You can insert (and tweak) this into uBlock Origin filters:

    ! YouTube Fix & Customization by Arch v1.8.4 ! (1/11) YouTube 4 Videos Per Row Fix (Home and Channel Pages) / YouTube Fix & Customization

    youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row, #contents.ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;)

    youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 5 !important;)

    youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-posts-per-row: 5 !important;)

(source: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1g5l9mc/comment/ls...)

Magic, thank you. Works, at least for now, until they mess up with the layout again. So much better...

FYI: YouTube provides RSS feed for every channel. The URL is as follows:

    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID

And without downloading with yt-dlp, videos can be watched from youtube-nocookie.com in full-window mode (no distractions) under:

    https://cinemaphile.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID

You can use the wonderful mpv player to view videos directly from a yt-url (yt-dlp backend).

As a subscriber, I get 6 algorithm suggested videos (even split 50/50 on subscribed vs suggested).

Then of course the content is also routinely interrupted by rows that take up more space than a row of video suggestions: * Premium movie suggestions, which also manages to take up half the width with just two sentences: "Discover your next favourite movie. Watch without ads, included with your Premium membership" * Shorts, despite me continually pressing the triple dots and saying "Stop showing me this crap". * Interactive Apps (same, I keep saying "not interested" or whatever variant message it shows me).

I think I'm more irritated that youtube gives me the choice to say "don't show me this" and ignores it, than I would be by not having a choice in the first place.

Let's not forget 'shorts' Yes, you can hide them, but they will be back there the next session.

What gets me the thumbnails are now so big, they're blurry since the images need to be stretched to fit now!

The preview is 530x300px on a 1920x1080 screen vs the image shown being 336x188px

How this passed any sort of QA is beyond me

They clearly need to conserve bandwidth for the most important part of the page - its 12 whole megabytes of Javascript.

I can't speak for the desktop experience lately, but just last weekend I opened the YouTube app on iOS to this peak user experience:

https://files.catbox.moe/vzo65c.JPG

It used to be 12 videos until about a year ago. The worst part is that if you zoom in and out the thumbnails don't change size!

The worst casualty of the current design is the search. You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations. No? Fuck off? Do what I tell you to do!

I developed an extension which lets you fix this to your liking (choose the minimum number of videos per row you want from a dropdown, while also fixing the spacing issues overriding the underlying --ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row CSS variable causes), plus many, many more annoyances and what I felt were missing options and features for YouTube:

https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube

You can also hide all the suggested sections and types of content you don't want, e.g. Mixes, so all you have is an uninterrupted grid of videos.

The YouTube abominations keep piling up: Vertical videos on a desktop, endless ads (thanks to the Chrome manifest change that disables decent adblockers), useless feed.

I highly recommend installing an extension that hides the home feed and sidebar recommendations, which at least makes YT non-distracting again.

I think in (South-East) Asia the people like vertical videos for some reason. Seems how many people record videos on their phones - at least in Thailand.

I quite like the 2x3 grid of videos. No complaints, actually.

The nastiest trick for me is that no matter how times I tell YouTube not to show me shorts on the home page, they always sneak back in.

This https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-remove-youtu... and yt-dlp to download things from only subscriptions that interest me (and watch later offline) changed my life.

I actually didn't notice until recently. Guess I'm also in the test group.

I wonder what's the purpose of this A/B test? Definitely has nothing to do with revenue, right? So what could it be? More engagement? I doubt that few seconds added upon more scrolling won't be much. Retention? Hard to tell.

My guess would be that this is in support of the preview hover feature. For a while now, you can watch an entire video just by hovering over it, complete with captions, scrubbing and audio. This wouldn't be very useful if the thumbnails were still tiny like in the past. Personally, I like this feature and don't often need to look at tons of thumbnails at once, but to each their own.

I wish we could go back; A lot of googles UI/UX is based on the next billion users experiences. I'm unsure how much influence this has on a day to day design choices they make. My experience right now on a 1440p monitor is 5 visible videos, 2 video ads, a ton of tags that I can't turn off for finding videos.

There are a ton of great UI/UX choices they've done over the years too; I just wish we had more options as a users.

I'm not a fan of this trend either. My suspicion is this change is to increase scrolling to pump more ad space; it makes sense from a business standpoint. But this combined with the Algo changes makes it hard to keep coming back looking for new content VS just consuming the people/content I know and enjoy.

Makes sense and yet it doesn't, because the more they degrade my experience, the more I turn away from youtube.

> Unfortunately, using an advanced analytics package I’ve projected that around May 2026 the YouTube homepage will just be one video, and by September there will be no videos at all on the homepage.

Doesn't exactly that already exist with TikTok?

It already exists on YouTube under the Shorts tab, which is just "we have TikTok at home".

Glad I'm not the only one who noticed and hates this change!

Doesnt doing this make youtube impressions go up, since they are showing you the video with less immediate competition around it.

Yes this change is super annoying

What does this mean? Does this mean that there will be no more video UI (only the shorts UI)? Does this mean that only shorts will show up on the homepage? etc. (Also a source would be nice.)

Parent comment needs a /s.

I think OP is being sarcastic, throwing a hint to how popular TikTok (and thus short videos) are over long form content

The most placebo button I've ever seen is that "Don't show Shorts" where it says something like "We'll show you less Shorts" and then they reappear 30 minutes later

I guess every content platform is moving to forcefully shoving slop into your face now

Their mobile site is also terrible. It's like the designers forgot that people watch videos in landscape mode. For example, comments won't load unless you rotate to portrait mode first. I mean, come on.

Haha so it’s not just me with that issue

Mobile web? On the Android app you can definitely put the comments side-by-side with a landscape video.

Look at the screenshots and tell me that's good design.

I think it looks great. I also think a maximized viewport on a 32" monitor is pretty moronic, but I am not writing a blog post about that because I assume the tiny, vocal minority are doing that for some reason that seems valid to them.

And yet you feel the need to comment about it. Some irony there.