Note 2025-04-05: Scrolling Youtube's Homepage Gives Me Anxiety

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I don't really use Youtube in general, but I do have a channel where I upload videos I embed on this website. As a non-Youtube user, I barely interact with it at all, but sometimes I do type youtube.com on my address bar and I see its homepage with 3 columns of large thumbnails for me to scroll through, but every time I look through a few of them I feel something crawling on my skin and I just want to run away from Youtube.

This may me because I'm not really subscribed to anything, so my homepage is mostly a random assortment of videos hand picked by The Algorithm, but I just don't like it.

There's something about these thumbnails that irks me.

At first I thought it was because every video is clickbait, with the sleaziest call to action imaginable, overly dramatic for clicks, urging me to do something that I couldn't care less about, somehow engineered for social media, or trying to sell me something. In other words, all very artificial and fake. But, while that is true for a lot of these, not all videos are like this, and yet it irks me.

For example, there is a thumbnail that says "How I Make My Textures" by some 3D artist. This sounds like the exact type of content I consider to be good content. It's just someone who is an artist, and they're posting about their vocation on the Internet. There couldn't be a better video than this, and yet its thumbnail just irks me at a visceral level for some reason.

I don't even know if the video is good or not, I just don't like this wall of thumbnails. Could it be that just the fact the thumbnails are too large is making me irritated like this? It feels kind of suffocating. I don't mind them that much when they are small in the sidebar.

Written by Noel Santos.

About the Author

I'm a self-taught Brazilian programmer graduated in IT from a FATEC. In a world of increasingly complex and essential computers, I decided to use my technical expertise in hardware, desktop applications, and web technologies to create an informative resource to make PC's easier to understand.

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