Another YouTube Redesign

YouTube redesigned itself again, which means I logged in one day and spent five minutes confused about where everything went. This is what happens every few years—they rearrange the furniture, people get annoyed, and then you get used to it. The old interface had a button in a bad place, and the new interface has the button in a different bad place.

The product chief Neal Mohan announced it in a blog post about how much better everything is now. Whiter design, lighter touch, more spacious. You can control videos with gestures. Finding good content is supposedly improved. And there’s a new logo—the red rectangle now contains the word Tube and keeps the play button intact, which I’m sure felt like a breakthrough to someone.

But here’s the thing: none of this addresses the actual problem. YouTube will never improve because the content is mostly garbage, and the content will never improve because that’s what people want to watch. Teenagers posting reaction videos to reaction videos, kids staging pranks, people vlogging instead of being in school. The algorithm surfaces it all with perfect precision. A whiter interface doesn’t change any of that.

So here’s the new design. I’ll get used to it in a week. In a few years they’ll do this again, and I’ll feel the exact same indifference.