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bitching Google? Doh!

YouTube desperate for cash? adverts now “interrupt”, kill slow broadband connections

Noticed something new tonight…

  1. Started watching YouTube video
  2. Hit “Pause” because Google’s Flash code is dismal (crashes frequently, since the update from approx a week ago) and works badly on slow connections; you have to let it pre-load a big chunk
  3. YouTube response: the video stops, and an advert starts instead
  4. …which (so far this week) nearly always crashes Google’s video playback code, so you have to refresh the page, and start all over again

EDIT: incidentally, this is why it makes me so sad when Google Engineers say: “the web is so great! We can remotely nuke every version of Google products, force all users to lose everything and MAKE them have our latest version! They have no choice – it’s perfect!” … because it so often – even with Google – translates to: “we can force them to lose our decent, quality, working code, and force them to move to our buggiest, broken, badly designed, crappy versions – and give them zero power over their own computers!”

Meanwhile, for the first time ever:

Going to any video on YouTube now automatically logs my gmail email account against that youtube video, even though the two things are completely unrelated

WTF? #signs_that_the_google-pocalypse_is_nigh

I guess the big G is seriously hurting for money at the moment… crappy “in your face” advertising, plus some creepy “steal your data, screw the user for all they’ve got” privacy-violation … I’m disappointed; I thought they’d hold out longer than this.

Aside: Black-Hat UX optimization from Google?

This is so deliberate and in-your-face bad UX design – from a world leader in stats-lead-design, no less – that I’m hard pressed to explain it as anything but black-hat (i.e. deliberately designed to fool the user).

e.g. The link to “manage” the YouTube integration … doesn’t work, it just takes you to youtube.com. And the link to complain – “Send Feedback” – is a dead link that doesn’t do anything when clicked.

The “edit [services]” link (which is carefully hidden, to prevent the user from exercising control) doesn’t work either – it redirects to a lo-fi version of the page you came from previously.

It’s almost as if they didn’t want you to fight back! :)

2 replies on “YouTube desperate for cash? adverts now “interrupt”, kill slow broadband connections”

Until the new look, I could surf YouTube without it taking my google account details and applying them.

Now, if I want to use gmail, I have to associate every video I see with an email address – there’s not even the illusion of simple web browsing any more. Google.com has been doing this for a long long time of course.

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