[mmmmmbop]

The author says they don't believe that a lighter version has been shown to reduce engagement.

I, on the other hand, fully believe that.

The recommended lite-youtube-embed project page has a demo of both lite and regular players [0], and the lite version takes noticeably longer to start playing the video.

Every additional millisecond of load time will reduce engagement, and here the difference is more on the order of hundreds of milliseconds or more.

[0] https://paulirish.github.io/lite-youtube-embed/

[skybrian]

I suspect you’re right, but on the other hand, I think it’s useful to think critically about whether starting the video faster is worth it if it makes the web page that it’s embedded in load slower. The “every millisecond counts” argument applies to the web page too. If the user bounces off the web page, they won’t get to the video anyway.

Also, maybe it’s fine if people don’t want to play the video? Personally, I appreciate it when a web page includes a summary, so that I can avoid watching a video. (I prefer not using YouTube for anything other than listening to music or occasionally watching a movie.)

Video can be a useful tool, but consider whose interest it’s in for you to encourage your audience to watch more TV. Is it really serving your users?

Even when I do want to watch a video, it’s selective. One thing I find rather frustrating about YouTube’s redesign (on desktop) is that it devotes so much screen real estate to promoting videos other than the one you’re actually there to watch. I’d prefer fewer distractions.

[roelschroeven]

> One thing I find rather frustrating about YouTube’s redesign (on desktop) is that it devotes so much screen real estate to promoting videos other than the one you’re actually there to watch. I’d prefer fewer distractions.

Theater mode (shortcut 't') is a bit better. But yes, I too would like a mode where the video fills the whole browser window.

[Stratoscope]

> One thing I find rather frustrating about YouTube’s redesign (on desktop) is that it devotes so much screen real estate to promoting videos other than the one you’re actually there to watch. I’d prefer fewer distractions.

The F key is your friend. It puts the video full screen. You don't even have to find the full screen icon at the bottom right of the video, just hit F.

[Talinx]

Why not load the minimal required content for it to look right first (e. g. thumbnail, video controls) and load everything else once the rest of the page has been loaded (e. g. buffer the first few seconds of the video), somewhat similar to hydration?

[nnf]

I would much rather wait a few hundred milliseconds for a video to start during the few times I decide to watch an embedded video than to wait for the full video player to load every single time I visit a page with an embedded video that I'm never going to watch. Similarly, I would much rather have every stoplight I approach be green for me rather than having every light be red but for not very long.

[vasco]

These things are not optimized for what we prefer but for what leads us to behave in a way that maximizes a particular metric, for youtube it's global watch time.

[bcrl]

How will Google collect data about every page load then?

[kylebenzle]

Did you even try the example? Obviously not. It's closer to 4 seconds difference, PLENTY of time for me and a lot of people to click away.

It doesn't help a discussion to ignore the topic at hand, create a straw man just to easily vanquish him. Who are you even talking to here, just yourself?

[tjoff]

>Every additional millisecond of load time will reduce engagement

This is something people believed in the 90s. None of the megacorps give a damn about that as is evident by their behavior. If it doesn't matter for them it doesn't make sense for you to optimize that on their behalf.

It is a non-issue for this usecase.

But please do care about it for the rest of your stack.

[qwery]

In the 90s, there was no "engagement" and "content" just meant the content of the thing you were talking about, but I digress...

> None of the megacorps give a damn about that as is evident by their behavior.

The rumour (and extrapolation) the discussion is based on is that Youtube prefers their bloated player to an unknown alternative because it makes the videos play faster, which drives "engagement". That is, in this case, the "megacorp" literally does care about that.

> it doesn't make sense for you to optimize that on their behalf

This is certainly true, but I don't think that's what the parent comment was suggesting.

[IX-103]

Heh. I'm doing work for a "MegaCorp" right now trying to shave a few milliseconds off of ad render times. We have metrics that show milliseconds do matter. Especially since a few milliseconds on desktop can translate to hundreds of milliseconds on mobile.

[giancarlostoro]

I remember when the old youtube player would just load and buffer the entire video, making replay ability very easy since you didnt need to redownload it. Somehow we regressed.

Google takes everything that works PERFECTLY FINE and turns it into a steaming pile of … I am gonna stop right there.

[Scaevolus]

That was the ancient flash player days, where it would buffer the entire FLV. One time a kid in HS Physics had 20 tabs of anime buffered on his absurd 17" laptop.

With more bandwidth and higher resolution videos, buffering an entire video in RAM is no longer a great option... plus they can make you buy YouTube Premium for offline playback!

[marcosdumay]

It used to be that if your network was bad, you could just play the video once without watching, and then you could play it again and watch it without it locking.

Nowadays, if your network is bad, you can just forget it. Every single media site seem to have migrated into this format at around the same time. It's obviously to stop downloaders, what it evidently didn't, but it will never change back.

[froggit]

> I remember when the old youtube player would just load and buffer the entire video, making replay ability very easy since you didnt need to redownload it. Somehow we regressed.

When did that change? I already considered youtube's UX to be so hostile I'll go for (literal, not metaphorical) years between intentionally watching 2 videos off there. It's also possible i just didn't notice as the data transfer from there is impressively fast via google fiber (likely not coincidental).

> Google takes everything that works PERFECTLY FINE and turns it into a steaming pile of … I am gonna stop right there.

Google's SDLC in 4 steps: 1) "Acquire" software idea (invent/buy/steal/kill/etc). 2) Dev to critical mass (unlimited money cheat). 3) Enshittify (Ads team trounces Dev team because capitalism). 4) Sunset before mob descends with fire and pitchforks.

[qwery]

I'm not seeing such a difference, but it is there. I'd be surprised if it was as high as 100ms. Obviously different computer environments[0] will have an impact here.

I would be much less likely to notice it as "slow" if it didn't show me a spinny-spin. It's advertising that it's slow!

I agree that the click-to-playback lag time would have such an effect, but how significant it would be is unclear. It would take an entity the size of, say, Youtube, to begin to measure this sufficiently.

[0] Firefox, 2(?) year old laptop, i7-1185G7, windows 11, updating Edge (in 32-bit mode) 24/7, haven't rebooted for a few weeks

[divbzero]

Same here: While the difference in speed is noticeable, I would be surprised if it’s much more than 100ms on this specific machine (Safari, 1 year old laptop, Apple M2, macOS Sonoma).

[stemlord]

I thought we were past the era of counting in milliseconds for load time now that half the web insists on using cloudflare security checks

[dangus]

This is a good point. Google doesn’t care about the total page load time of your website, they care about the load time of their video.

[knome]

Does the potential lesser engagement with videos matter in the face of those videos causing a delay in loading the page that displays them? You'd need to check per-video engagement drop against people not bothering to engage with the site in the first place.

[estebank]

This is an example of the tragedy of the commons: the watch time effect is tracked by YouTube, which maximises for it, but the drop off of visitors to the site is something YouTube doesn't "care" about (doesn't track it directly, doesn't optimize for it, etc.).

[cogman10]

> Every additional millisecond of load time will reduce engagement,

I do not believe this. Humans can't tell the difference between 1 and 10ms. I'd love to see the study that actually proves this assertion. I suspect, it's never been done for embedded videos just webpage load time.

But further, we are talking about embedded videos that you have to click to start anyways. Presumably, the person clicking the video has a desire to watch it and thus can stand that the video takes an extra 300ms to load.

[57FkMytWjyFu]

Drummers can discern down to 6ms, this producer states they can barely discern 3ms.

https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/133356/what-is-the...

So from those metrics, it's pretty easy to tell those two divisions apart.

[lelandfe]

It also seems like it takes two clicks to start a video? Is that a bug?

[tantalor]

Why is it slower?

It feels same to me (Pixel phone)

[maxloh]

If I understand it correctly, the library displays a thumbnail and defers loading the YouTube embedded player iframe until you click on it, thus improving responsiveness (page load speed is not affected by its iframe however).

[squigz]

> Every additional millisecond of load time will reduce engagement

Is there any data on this?

[_wire_]

> Every additional millisecond of load time will reduce engagement

LOL!

What's engagement?!

Half the embeds I see don't work because the content is censored or rotted.

For content that plays, the rush for my attention includes an overwhelming dynamic of at least three parties with vested commercial interested in the occupation of my mind cramming unrequested and unwanted advertorial content into my nervous system.

Blocking unrequested content and keeping a healthy distance from tracking adds many seconds of delay to access of requested content, and the requested content typically has a cognitive half-life of a few seconds to minutes.

And the requested content itself typically contains order 10,000x milliseconds of insipid attention mgmt jingles and branding setup.

Then to finish it off. Even the most high-minded productions waste minutes of egress begging for "likes, subscribe, comments," reading off lists of sponsors with silly handles, admonishments for upsells, and cappers to "hit the bell, it's so, so, important", immediately following which the player bot resets to cramming a new unrelated vid into my sockets.

Engagement?! Pfft. It's an incursion.

[dubcanada]

I don't think the point of this is to replace highly critical videos. It's to replace videos like installation instructions which may only be needed by 10% of your users.

Not only that but 250ms is the average reaction time of a human, you don't notice an extra 5 milliseconds.

If a video is required on your website for engagement you probably shouldn't be hosting it on YouTube anyways.

[qwery]

> Not only that but 250ms is the average reaction time of a human, you don't notice an extra 5 milliseconds.

Please stop repeating this sort of thing as a simple fact. Time and latency are difficult things to reason about and simple explanations sound particularly convincing when one lacks an intuitive understanding of the subject.

Perceived latency is not the same thing as "reaction time". What reaction was measured? How? From what stimulus? Your reaction time number does not support your claim that humans can't notice a 5ms difference in lag.

In any case, you are misunderstanding and misrepresenting the comment you replied to.

When you are talking about an organisation like Youtube (size, money, mercenary, malicious, etc.) and discussing metrics like this, individual milliseconds is not an unreasonable unit to use. Consider the volume of the data. Nobody is saying that if something takes 5ms longer to load that no single human being will be capable of waiting for it anymore.

Further, your 250ms is perfectly in the range of the parent comment's order of magnitude of hundreds of milliseconds.

[lotsofpulp]

>Not only that but 250ms is the average reaction time of a human, you don't notice an extra 5 milliseconds.

If this is true, then why are online first person shooters noticeably worse when playing with a 250ms ping connection compared to a 5ms ping? 250ms ping is basically unplayable.

If I recall correctly. I stopped playing video games many years ago, because my college’s internet connection didn’t offer low enough latency to be able to play.