YouTube homepage showing videos in list view, removes most carousels

Abner Li | Oct 31 2019 - 8:35 am PT

Back in August, YouTube was spotted testing large thumbnails on the web homepage. For many today, the Google video service is showing a design at the other end of the spectrum that lacks thumbnails and showing one item per line.

Instead of carousels on the YouTube web homepage, visitors — both signed in and logged out — are seeing line after line of single videos. The thumbnail is at the left followed by title, uploader, view count, date, and a pretty extensive description.

Each card notes whether this is “Recommended” or from a particular channel. One or two carousels for “Top news” and “Trending” are unaffected after really scrolling.

This is most likely a bug — or widely rolled out A/B test — given the inefficient design that means you can only see three or so videos per screen. Meanwhile, item after item is described as a recommendation with no real variety. This YouTube homepage video list is vaguely reminiscent of the main feed on Android and iOS, but totally wipes out the advantage of having a larger screen on a desktop computer or tablet.

Then again, the full thumbnails let people really find out what a video is about rather than having to rely on title, author, and thumbnails alone.

This YouTube homepage filled with lists of videos looks to be widely rolled out with all desktop devices we checked featuring the look as of posting on Thursday morning.

Update: Team YouTube on Twitter has confirmed that this is “not an intentional change” and will be reverted back to the grid.

If your YouTube homepage is showing videos in a list view (instead of a grid) this is not an intentional change and we're working to fix it!

Thanks for all of your reports, and we'll share another update when the issue is resolved.

— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) October 31, 2019

Update 2: Fixed as of noon PT.

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