I cannot put into words how much I Fucking Loathe the fact that when you search something on youtube now it will randomly intersperse blocks of “people also watched” and “for you” into the results. That’s not what I searched for, youtube. I typed in a search query because I wanted to see search results, not random unrelated garbage you have placed in my way apparently to either inconvenience me or force me to scroll further for actual results. I despise your wretched little games and every time I see it I can only instantly close the tab as I am overcome with the urge to burn something down.
“I despise your wretched little games” perfectly conveys how I feel about the entire algorithm/attention economy
They also refuse to actually show the parameters you searched for. If you sort by “upload date,” the first few videos might be more recent ones by upload date, but anything past that you’ll find a video that was uploaded five years ago, then five months ago, then three years ago, etc, which—NO! That’s NOT WHAT I ASKED FOR!! PUT THEM IN ORDER!!!
Also sometimes the “people also watched” bullcrap will not only be entirely unrelated, it will also be videos with violent, sometimes outright triggering thumbnails. I’ve gotten some AWFUL unrelated video thumbnails just when searching for video game music videos.
the thing is this dashboard change isnt the end of the world ill get used to it whatever im just fucking dying of embarrassment that its supposed to look like twitter
twitter gets run over by a bus and the next day tumblr comes 2 school wearing her clothes like. oh my god come on
This might be egotistical of me but if anyone wants to give the staff feedback but isn’t sure what to write that’s more productive than just “it looks like twitter and we all hate it,” here’s what I wrote. Feel free to riff on my points o/
The new dashboard layout is feels counter-intuitive to your established users and has some serious UX issues. There’s no reason for a blogging platform to go out of its way to look like fast-paced social media, so the twitter-reminiscent layout just feels cramped and overly busy. The new left-hand menu is especially frustrating, not only does it contribute the most to the visual clutter, it doesn’t feel streamlined to give access to the things people are likely to look for most often–most notably, opening the “activity” panel now covers up the dashboard instead of being offset to the right, and navigating to my own sideblogs now requires clicking and scrolling past information that I don’t need to regularly access from the dashboard.
If you’re not going to reinstate the original layout, or allow users to toggle between them, then at the very least it would be nice to be able to collapse the left-hand menu to only icons, and to have “Blogs” separated out into its own dropdown instead of being hidden inside the “Account” menu. I also think the right-hand column could simply be used more efficiently by partitioning some of the menu content out, since once you scroll past the radar it’s just dead space.
Ultimately, I think it would be valuable to remember that you have an established userbase who specifically chose tumblr because it’s NOT twitter, instagram, facebook, etc. You’re never going to be able to “tweak” tumblr enough to be a 1:1 competitor to those sites, and presumably that isn’t your goal in the first place, so trying to mimic them on a purely aesthetic level isn’t going to draw in the people who are already comfortable on those sites, but it will alienate the people who were trying to avoid them. If my favorite burger place starts trying to compete with the sushi place across the street by putting raw fish on all their burgers, I’m going to stop going there for burgers OR sushi, and I’m not going to recommend it to anyone else either.
