmetic tweaks without alarming everyone like the end of the world is happening. But when it hurts existing functionality, there should be better communication on their blog. Case in point: the Playlist Box on a Channel no longer works to show List and Grid modes: ever since a couple days ago, its usefulness was reduced to displaying just a single channel thumbnail and the full description, which isn't as apt browsing. I emailed them and haven't heard back yet, and something like this has happened several times.

They also appear to have removed showing daily rankings from most but not all channels (how puzzling is that?), which is a vanity thing, but nevertheless encouraging to rising YouTubers (like me). On the upside, they did add the ability to sort by views back to search via a nice dropdown menu and announced this — look at the post's comments for other people who noticed the same problems as myself.
 

2. Crappy video quality. I used to be more forgiving, but after seeing more of what's out there, it's really Stone Age that YouTube still has severely fuzzy videos. The compression quality is terrible when compared side-to-side with the crispness of the new Flickr "your 'beautiful wife' should not be moving" video and other sites, and default sound remains at lofi mono. A good way to compare is look at small text elements and observe what's readable: use TubeMogul to to upload a vid to multiple sites easily. Some have poorly argued the crap-qual is needed to discourage copyright infringement, but that doesn't make sense because it degrades all the original, non-infringing content and certainly doesn't address the root legal issues. Also, I doubt YouTube has a shortage of disk space.

Adding to the confusion — and this is what really gets me — YouTube recently introduced a "high-quality" mode under the radar, but in instances I've seen:

1. The quality different is hardly noticeable.
2. They also introduced a very annoying sound distortion bug on the "hifi" vids (which made my voice sound like I was a vaguely Slavic dictator).
3. They under-the-radar left the option to choose in My Account > Video Playback Quality.

Even worse, they changed it so they don't tell you if a vid you're watching is "high-quality" (I stress the quotation marks due to the dubiousness of it), and not all vids are available that way yet, but for now, it's like the mystery meat of video playback! :\ And more about that audio distortion bug: it literally took me weeks to get some decent replies to what I presented as a very simple and easy reproduction to Ardra and Francisco @ YouTube, and even then, the email exchange petered out with slow responses, and the issue was not satisfactorily resolved.

While I'm laterally thankful that some of my vids were chosen for the "high-quality" test pilot, these problems wouldn't have happened if I had known that my content was switched over to hifi, also introducing the audio distortion bug. I'm concerned YouTube didn't catch this earlier themselves, but then again, with the already-poor encoding quality and many user-created videos that are blocky to being with and uploaded with distortion and clipping, I can be understanding. Nevertheless: YouTube, it's important to be better about your followup.
 

3. Sending feedback is needlessly confusing. Yes, there are some good general-purpose answers in YouTube's Help Resources area, which is fairly visible. But once you go there, how do you send a personal support ticket? Even their Contact Us page gives no clear clues. I understand encouraging self-help is sensible from several perspectives, but when someone like me knows what they're doing and is baffled why your Current Site Issues was last updated over a month ago — as of this writing, 2008-02-28 — please, make it easy. I have good info to share and improve your service and am willing to give it to you, YouTube, but since you make it so hard… I may give up! After clickering around some more, I slapped my hair in a bittersweet joy to realize that at the bottom of every answer in their Help area, there's a different "Contact us" link — no, it doesn't lead to the same place as the other "Contact Us" with the same name, and that's bad usability design.

I'm in solidarity about encouraging self-help through "good friction" and being efficient about providing answers to frequently-asked questions, but the kicker here is when you finally do get to report a specific problem, it tells you:

Describe the issue here (maximum 350 characters, about what fits in this box): *

Oh and by the way, I'm a fan of terseness, but that's not even as long as a YouTube comment (500 characters). For technical bugs (and there are numerous), it means you have to leave out certain important details and do the slow email back-and-forth thing. YouTube certainly isn't helping themselves or us with this.

 
4. Comments don't reliably appear. Here's a perfect example of broken communication: I like corresponding with nice people who leave comments on my YouTube videos. I'd do it more, but I don't — and encourage commenting on my blog instead — in large part because 4/5 of my YouTube comments have disappeared into the ether!

In another bad UI choice, when you click the Post Comment button, the text changes into "Comment Posted!" No! The first time I saw this happen was during my early-90s HyperCard days, and it's not a good way of showing feedback. A better way is to actually display my comment on the page to acknowledge yes, it's arrived (without reloading through AJAXY wonders), and no need to change the button text. Leave it alone.

Even when I see "Comment Posted!" tho, I'm misled, because I refresh the page manually and my comment never turns up. I have interest in commenting on YouTube, but their system needs to work more reliably… else I'm nary touching their comment boxes.

There are similar problems, by the way, with updating channel images and such. Which brings me to…
 

5. Incorrect info and missing details. If you're a YouTube Partner, in My Account > Branding Options, it tells you the maximum dimensions for a Channel Banner are 850×75 pixels. This is outright wrong and wastes time if you went to work crafting one before knowing the actual size. Have a look at my channel banner. It's 875x75 pixels. Even more confusing is when you try to follow the examples of leading channels like National Geographic's, which boasts a 875×150-pixel "blankspace" banner used to style their page. Guess what happens when you try to upload something that size? It gets squished down to 875×75.

Plainly, specs like this should be made more clear. (I reported it ages ago, no reply.) I wondered for a long time, "How do I get my channel videos to autoplay?" until learning from some helpful YouTubers that it's a benefit of being a Partner. And I do enjoy being a Partner — the setup process was easy — but despite the glimmer of "enhanced channel branding options", there's no mention of other niceties like channel autoplay. That would both be appealing and help clarify "Why don't I have X feature on my YouTube?"
 

All that being said, I reiterate enjoying YouTube for pretty much "free" (aside from the usual Internet burdens like unwanted ads, I can live with those). I've gotten a lot of entertainment from them, and they've been a great help in getting the word out about my Second Life video tutorials. I hope YouTube can improve the above, and I'll be happier.

What are your YouTube woes? Let me know in the comments!

Tagged as: General, The Web