YouTube Thumbnails Have Gotten Ridiculously Large, and People Are Not Happy

Although we know that plenty of people navigate YouTube via devices other than their computers these days, it's worth remembering that YouTube was a website before it was anything else. Recently, users who still try to use YouTube on their desktops have discovered just how difficult that task is.

The main reason for that appears to be a change to YouTube's user interface that has made the thumbnails for individual videos larger. These larger thumbnails are not popular with users. Here's what we know about them.

YouTube has not offered an explanation for its decision to increase the size of YouTube's thumbnails, but the change has bothered many users on desktop who can now only see three videos in every row of their home screen. This makes finding what you're looking for more difficult than ever, and has led many to wonder what YouTube's rationale for increasing the size of the thumbnails could be.

It seems possible that emphasizing the thumbnails more might make more people want to click on them, or even that reducing the number of options makes a user more likely to click on one of the options listed.

We don't know for sure, though, because YouTube has not explained the decision. All we can say for sure is that users seem to be pretty against the bigger thumbnails, whatever YouTube's rationale might be.

"Got this update too, current UI designers really hate normal desktop users lol," one user wrote in response to a thread on the topic on Reddit.

"I used to be able to see 10 videos on one page," another added. "Now I see six thumbnails but can only read the video title of the first three. The quality of the thumbnails is still low, so they're now supersized and pixelated/blurry."

There are ways to jerry rig your machine so that you can see more thumbnails in a given YouTube row, but the solution involves zooming out from the website as a whole. While zooming out will allow you to see more videos, it's not how YouTube is designed to operate, so it's possible that you might run into other issues if you choose to take this step.

While this increase in the size of thumbnails has undeniably bothered many of YouTube's regular users, it seems possible that at least some of them will adjust to the new size in time. We might never know exactly why YouTube made this change, but as is the case with everything new on the internet, the backlash is swift and severe.

Sometimes, people hate the changes these websites make forever. Other times, though, people get used to them over time. Only the passage of time will determine whether this is the kind of change that people will get over, or whether they will always want to see more than three videos in a single row when they open their YouTube home screen.