For about a year, I’ve gotten notes from readers asking why our YouTube embeds are broken in one very specific way: you can no longer click the title to open the video on YouTube.com or in the YouTube app. This used to work just fine, but now you can’t.

This bothers us, too, and it’s doubly frustrating because everyone assumes that we’ve chosen to disable links, which makes a certain kind of sense — after all, why on earth wouldn’t YouTube want people to click over to its app?

The short answer is money. Somewhat straightforwardly, YouTube has chosen to degrade the user experience of the embedded player publishers like Vox Media use, and the only way to get that link back is by using a slightly different player that pays us less and YouTube more.

  • randombullet@programming.dev
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    4 hours ago

    They want to force you into the YouTube website for analytics and watching habits. Maybe you’ll find a video that catches your fancy and spend longer on there.

    • theherk@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      That doesn’t make sense in this case. The opposite in fact, as pointed out in the text. They removed the link that leads to that scenario. So now they just use a slightly different player to get that behavior.

      • renegadesporkA
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        3 hours ago

        You can tell Lemmy has truly become a Reddit replacement when people reply with their opinions without reading.

      • randombullet@programming.dev
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        4 hours ago

        Different CDN that throttles videos that only allows 480p resolution max. You’ll have to go to the main website to watch anything higher.

        Or they’re prepping for locking higher resolution through a paywall or you have to be logged in to watch 720p or higher.