Straight from the heart! Only yesterday I rented my first ever item on YT. An English movie, found with an English search query.
"Based on my location" they gave me a French dubbed version of it. No alternative sound track, heck not even subtitles.
I live in Switzerland, we have 4 official languages. I speak one of them: German. Not a word French. The proposed solution: go to apple and ask for your money back. Very poor experience.
Do not even get me going on the "want to use Premium for a month"? I've declined that offer at least 48 times. Did not want it then, do not want it today. Really a pity since there is a lot of cool (not sponsored or monitized) content.
Easier said than done if you're watching YouTube on, say, a Smart TV.
Personally I'm very content with my Google Play Music subscription that also includes YouTube Premium. The music service is no different than Spotify (for me, at least) and I also get ad-free YouTube on all platforms.
I assume you mean to ask Google for your money back?
It's funny because I have a client right now asking for some advice on how to design a localizable website that can guess default language and I'm realizing that no one has really solved this very well.
Or just a menu that lets them choose their language right there on the page somewhere. If you can automatically redirect someone based on their browser language, then you can add a menu with some language names and flag icons next to them too.
Either way, it must like rule 1 of UI design; even if you think you know better than your user does, let them override that choice when you get it wrong.
I've been trying to not assume an Anglo-centric audience, but it seems like this is a popular choice. Almost every major international site, just has English or region-specific English as the fallback.
Some little British or US flag in the corner works well in my euro experience. I learned to look for that pretty quickly spending time in Austria/Germany.
Don't. I mean it.
It's the same things with assuming patterns about names or addresses.
A lot of people work abroad.
Choosing the language yourself _is not a problem that needs 'solving'_
Personally it is a problem that I want to be left unsolved :)
Or rather the solution I would like is rarely used, I have only found it on some Amazon sites, where you can freely choose the country-level localization (via the domain) and the language-level localization (via a menu) independently.
It was an happy day when I was able to browse the German Amazon in English.
No not at all. All I wanted was to watch the movie in its native language (or a language I could understand at least).
Getting my money back from google is impossible, according to google. Since they could not offer a solution to the language issue, they told me 4 times to complain at apple and try to get my money back from them.
Again: that was not my issue at al. The time it took to dialog with google support was 10 times as expensive as the rent for the movie anyway. I wanted my expectations to be met, was told that it's impossible, so I adjusted my exceptions when being offered to buy / rent from YT to zero.
> It's funny because I have a client right now asking for some advice on how to design a localizable website that can guess default language and I'm realizing that no one has really solved this very well.
Really? How about “guessing” that the client’s language preferences are those expressed in the Accept-Language request header?
The UI is bad, but the most frustrating aspect of YouTube is the continuous struggle between creators and the automatic copyright strike system. Nearly every single large YouTuber I've subscribed to has had some experience with a false copyright claim interfering with their platform at one point.
It feels like YouTube actively doesn't want creators to grow a community on their platform.
YouTube is between a rock and an hard place, on one side creators expect it to be a reasonable platform on the other side legacy media will attack it with a viciousness proportional to how much it is not a shitty place for creators.
Until they stop siding against the creators they will never escape from it.
Use invidious instead. It's a frontend to youtube without the bullshit. Not all videos work (only the ones that allow embedding) but most do. I've got my browser to redirect all youtube.com URLs to invidious and all twitter URLs to nitter and it's made an enormous difference. Experiencing software that works for you and not against you is a remarkable feeling.
It's appalling how such a powerful company can keep so many things so bad for so long.