5 unfortunate ways YouTube just isn’t the same anymore

• Annotations
• Customizable channel backgrounds
• Video Responses
• Google+ integration
• Dislikes

Of all the web-based video streaming platforms out on the market, none are quite as iconic or dear to my heart as YouTube is. A pioneering force in the early days of the internet content creation and video sharing scene, I’ve witnessed the Google-owned service evolve alongside my own personal growth and development.

It’s hard to believe that the very first YouTube video was published onto the site more than twenty years ago, but that’s the reality of the situation — time most certainly flies by. Over the course of two decades and counting, Google has introduced, implemented, and subsequently deprecated a number of YouTube features; some are remembered fondly, while others are looked back upon with disdain.

Here are five classic YouTube features that I personally have nostalgia for, and that I hope to see make a comeback at some point in the future.

Annotations

Killed by Google on January 15, 2019

Some of my earliest memories of using the internet involve watching and interacting with annotation-infused YouTube videos. Annotations were an early staple of the platform, allowing uploaders to place small blocks of text on top of their published videos. These blocks of text were sometimes used to correct typos or inaccuracies, and other times they included hyperlinks to related videos or to third-party websites and resources.

In some cases, crafty YouTubers even created ‘interactive’ videos using the annotation feature, as was the case with choose-your-own-adventure-style videos. Unfortunately, annotations were also sometimes used to spam the audience or for other more disruptive purposes, too.

Various annotation preservation methods have been put forth over the years, and, technically speaking, the free and open-source Annotations Restored for YouTube web browser extension can resurrect at least some annotations from certain archived videos.

Google first shut down its annotations editor system back in 2017, and then it fully phased out the feature in early 2019. Interestingly, annotations never made it onto mobile, perhaps indicating that the company wasn’t too fond of the feature to begin with (despite it being beloved by many users). Today, YouTube end screens serve as the spiritual successor to annotations, allowing creators to present quick link cards at the end of their uploaded videos.

Customizable channel backgrounds

Killed by Google circa 2012

YouTube has underdone several major design overhauls through the years, each bringing a unique look-and-feel to the platform with modernized UI elements and refreshed bells and whistles. Unfortunately, as YouTube became more mainstream in the 2010s, Google increasingly ‘corporatized’ the platform with a more uniform design language and less of the whimsy that was characteristic of the earlier days of the internet.

Prior to around 2012, individual YouTubers enjoyed more flexibility in how they could present their channels to the public, with customization options that simply don’t exist anymore. Perhaps most notably of all, most YouTube channels of the time were outfitted with custom background wallpapers, making for what was a far more expressive and personalized experience.

Video Responses

Killed by Google on September 12, 2013

Video Responses were an early YouTube feature that allowed uploaders to correspond with one another in the form of video-based replies. Launched as a way to streamline communication within the YouTube platform itself, a video response could be posted in-line while watching a video simply by clicking the ‘post a video response’ button. Once uploaded, responses showed up right under the original video, in the same vein as written comments.

Google sunset Video Responses in 2013, citing a lack of user engagement with the feature. The company continued to display existing uploaded response videos going forward, while encouraging users to simply publish response videos with descriptions and hashtags to indicate that they are intended as a response to another users’ upload.

Google+ integration

Killed by Google on July 27, 2015

In the mid-2010s, Google was all-in on social media, attempting to establish itself in a market then-dominated by Meta (at the time known as Facebook). Google’s premier Facebook competitor, Google+, ultimately failed to capture the attention of a mass audience, despite it shipping with a genuinely innovative ‘Circles’ feature for curating friend groups and for adjusting the visibility of posts.

Prior to throwing up the white flag with Google+, the company attempted to shoehorn the social network into its various services like Search, Gmail, and Photos. In the case of YouTube, Google + integration assumed the form of locking video comments behind an active Google+ account, surfacing YouTube comments onto users’ Google+ feed, and more.

In July 2015, Google officially tore Google+ integration out of Google, citing the need to have “everything in its right place.” The pre-Google+ YouTube experience was re-established, and the social network and video sharing platforms went their separate ways. Ultimately, Google discontinued Google+ for consumers entirely in 2019, after a long and drawn-out decline in usership.

Dislikes

Killed by Google on November 10, 2021

The most recent legacy YouTube feature to be included on this list, the removal of video dislikes was (controversially) made by Google back in late 2021. Technically speaking, dislikes are still present on YouTube, but they’re obfuscated by default unless you’re the publisher of the video in question. The thumbs down button itself still exists, but clicking on it no longer contributes to any public-facing scale of upload popularity.

Thankfully, it’s easy enough to bring back the YouTube like-to-dislike bar using a free and open-source browser extension called Return YouTube Dislike, which offers an (imperfect) dislike estimation based on a “combination of scraped dislike stats and estimates extrapolated from extension user data.”

The like-to-dislike ratio bar remains one of the most iconic elements of the traditional YouTube experience, setting the platform apart from most other social sites that only include affirmative emotes such as “likes,” “hearts,” and “loves.” I can appreciate Google’s desire to reduce cyberbullying and internet dogpiling, but I don’t think it’s worth the sacrifice of losing out on a rating system all together. Personally, I’d be in favor of the company bringing back its 2006 – 2010 era five-star rating system as a sort of middle ground solution.