YouTube Did a Thing

You notice?

YouTube Changed Something

Out of the blue, YouTube changed on me. I'm sure the dedicated folks saw it coming — there's probably a site or a mailing list that tracks this stuff. It's Alphabet, after all. Everything they do gets documented, then the documentation gets documented: every change, fix, improvement, and design tweak on the record somewhere.

It's not often things get shaken up much. Usually it's a slight shift in where the elements sit, or a bit of a style tweak. Not this time.

In someone's eyes this is an "update." I call it a downgrade. A bunch of features that used to be there for everyone are now locked behind the subscription plan(s). Damn it. I've heard plenty of "power users" say it's worth it — pay the small bit, get your videos uninterrupted. And now, apparently, get back the features that made the whole thing that touch better too.

How I Noticed

I logged into my account the other week and started queuing up a playlist — at least they haven't taken that away from us. Not on PC anyway. They have on mobile; guess too many people were building their own music-video feeds. Maybe.

So I've got my videos going, sitting back with them playing in the background while I tinker away at one of the many projects rattling around in my head. A video comes up — great content, great subject matter. Except it's killing me how slow the narrative is flowing. Think Charlie Brown, the teacher at school — whomp whomp. We all have those moments, holding back the big yawn. You want to watch, but the cadence is so slow.

The Speed Hack — Gone

There's a solution. There was a solution. Bottom-right corner, the gear icon — click it and you get a nice set of options. This is the trick I use as often as I can: the speed option, cranking videos up (great for studying or cramming) or slowing them down so you don't miss a thing. A few times I couldn't make out what was being said, slowed it down, and got it. I think I wrote about this before — in my YouTube Speed Hack post, or was it "YouTube Hacks"? A number of posts ago now, I don't quite remember.

At first I thought my browser rendered the page wrong — a block of code that didn't load. I'm searching desperately for the one feature I lean on the most, and there's just a remnant of it left. A tease. A reminder of how good things had been. Click the slider and a popup fires: the speed adjustment feature is now behind a subscription plan.