

What if YouTube made the black empty space white? [PIC] - elzr
http://elzr.com/images/blog/screenshots/white-youtube.jpg

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Raphael
Even better: make the page background black. (I did notice testing of a "turn
off the lights" button, but I no longer see it.)

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lhorie
Making the page black by default would make comments harder to read (imo).
Then again, I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

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stcredzero
Change the CSS so that the comments are light colors on black. The black page
makes the videos look better by tricking your eye into seeing more contrast.

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lhorie
yeah, that's what I meant. Maybe it's just me, but sites with white text on
black background tend to hurt my eyes.

I do agree that black backgrounds are nicer for watching videos though.

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bmelton
I was expecting a commentary on whether or not this was more green, so I was a
little shocked seeing the spartan page that awaited.

I think it LOOKS a lot better. Without the benefit of commentary from the
author, I can't say whether that was his intent or not. From the stills, I can
say that it takes a little away from the video, in that it isn't clearly
framed as the main content on the page, but I'm guessing that motion video
would make that problem go away.

As a complete aside, I almost love the lack of commentary from the author. I
certainly don't recommend it for every post, but it's almost like blog art, in
that the resultant conversation is free-form.

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elzr
"Never tell people what to think about stuff. Tell them about it and they will
surprise you with their ingenuity." (To paraphrase Patton.)

Thanks for the thoughtful comment bmelton. I very deliberately restrained from
commentary to focus all the attention on what I really wanted to say: the
picture.

I tend to overindulge in commentary and analysis, but I believe that even more
than as filters of news, the true strength of reddits is in analysis
filtering.

I also submitted it to Reddit, where it's had some success too.
[http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8yhay/what_if_yo...](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8yhay/what_if_youtube_made_the_black_empty_space_white/)
(and has proved quite controversial.) But the most striking thing is the
different quality and spirit of their comments to those from here.

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tetsuo13
Perhaps use white when viewing the video is playing normally on the site and
go back to black when viewing in full screen mode.

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herval
white makes the video size quite irregular - and a lot more different from TVs
(as far as I know, the background and frames are usually black). That is not
an excuse on itself since it's a different media - but making it similar
reduces the adoption barrier.

And it looks a lot tidier with a cleanly defined black square anyway, imho...

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jcsalterego
Meta-discussion: I feel like we should avoid single images if we want to avoid
becoming yet another news aggregation site.

What's next, {"Top N [Nouns] to [Verb]" | N > 1}? :(

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drawkbox
Do it like Vimeo.

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elzr
Thanks for the headsup, I hadn't realized how elegantly Vimeo solves the
problem.

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cflee
Is the poster trying to make a point _other_ than that it's more aesthetically
pleasing to have it white?

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ams1
does it need to have another point? are design matters unwelcome at HN?

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LargeWu
I think it's more a matter of the author didn't include any commentary at all.

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moe
Seems like we didn't need any commentary to figure out and discuss the obvious
question.

