YouTube was spotted back in August testing large thumbnails on the homepage of the web. For many today, Google’s video service shows a design that lacks thumbnails at the other end of the spectrum and displays one item per line.
Visitors, both signed in and logged out, see line by line of single clips instead of carousels on the YouTube web homepage. Title, uploader, view count, date, and a pretty extensive summary follow the thumbnail on the left.
Each card points out whether this is “recommended” or from a channel in particular. After really scrolling, one or two carousels for “Top News” and “Trending” are not affected.
Because of the inefficient design which means you can only see three or so videos per screen, this is most likely a bug— or widespread A / B check— In the meantime, item after item is defined as a non-real variety recommendation. This YouTube homepage video collection is vaguely reminiscent of Android and iOS main streams, but completely wipes out the benefit of having a larger screen on a desktop computer or tablet.
Then again, the full thumbnails let people find out what a video is about instead of relying on title, author, and thumbnails alone.
This YouTube homepage loaded with clip lists appears to be broadly rolling out with all the mobile devices we’ve reviewed featuring Thursday morning’s presence as uploading.
On Twitter, Team YouTube confirmed that this is “not an intentional change” and will return 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!
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) October 31, 2019
Thanks for all of your reports, and we'll share another update when the issue is resolved.
