8 ms·
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-
by mmmmmbop 2y ago
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/ https://paulirish.github.io/lite-youtube-embed/
- lelandfe 2y agoIt also seems like it takes two clicks to start a video? Is that a bug?
- tantalor 2y agoWhy is it slower? It feels same to me (Pixel phone)
- maxloh 2y agoIf 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).
- dubcanada 2y agoI 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.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago>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.
- thfuran 2y agoThe difference between 5 ms and 250 ms is a lot more than 5 ms, so there's no contradiction.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoOops, yes I misinterpreted that. I was thinking how can 250ms be the average reaction time when it’s too slow of latency to play a video game, wouldn’t average reaction time have to be lower since people do notice lag at 250ms pings?
- Filligree 2y agoHumans can notice and characterise much smaller intervals, down to somewhere around five milliseconds. We still aren’t capable of reacting faster than about 250. However, if you have latency of 250ms then your total reaction time isn’t 250, it’s 500.
- LocalH 2y agoWith aids, we can perceive and notice even smaller intervals. I play a lot of Fortnite Festival, which is the Rock Band-style mode added near the end of the year. This game, unlike any previous game in the genre, has "perfect" judgements for note hits. The window for a perfect judgement is something around 20 or 30ms. The game also gives you an average offset from "dead on" for each song, measured in milliseconds. Since the perfect judgement is immediate feedback, it enables players to perceive when they are just a few milliseconds off and correct for it. I regularly get average offset results of +/- 3ms or better, including plenty of 0ms average offsets (this is of course averaged across all notes in a song, which I am playing on a plastic guitar on Expert difficulty). I'm nowhere close to the best player either, there's one player who recently got one of the most impressive full combos of the Metallica song One that could ever be done - they hit all notes without mistake, they got 100% perfect judgements, and they got the #1 leaderboard score, meaning that not only did they hit all notes within the 20-30ms "perfect" window, but they also "squeezed" overdrive activations within that window to activate and hit the first note as late as possible, and hit the first note after that overdrive activation would end as early as possible to still get it under the extra 2x score multiplier that overdrive brings. The game genre also overcomes the relatively huge (in the context) human reaction time by providing you gems to read before the strikeline (or "now bar"), so that you can basically internally correct for your reaction time, similar to how people reading sheet music can perform in lockstep rhythm when everyone is skilled. It's amazing what different forms of augmentation can do to help paper over the inherent shortcomings in our senses.
- qwery 2y ago> 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.
- nnf 2y agoI 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 2y agoThese 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.
- Retric 2y agoGlobal watch time isn’t something non Google website owners care about. Remember, Google benefits from making the web worse.
- FredPret 2y agoDo they? They have the biggest browser, an online office suite, a cloud, and a giant ad network. They want to maximize internet use, or they should want to.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dangus 2y agoThis 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 2y agoDoes 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 2y agoThis 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.).
- crabmusket 2y agoIn this scenario, what is the "commons"?
- paulmd 2y agoeveryone else’s engagement except Google’s will be degraded by the increased page load times
- qwery 2y agoI'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 2y agoSame 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).
- skybrian 2y agoI 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.
- Stratoscope 2y ago> 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.
- brookst 2y agoBut I don’t want full screen, I want it to take up the full window that I have allocated to the browser, while still allowing me to multitask in other windows.
- nulbyte 2y agoI love Firefox's picture-in-picture mode for this exact reason. I think there is an extension for Chrome also.
- hombre_fatal 2y ago
- tjoff 2y ago>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 2y agoIn 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.
- froggit 2y ago> In the 90s, there was no "engagement" and "content" just meant the content of the thing you were talking about, but I digress... Sometimes i think back at this idea from the 80s when i need some perspective: "Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other." https://lawsofux.com/doherty-threshold/ https://lawsofux.com/doherty-threshold/
- qwery 2y agoThat website/page is a bit weird. It seems to be based on a TV show[basedon]? What I assume is the actual IBM report[0] might interest you. [0] https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102751398 https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10275139... [basedon] https://daverupert.com/2015/06/doherty-threshold/ https://daverupert.com/2015/06/doherty-threshold/
- IX-103 2y ago
- giancarlostoro 2y agoI 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.
- marcosdumay 2y agoIt 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.
- ric2b 2y agoIs it to stop downloaders? I doubt it since they work just fine, it's probably just a way to reduce resource usage on more constrained platforms like low end mobile phones or smart tvs. There is probably a lot of code sharing among all platforms such that companies don't want to support two different buffering flows.
- chris_pie 2y agoIt also decreases bandwidth and processing server-side, when a user leaves before finishing the video.
- kylebenzle 2y agoWhy not just go with the flow and use/develop a downloader browser extension?
- marcosdumay 2y agoI've used them a few times for dealing with a bad network. But this is a "me" solution, and I'd imagine those sites would like to be accessible for more people. (I'm personally a very bad "customer" for them.) Anyway, it's a mild annoyance for me (I have that "me" solution), and not really my problem to solve.
- _wire_ 2y ago> 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.
- cogman10 2y ago> 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 2y agoDrummers can discern down to 6ms, this producer states they can barely discern 3ms. https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/133356/what-is-the-limit-to-which-humans-can-precisely-time-notes-on-an-instrument-or-p https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/133356/what-is-the... So from those metrics, it's pretty easy to tell those two divisions apart.
- squigz 2y ago> Every additional millisecond of load time will reduce engagement Is there any data on this?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- stemlord 2y agoI thought we were past the era of counting in milliseconds for load time now that half the web insists on using cloudflare security checks