If you have been on the YouTube mobile app in the last couple of weeks you may have noticed that they decided to change the layout a bit. It is always refreshing to see an app change its layout, but over the last couple of years, apps like Snapchat and Instagram have gotten a lot of flak for it. Most of the time it appears that these updates are made by individuals who have no background in web design and that seems to be evidently more than ever with YouTube's recent change to the comment section.

if you open the YouTube app right now and click on any random video you would notice that the comments have been moved to the top of the screen rather than you having to scroll all the way down to the bottom of your screen. I am going, to be honest, as an individual who uses YouTube every day for multiple hours a day this change is a little irritating. I never had a problem scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the screen to click on the comments. I do not believe anyone had problems scrolling all the way down to the bottom because the comments are a secondary component to the video. Not only that, but the original comment bar was much larger than the one we have now. If you currently open a comment in that comment toolbar, it almost takes you to an entirely different page for the comments and overall just slows down the flow. Not only that, but if I were to interact with an individual's comment, and after I am done reading it decided to read someone else's comment, I have to back out of the entire comments section reopen it and scroll down to find the next comment.

From what I heard online it appears that this change was made in order to promote and individuals to check out other suggested videos that appear at the bomb of the screen. But all this has done is made me less likely to interact with the overall bottom half of the YouTube screen when I'm watching a video. It has unnecessary steps that overall ruin the experience for me. From what I've heard recently it does not appear YouTube is changing this anytime soon, however, I have heard that a lot of people dislike this change. Hopefully that even though we are in a pandemic right now on top of recent events of protesting and rioting having the nation's attention on other things, I hope the people at Google and YouTube recognize this change that is needed to their app.