Thursday, August 26, 2010

An Open Letter to YouTube - "Charts"

This month, YouTube revamped it's "Most [Blank]" lists with "Charts." It's yet another pointless revamp of something for the sake of seeming busy. And so, an open letter that no one in power will read:

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Dear YouTube,

Why do you insist on "fixing" things that aren't broken and, in fact, making them worse?

- You now have to go through multiple clicks to get to these "charts,"
- They display LESS information at a glance than the previous Most Viewed/Subscribed/etc... format (only 10 videos/channels per page?), forcing people to go through twice as many pages to view the top 100 of any particular category.
- it wastes half the screen with blank space, which is probably part of the ultimate plan, leaving a spot to clutter up the page with Google ads and forcing users to look at twice as many.
- You still only allow access to the Top 100. What if I'm tired of the same 100 channels and want to see, say, the Top 400-500th most subcribed channel, to get a sense of what everyone else is doing?

Your layout changes in general just seem to be for the sake of moving things around, not for any practical reasons. YouTube's design philosophy should be to ADD functionality, not just CHANGE functionality. Give us MORE features, don't bury existing features in an endless hole of drop-down menus.

I realize in the corporate world, various departments have to "show their work," so they can justify their existence, but this is pointless.

At the very least, do the following two things:

1. A view-style option so that people can go back to viewing more than 10 videos per page, and
2. For frak's sake, let us see the channel/video database past the 100th; it's favoritism of the worst kind.

Sincerely,

Me