YouTube watch page redesign (description layout) getting mixed reactions, but you can restore old UI using this hack

YouTube, the most popular video platform in the world, is constantly receiving new features or changes.

Many times, YouTube users have complained about the lack of closeness of the YouTube team with the community. This can be especially noticeable when the changes are not well received, but are permanently maintained.

For instance, the removal of the ‘Dislike’ button was not a user request, but rather a unilateral decision by the YouTube team. Although the criticism of that change was massive, the YouTube team kept it.

Now, it seems that the platform is receiving another change that users are not liking. More specifically, many have received a YouTube watch page redesign that affects the description layout positioning.

The YouTube watch page redesign changes the description layout positioning to a kind of ‘compact’ mode. The end result is that all the UI elements are very small and close to each other.

According to users, the new YouTube watch page layout is unintuitive and cumbersome.

I hate the new YouTube layout. I hate it so much. Everything is so unintuitive, small, and cumbersome. I am stunned by how bad UI designers are at their jobs.
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Whoever made this layout NEEDS to be fired right now this is a disgrace. Also, how can i fix this for myself as knowing YouTube they will be fully useless in fixing this
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For those users who are uncomfortable with the YouTube watch page redesign, there are a couple of workarounds that reportedly help mitigate the issue.

The first workaround is to install a user script that returns the position of the YouTube UI elements to the traditional one:

This user script on GreasyFork will change the description back to how it should be. You’ll need to have Tampermonkey installed to use it.

It’s annoying YT is doing these experiments. Some accounts get the compact version, others get the side bar description (that one is a bit more tolerable imo). Anyway, that script will take care of both cases.

What everyone should do is send feedback straight to YT and tell them “We do NOT like the new description layout!”, maybe they will listen and stop this madness.
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The other workaround is to install a browser extension:

I have a fix for the Youtube watch page redesign

It looks like garbage, and I know a bit of CSS, so I quickly threw together a stylesheet that removes some of the awful changes to the video page. Here’s how to get the fix:

Step 1: Download the Stylus extension:

For Firefox Users
For Chrome/Opera/Edge/Brave Users

Step 2: Go to the style page (https://userstyles.world/style/4623/youtube-watch-page-fix) and click install.
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We will update this story as events unfold.

NOTE: You can also check the YouTube bugs/issues tracker.

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