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

    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.