dave submitted a link to YouTube's blog post about a new related videos feature that's making waves, and not in a good way. The feature adds a related video bar to the bottom of videos, but the thing shows up while the video is playing! There's a ton of negative comments on the blog post of people annoyed by the new feature:

sorry, gotta say i'm not digging this. the mouse rollover is an absolute pain. it stays around far too long and obstructs the video. keep this up and i just might have to learn flash to package these things up myself..

it sucks. you screwed up big time!! change it back please. i don't want to see those distractions when the video is PLAYING!!! who let this idea go anyway? what a dumbass.

This is obtrusive and annoying. Please turn it off by default.

This new "feature" is terrible. If they want to keep it around, with some needed tweaking, it still needs to be OFF by default. It is not obvious or user-friendly for people to turn off. Not to mention that every video that's previously been embedded now has this, since it is the default. There should also be a global preference for the viewer (a user logged in) to turn this off automatically for every YouTube video they view.

Actually, I changed my mind. I love this feature so much, I think Youtube should do this for their main site. Why stop with embedded videos? C'mon, Youtube, I'm a young American. I have no patience! I can't wait until a clip is over to see other relevant videos! I want to hover my mouse over videos on the main site and have access to other videos NOW NOW NOW.

It's not all just negative reviews though. A few people provided some sensible suggestions: Let the user hide the feature, only show the related videos pop-up at the completion of the video, don't make the option default and mess up existing embeds, etc.

I think that it would make sense to simply display it at the end of the video. If someone really gets that impatient, they can jump to the end and get related videos, or click to get to the YouTube page and see the videos there. But popping the thing up while video playing really does seem pretty stupid, and unfortunately since it's the default it's already occurring on videos that have already been posted. Who is going to go through and change every video to add the "rel=0" parameter to disable the feature?

In the case of this site, I might script it so all YouTube videos automatically get the parameter and stop showing this feature. Hopefully YouTube hears the criticism and improves or scraps it.