YouTube hides Watch Later shortcut behind the three-dot menu on desktop

YouTube has quietly pulled the Watch Later and Add to Queue buttons from video thumbnails on its desktop site. What used to be a simple hover-and-click is now buried inside the three-dot menu.

The change seems to have happened over the past day or so. Threads on r/youtube are full of people reporting the same problem. Hover over any thumbnail on the home page or subscriptions feed, and those shortcut buttons have vanished.

It is not happening everywhere though. The buttons still appear normally when you are on a specific channel’s video list. The main feeds are the ones affected, and the shift remains even if you have turned off video previews in your settings.

For anyone who queues up videos all day this feels like a real step backward. One regular poster mentioned they cycle through thirty or more clips daily and use Watch Later as a quick staging area across multiple screens. The old way took one click. The new way means hovering, opening a menu, hunting for the right option, and clicking again.

YouTube has stayed completely silent about the tweak. There is no announcement or explanation, so it is hard to tell if this is a permanent redesign or some ongoing experiment.

There might be one potential workaround. But not many have reported any success with it. According to one commenter, a Tampermonkey script posted on GreasyFork restores the Watch Later button on the subscriptions feed. But someone else responded stating that it did not do the trick for them. So your mileage may vary.

Plenty of people are calling this the latest in a string of UI changes that feel like they make intentional viewing harder. The suspicion is that YouTube wants users watching whatever the algorithm pushes rather than building their own playlists. But that may be reading too much into one button.

This, however, isn’t the only problem that YouTube users have been complaining about in the past few days. A bug showing ‘No views’ on search results, a test hiding like counts on mobile, and a strange prompt asking adult users to invite a parent have all surfaced around the same time.

So it seems YouTube has a lot on its plate to deal with. Nevertheless, we’ll update the article if and when we come across any other workarounds to bring back the Watch Later shortcut.

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