Update: February 24, 2024

Well, well, well, well, well, well… It’s Saturnday again and here I am. It turns out we were right, and Bitchute finally realized their mistake. It only took them a couple-few months to figure out that they are stupid. Hey Bitchute, yinz could’ve hired me as a consultant for a fraction of the cost. Thanks to Bob in the comments for the upd00t. I haven’t been visiting Bitchute much lately due to life, but it turns out they have recently re-enabled the video titles for users who are not logged in. Anybody want to take a guess at how many hours of circle jerk meetings they wasted on this decision? They looked at their stats and realized they F’d up, and that’s my reader’s digest take. Cheers, Bob. This Modelo is for you.

Addendum (02/29/2024): Welp, I got to browsing Bitchute last night and noticed that Bitchute made another horrible user interface call! They completely changed their video player and in the process they disabled all keyboard functionality for their video player. What this means is that the arrow keys no longer work for seeking backward or forward in the current video you’re watching, the “F” key doesn’t enlarge the video into full screen, and the friggin’ spacebar doesn’t work for pausing the video! How silly of a mistake can you make? What are they doing over there at Bitchute? C’mon, man! Until Bitchute’s next stupid move, I’ll see you then.

Addendum part 2 (03/03/2024): I doubt Bitchute is reading my blog, but they fixed the left and right arrow seeking keyboard shortcuts and the spacebar for pause and play in their video player. They still haven’t fixed the “F” for full screen shortcut. That’s 2 out of 3, so good on them. I haven’t lost total faith in Bitchute just yet.

Addendum part 3 (03/07/2024): Bitchute finally enabled all the video player shortcuts again: “F” for full screen, “M” for mute, “up arrow” for volume up, “down arrow” for volume down, “left arrow” for seek left, “right arrow” for seek right, “spacebar” for play/pause, and even the number keys allow you to seek to specific points in the video like YouTube’s video player. Congratulations, Bitchute! You did it!

Tax slave day final update (04/15/2024): Welp, Bitchute completely messed up their video player keyboard shortcuts… again. I found out that it is the Brave browser that Bitchute hates. When I disable my Brave shields, Bitchute’s video player keyboard shortcuts work again. Well, that’s unacceptable and I’m not going to watch the same ad over and over, so I’ll just have to deal with it. Conclusion, if you block Bitchute’s ads with Brave web browser, video player keyboard shortcut features will stop working. Le sigh… Anyway, I’m done crying about how Bitchute keeps messing up. I’ll go complain about something else on the ever-vorsening Vorld Vide Veb in another post.

Original Post (OP): December 9, 2023

Merry Christmas!

I’m chilling on a Saturday having some lunch, so I’m sitting here browsing through some weird videos on Bitchute.com and I notice some funky stuff suddenly happened with their user interface and experience. This is a disaster.

Big mistakes Bitchute.com has made recently:

Hiding comments from view by default, so now you have to click to view comments.

This is Bitchute’s underhanded censorship tactic because their user base consists largely of critical thinkers. It seems they don’t want new users to see some of the harsh comments people post, which is understandable. Some people, ya know? However, adding more clicks adds more hassle and frustration to the experience. Scrolling is so tiresome, and more clicks are work in the modern era of internet users. OMG, you’re telling me I have to scroll down this long ass page aaaaand click more than once for my prize? Zzzzzz….

What if that user has arthritis and each click really makes a difference? Think about that! You’ve essentially disabled community discussion unless a user commits to working for free and really, really cares about the comments. Bitchute knows exactly what they are doing with this decision. Maybe they chose to turn off the “All” tab due to censorship, or was it to force more new user registrations in a cheap way? Probably both, but I’m a cynic about this topic, so I’m biased. 😂

Subscribed, trending, and all tabs are now also disabled by default unless you create an account and log in!

What a tragedy! I love NOT logging in to websites! Humans naturally DON’T like their every move to be logstalked. Being stalked or tracked means you are prey or a product. That is one of the main reasons I used to love Bitchute, because I could browse all kinds of recently uploaded unique and cool videos that I wouldn’t see anywhere else, but now that is ruined unless I make an account and allow them to track my every click, keystroke and view to continue to build their own profile about me and sell the data to the highest bidder. The “All” videos tab was my favorite thing about Bitchute because I always learned something new. I always found some new rabbit hole to entertain myself with for hours on my spare monitor while I code on my main. This is gone now. It seems censorship has finally made its way to Bitchute due to the website’s growth and certain topics reaching critical mass. I knew this was coming because I’ve witnessed it multiple times on other websites.

Huge Fail: the main “Popular” tab on the home page no longer has visible headings.

This has to be a mistake! Where are the video titles? Hello? Is the B-Team (get it?) working during the holiday season? The Bitchute 1337 A-Team spy crew are all on vacation.

The internet needs to go in reverse mode.

The internet used to be awesome, now it seems dead. Websites need to stop asking users to log in for the simplest of things such as viewing an “All” videos tab. WTF?

I guess everything has to be tracked to a “T” nowadays because some tyrannical DARPA reptilian humanoid robotoid ex-machina hybrid overlord said so, or to maximize profitability, or both? Just provide me with the f*##ing information or entertainment I want. This is one of the reasons I got rid of cable TV many years ago. Why pay for something and still get ads? No, no, no! Stop!

Remember back when we first started making websites? We didn’t ask users to f&*ing log in all the time. We just put the information and links on the page and let people download it until the bandwidth capped out and reset the next month.

Then people would be like, “Hey, this is a really informative page. I have my own website and I’ll link back to this awesome resource without making someone log in to get the link! Or I’ll mirror the content on my own host because they said I could. I love the internet! It’s so cool!”

That’s how the internet used to be when I first started coding my own websites on Angelfire, Geocities, etc.

People will naturally go where there are more freedoms, so I foresee many users abandoning Bitchute if these poor UI/UX decisions continue.

My theory is that Bitchute.com is facing harsh sanctions from their controllers because of the plethora of touchy subjects users on Bitchute discuss and upload videos about. People even upload full movies and TV series on there and the admin can’t seem to keep up yet. When more investors contribute to Bitchute, they will surely begin implementing more advanced algorithms to detect the copyrighted videos. I’m sure there is a hefty cost associated with licensing those types of YouTube-level algorithms from movie and software companies. Video auditing doesn’t seem to be a human-manageable task because of the large amount of uploaded videos every day, that is unless you’re outsourcing to India to moderate content like some social media companies.

The freedoms available on Bitchute will not last long. The same thing happened with YouTube. I can clearly observe the underhanded censorship tactics Bitchute is implementing because I’ve been using their website for a couple years now. Their latest “log in to view all tab” decision will force registration of many new users, but will also discourage people like me from using the website at all. I will NOT be creating a Bitchute.com account and will find a workaround or an alternative website.

We all know websites cost money to run and video sites are some of the most expensive types of websites to operate. Bitchute should just start charging people to use the website and keep the good usability features and freedom of speech as the #1 priority, if money is the problem. I’d probably be more inclined or enticed to subscribe for a good video web hosting service that provides true freedom of speech and open discussion without censorship of any topics, but Bitchute does not offer anything close to this ideal.

My current workaround for Bitchute removing the “All” tab

I’ve simply made a new folder in my bookmarks toolbar called “V” which is short for Videos, obviously. When I find a video that I like, I click on the channel name and then just bookmark the channel video feed into my “V” folder.

Then I can simply use my mouse to center-click once on my “V” folder in my bookmarks toolbar, and that will automatically open every single channel feed in a new tab. This actually works for me and I can deal with it. I’ve just started building this list, but the more interesting videos I find, the larger the list will grow! Ha ha!

Also, the Bitchute search feature still seems to work (for now), so you can search for a particular video and find the channel that uploaded it and then bookmark that channel. I recommend ripping the videos that you like on Bitchute, because there is a fat chance they will be gone within a year! If you don’t know how to download videos from Bitchute, check out my article on that to get up to speed like the 1337-bro that you are. 🤖