I come to you in this Figment Area post with good news. It's not that much, but it's a positive thing that will make the life of your average meme citizen on The Internet demonstrably better.
It's a change that was recently made on YouTube. We all know YouTube is fucking annoying, and they're always doing terrible things to their platform's community. It's been going on for over a decade. In fact the whole tech industry in a corporate league has been a pain in the ass, feeds and content don't work and now about a million people are theorizing that The Internet is "dead". It's no secret that The Internet got shittier in the last 13 years. So did YouTube. But when the website got uglier, I think it distracted people from how an adjacent aspect greatly improved a piece of small but useful functionality. A few months ago, YouTube changed their video player...
Most of you can probably see a few problems. Personally I see rounded corners on the outside of a fucking moving picture that you're supposed to be able to SEE all of and it makes me mad, though I have extensions for that. I actually had to turn some of them off to give you an authentic example to look at. Everybody was super annoyed by the facelift that the button graphics got. Yes, they're ugly. However, many of you, ones who like taking quality screenshots, can benefit with something else from the same time that this new player did last year.
For those of you who don't know YTPs, or "YouTube Poops", they're an old medium-thing of YouTube that does crazy edits, and they would often put text in a split-second that, to read, required intense timing.
Now, think about it. Especially if you've spent more than one year during your life using YouTube. Why would I be showing you this screenshot and claiming that it demonstrates a positive shift in the website? Do you think hey, maybe there's something different about the screenshot this time? Did I pause the video? Is it kind of quality, in spite of the image editing downscale? Do you think I just took a screenshot of the video dozens of times until capturing the exact right timing with one of them?
Dude, why does nobody see it? YouTube has made it so that you can properly screenshot paused videos now. WITHOUT the stupid controls getting in the way.
That screenshot up there has text that's visible on only one video frame. Now this works with any video. For people who use YouTube clips to make memetic images, this is HUGE. Before this new player came out, for all its faults, YouTube video watching was like "Playing video? Yes, that's all fine. ✓ ...Video paused? Fuck you if you want to take a screenshot." And that quote doesn't come from me, it was a post I saw on social media a long time ago, back when this game was still stupid, and a post I won't dare try to track down now. I immediately recognized that post as being right, and was annoyed later that the poster made the description job work so easily when my use of words felt futile before because they would probably form a series of sentences that were too long and fucked it up.
Now it's really easy to get a recorded frame of the video you want. It works in full-screen too. With new proper pausing, combined with the < > buttons on your keyboard to minutely step forward and back one frame, you can just do it. This actually cuts down on streaming services a bit - legal or illegal - because some moments can be easier to find on YouTube. Obviously this is essential now and downloading a YouTube video to get the picture is a stupid and ridiculously inconvenient solution.
YouTube's new player is here. And though you may be right about it being uglier, it comes with a gift. Enjoy this gift while you still can.