Just the Video
Opening YouTube to watch a music video used to be simple. Now there’s a banner ad, comments from every troll with a keyboard, buttons everywhere telling me to rate and share and subscribe. The whole interface is designed to interrupt me before I even hit play.
Someone used to write about YouTube being too cluttered. The complaint was straightforward: just show the video. Don’t need the engagement metrics, the sense of community, the algorithm watching what I do. Just the song and nothing else.
That’s not a thing anymore. YouTube decided engagement was more important than simple consumption. Every pixel on the screen is optimized to keep me clicking on something other than the video I came for.
I miss that simplicity. Watch something, feel something, leave. No trace. No data about it. No algorithm learning my taste. Just me and the work for five minutes and then it’s over.
Most of the time the artist’s work speaks for itself. The song doesn’t need YouTube to prove it’s worth listening to. But good luck finding anything on YouTube without wading through the noise first.