At this point I should use a different frontend, but given how often YouTube likes to break anything connected to it with its constant changes, I’ve put it off…

However it’s not even the insistence on shorts that’s got me writing this. It’s their tile/square scaling for videos in general. On my display they’re so massive you only see around six to eight videos at default zoom.

Even more annoying is they seem to go back and forth on this, so some days it’s like this then it’s back to something that lets me see a multitude of videos to choose from without constant scrolling. I understand there are way bigger problems with YouTube than this, but it’s bizarre that among all the criticisms I haven’t seen this as much.

The content recommendations vary wildly to often being trash, the push of shorts on desktop is bad, and to top it off they seem to want to make the basic browsing experience awful too. Yet they’ve basically got a near monopoly on user-uploaded videos so I’m stuck venting about them instead of moving to alternatives.

Somebody figure out how to make PeerTube or similar really happen for web’s sake.