Here’s why you can’t click the title to go back to YouTube on our videos.

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.

  • @11111one11111English
    1•1 day ago

    Why isn’t there an unfederated rule banning youtube, Twitter and whatever else links? I only ever see youtube and Twitter. Forcing people to break convenient habits is the only way anything will ever change. I know that mentality seeeeeeems totalitarian but thats only because it absolutely is. Lol

    • @[email protected]English
      3•1 day ago

      I think a better strategy is just to prefer linking to content on Peertube whenever it is feasible and just not worry about it to much when Youtube is the only source for actually good content on some topic. There is wayyyyy too much consolidation around Youtube to effectively challenge in the hardline way you are saying, it just isn’t practical.

      Here are some cool Peertube instances.

      https://tilvids.com/ -> an instance dedicated to educational/edutainment videos

      https://lostpod.space/ -> a smaller general purpose peertube instance that I like