Did YouTube break YouTube?

YouTube recently released some new design features.

What YouTubers are Saying About the New YouTube Design

http://news.tubefilter.tv/2011/12/02/new-youtube-design/

There are three key areas where this affects the user experience

1. The home page - this has changed for all users
2. The Channel page - this is currently still opt-in.
3. Overall design - this has changed for all users.



So, how is YouTube broken?
The new channel moves comments on a channel to a "feed" tab. This makes them less visible and hence makes the channels less "social". In addition the new channel design hides the subscriber list for that channel. This again tends to make the new design less "social" especially for series getting off the ground where others might want to interact directly with subscribers.

A few observations about the new home page.

The new home page allows you to pin your top 10 channels at the top of your subscriber list on the left. This is a useful feature, but default it only shows the top 5 until you click on "more". Since the pinned channels are in alphabetical order this means that channels that are at the end of the alphabet are at a disadvantage. You can of course get around this by only pinning 5 channels, but it would be more elegant if YouTube allowed us to show all 10 by default or order our top 10 so that it did not depend on alphabetical order.

If you have found other ways the new YouTube has affected you, post a comment below and let us know.