It seems the feature has been restored. As of the November 7th update:
> TeamYouTube has confirmed that they are working to bring the sorting options back to the platform. Furthermore, they said that the options were removed due to some issues.
It's not clear if they wanted to remove it and reverted due to backlash, or if there were genuine technical issues/limitations that needed to be addressed.
Why do you think it "has been restored"? In the quote it says " they are working ". I can confirm Youtube web site viewed on Firefox still lacks the option.
This is amazing, I wanna use it someday. Were the issues technical? Maybe. Were the issues problematic decision makers who've been overridden? Also maybe.
> I can't even imagine what can be a technical limitation to break sorting on something what worked for more than a decade.
The default sort (which is reverse chronological) is more likely cached than chronological order. It could be that it's not really about if it could be done but assuming this is really a good-faith problem it could be that the chip crunch made optimising performance a priority and removing effectively-uncacheble (or alternatively space-consuming) chronological order did remove some pressure.
The fun thing is, it’s probably because they stuff everything into a big giant database and that just doesn’t play well with the fact that any user ever accesses a millionth of a millionth of a percent of those database rows.
I think with the scale requirements of YouTube, we can not assume that the search is powered by one single DB or any traditional, relational DB at all.
Some things that are easy with one DB, get surprisingly hard when you scale up. Lets give them the benefit of the doubt regarding technical issues here.
I don't give them the benefit of the doubt, because they should have had proper testing in place before anything like this reached production. This is either intentional or grossly negligent.
> It's not clear if they wanted to remove it and reverted due to backlash, or if there were genuine technical issues/limitations that needed to be addressed.
I dunno seems clear as day to me... Like what are the odds the company that processes the largest amount of data in the world on a daily basis can't sort some results by date.
Well I for one, like that it's now possible to sort channel videos at all on mobile. The dropdown was completely missing before in Vanced, but the pill buttons show up now.
I think it is simply bad for business to have this sort option, thats why they tried to remove it. When users wants to sort video order backwards, they have to do additional queries to db (costs money) instead of showing cached page, find and load video from disk (costs money) instead of showing cached from memory, deliver this video to user from central servers (costs money) instead of delivering it from cache server located on the last mile. So, removing backward sorting means less money spent on servers, simplier code and faster further development (less money spent on developers). And later they will say something like "it was used by 0,001% of our users, nobody will miss it". Just business.
It's not about reducing the costs you mention it's about showing only what they want to show the users, because those videos somehow make more money for them.
This theory, that a company dedicated to serving videos struggles technically to serve videos in a cost-effective way, seems unlikely.
The default position should be that if the video is on YouTube, they're happy to serve it. If YouTube doesn't want to serve a video it makes more sense to simply not host it. And indeed they routinely get rid of videos that they think will lose them money.
Also I have noticed several times that if they did not get rid of the whole video, they get rid of the hi quality versions of it, eventually that leads to video being 360p only, when originally it was 1080p.
do you really think YouTube, which carries 5-10% of all internet bandwidth, removed a sort feature on its METADATA because it will cost them too much? Lol.
I think we all feel this could be the cause. Someone decided they can optimize because less than 5% used this sort order. So they knew they would be uproar, but a small, 5%-ish uproar. And now once someone uploads a video they have to rebuild only two caches (recent and popular), not three.
You think they've got the big data chops to serve me a 300 megabyte video on ad revenue alone, but they're struggling with the cost of sorting a list of a few hundred URLs?
What kind of company would give preference to what's easier to implement technically over what users actually want? I can only think of two kinds: those that will quickly disappear and then - unfortunately so - those that are so big that they can give a flying f about users without really feeling any impact.
It could be a nice side effect, but it's probably not the primary reason. Zoomers and gen alpha users are fickle consumers, and engagement drops when they are presented with "old" content.
Google has the competence to build a good product, they just don't have the leadership to do it while maximizing data collection and ads.
Do they not actually want people to use the service? You find a channel you really like, then you watch their content from first to last. What kind of lunatic watches someone's uploads out of chronological order? How can you keep track of what you have and haven't seen if you do that? Youtube may as well remove subscriptions and replace the home page with a big-ass "Random" button.
You know what makes more database queries than sorting by date? Making me manually scroll through thousands of videos to the bottom and loading thumbnails for all of them. I don't care how restrictive they make the API, they can't stop me from writing a "start from oldest" extension that gives you a button to just automatically scroll to the bottom.
What kind of goddamn sociopath OK's a change like this?
Same. I don't know why nobody at youtube understands that, yes, I might want to watch a funny 53-second video again but I probably don't want to spend an hour re-watching part nine of a Let's Play from 2015.
It’s probably a unsolveable computer science problem to add a filter that says “how many times does this user rewatch content, or dismiss recommended content she has already seen” and then not serving stale content.
Personally, unless I’m quering something that’s fairly narrow, for recommendations you push to me please never show me anything older than 36 months. No, I don’t want an 8 year old video on this topic.
Yeah, but normal people watch/listen the same music video 300 times, but then see the comedy video or documentary video only once.
And for age, it is also fairly normal to listen to music older then 36 months. And to watch educational videos older then that. Or crafting videos older then that. Or tutorial videos older then that. Most of time, I am cool with old videos.
For many of the topics i'm interested in videos made in the last 36 months are not better (if anything they are worse).
If i'm looking up correct excercise form, how to cook a certain dish or perform a repair video's made 10 years ago are as good as video's made yesterday.
5 years, likely. 10 years is before 720p became common. Videos that came after 480p are actually better for things like repair videos. Also the speech sound quality is way better these days.
YouTube is helping me build my house step by step.
For framing, the first thing everyone recommends is “Framing Walls with Larry Haun” (1992). You even get the VHS tracking blips now and then from the video capture.
To be fair it’s also good advice to then supplement Larry Haun’s videos with modern framing techniques but his videos are the first one should watch.
Might just be a single example but it’s the first counterpoint that popped in my head.
They are. People that started with the genuine intent of sharing their knowledge gradually turned into professional youtubers, and now it's all about hacking the algorithm, diluting content in multiple videos, selling you to their sponsors. Older videos are almost always better.
Solution to the unsolvable problem: have one swim lane of "watch again", another swim lane of "watch similar", then only subs+discovery.
These are easy and solved already. Apply exponential weighted average for length since watch for sorting, with two peaks of a month ago and a year ago.
I fear the YT folks have a hot mess and it will be twitterized at some point (the new tech lobotomized).
Because the most watched youtube videos are music videos, and people listen to the same music regularly.
Also because some videos have been popular enough that people wanted to show that to their friends, and regular users don't know how to use the history, so they want to find it in their home page again.
I assume the algo just doesn't know the difference between videos that are rewatchable and ones that are not, and does that on some statistical metrics that don't make sense in a lot of contexts.
When you think something is stupid, the answer is usually there is something we don't know about it.
An algo that does not know what the user wants but tries to do something anyway, based on "some [..] metrics that don’t make sense [..]" is by definition "stupid".
I'm sure that many of old videos has been removed. And the more I use the Internets the more I consider to save as much of stuff as possible (webpages, videos, everything) maybe on another machine with a really giant disk.
There's a filter for that on the home screen! It's called "new to me", and it shows up sometimes! Because why would you want something useful like that all the time? Nah much better to just hide it or not show it at all like 60% of the time.
> It's called "new to me", and it shows up sometimes!
You can always chose the "new to me" saussage, it is always last in the line of sausages with some tags inside of them. The problem is that "new to me" stops showing really new content if you gonna use it heavily. Sometimes it gives video with that red line on the bottom of preview which means I watches this recently or videos from some channels I am subscribed to. So, this is option is a garbage as most of other YT options.
Please start an open source project for such an extension and count me in.
I'm so aggravated by YT's idiotic decision because I agree 100% with the usage pattern you describe. Over the years, that is exactly what I've done many, many times.
Sure, I also watch random videos here and there from channels I never ever come back to. But if I ever want to look at the entirety of someone's uploaded videos and sort them by anything at all, it's always by "oldest first". The remaining two options are useful, too, for sure. But I've never actively sorted anything by popularity manually. Always "oldest first".
After installing the addon and visiting just https://youtube.com I get redirected to https://inv.vern.cc/ that just displays "Our main server's ISP is having issues, even router resets haven't fixed it. We apologize for this long downtime". Visiting https://twitter.com I get redirected to https://twt.funami.tech/ which displays "502 Bad Gateway"
Not a great experience to be honest. Still, love the idea, but execution is poor at best.
Don't even bother, you only have to look at how often youtube-dl has to change to keep up with Google's infinite breaking UI changes. There's so many other open source projects that would benefit from your efforts that don't feed the Google machine.
You could likely build something on top of youtube-dl to output a chronological list of videos. Instead of downloading, dump metadata for each video and then sort locally.
> That said, being able to sort comments chronologically here on HN would be nice too, so people in glass houses…
This is basically the main reason I wrote https://ditzes.com, be able to read HN while offline + chronological order of the comments without putting any importance on points (edit: and well, to have a dark UI to be able to read after the sun goes down too). Here is this comment thread in ditzes: https://ditzes.com/item/33558531
I mainly use it via a browser bookmark that redirects me from HN to Ditzes. If I find a comment I like, click the date with middle-mouse to open the comment in proper HN to comment.
Here's the bookmark in case people wanna use it:
javascript:window.location.href = 'https://ditzes.com/item/' + (new URLSearchParams(window.location.search)).get('id');
sometimes for a giant database you’ll sort by most popular, but, for most, you’d want the most recent. It’s super confusing what YouTube is doing especially after the last change that outright broke the recommendation algorithm.
> What kind of lunatic watches someone's uploads out of chronological order?
For some type of channels such as latest technology reviews or news commentary, the sort by "Oldest" isn't as critical because the older vids have less and less value as time goes by. The default of showing the most recent newest vids works ok for that.
E.g. sorting MKBHD tech channel[1] by Oldest would have brought up the old 2008 videos when he was a teenager reviewing products that are long obsolete. Good for nostalgia but not relevant to getting the latest info on Pixel 7 and Android 13 in 2022. With sort in chronological order, you'd have to hit the PgDn key a hundred times before you scroll down to the 2022 videos.
That said, I personally used sort by Oldest all the time. E.g. I find a random house construction video so sort the channel vids by Oldest to start at the beginning where they cleared the land and poured the foundation.
>I don't care how restrictive they make the API, they can't stop me from writing a "start from oldest" extension that gives you a button to just automatically scroll to the bottom.
Last time I tried this, Youtube had unstated rate limits for pulling lots of metadata like that. I did some experiments on music channels that had thousands of vids and both the API and manual UI (automate press PgDn key repeatedly) had invisible rate limiting where you couldn't reach the oldest vids.
youtube wants you to watch what they recommend. Removing the capability to browse, curate and choose your own watch lists is just a step in that direction.
> Youtube may as well remove subscriptions and replace the home page with a big-ass "Random" button.
> You know what makes more database queries than sorting by date? Making me manually scroll through thousands of videos to the bottom and loading thumbnails for all of them. I don't care how restrictive they make the API, they can't stop me from writing a "start from oldest" extension that gives you a button to just automatically scroll to the bottom.
Wrong. There was an article on HN that no internet service allows you to open a 10000th page of any search. So, even if you have a really powerful device which is able to handle this amount of pages which are loading all at once (if you are travelling in endless mode as there is in Youtube), I am absolutely sure that at least for some creators' feed you just can not scroll it all without getting a 5xx error.
> You know what makes more database queries than sorting by date?
You seem to be forgetting the scale of these "databases". Lots of data these huge companies hoard is stored in slower, cheaper, storage. They know roughly what data should be kept cold and warm. And in general old videos can be left in cold storage, because people rarely watch them.
While Youtube wants to control what you watch, I'm pretty sure this is a cost-cutting measure.
> What kind of lunatic watches someone's uploads out of chronological order?
Welcome to the TikTok algorithmic feed. Viewing videos in order and with context is so passe.
That said, I rarely do this as well. If I've found somebody's content I like, I'll tend to then go see what playlists they've made for similar topics. Some channels will have over 500 videos dating back a decade at this point - I'm not going to watch that in order, but I'll at least browse by playlist.
Not all users bother to make comprehensive playlists though. Sort by oldest is convenient when playlists are incomplete or missing altogether. I really don't think it's a serious burden on YT's infrastructure, since it just involves sorting some metadata by reverse order.
YouTube wants in on this directly too with Shorts. It only allows you to dismiss the shorts widget on your logged in home page for a month at a time despite other boxes like channels or topics being possible to dismiss permanently
I would go so far as to flip it: What kind of lunatic watches someone's earliest content? A lot of these people have been doing this for 10 years at this point. They've learned a lot. Their style has matured. Their production values increased. Why would you go back and watch all the content when it was one dude with a handicam and a tripod when there's years of high quality (not to mention more relevant) content at the top of the Newest list?
Absolutely. Among other things, creators remove their content when it stops being fashionable. Half of my personal video archive isn't online anymore because the creator decided it was too edgy.
> How can you keep track of what you have and haven't seen
YT does show you any progress you have made watching a video when viewing a channels video list
> Youtube may as well remove subscriptions and replace the home page with a big-ass "Random" button.
They are trying too. A number of YT’ers with partner managers or who have had conversations with staff, have said YT wished they could get rid of subscriptions entirely and rely on the algorithm instead. Tbf on this point, I hardly ever use the subscription page myself and either use the recommendation page or direct link/notifications, so I can see their point on not really caring about subscriptions, but you know we as humans do like to see numbers increase.
This would make me immediately drop YouTube for good. I only view videos via subscriptions and organic recommendations. No subscriptions basically means no YouTube for me.
I don't believe subscriptions will be going away anytime soon. Creators still like the sub count even though it is pretty meaningless these days and YT themselves seem to have a love/hate relationship with it, while on one hand they want to do away with subscriptions, but on the other hand they still use the metric for things like being able to monetize content, access to features/services and they add things to the creator dashboard telling creators the percentage of viewer who are subed/unsubed and recently disabled to ability to hide your sub count from the public.
And as you said there are viewers who exclusive use the subscriptions page, I used to be the same and had my default youtube "landing page" as the subs page. But YT changed something and broke that and before I could be bothered to fix it I found that I was enjoying atleast some of the content the algo was recommending to me so started using it more and more, and before I knew it I stopped using the subscriptions page entirely.
So while they wish they could turn subscriptions off, I think they know it would cause too much backlash and would still have to still have to add a way for viewers to follow creators they want but make it more meaningful. I'm currently subscribed to over 500 channels but a lot of those channels could be removed from my list because it contains channels I no longer watch (be it because my tastes changed, the channels content changed, the channels are dead/retired) but I cba to go though the list and unsub. At which point a viewers sub list is just adding noise and delieverying (atleast some) content the viewer doesn't actually want to watch.
Does Google guarantee that they don't collect the data anyway? I always understood that as "don't show me my history" rather than "don't collect my history".
Fancy downloading your YouTube data checkout to verify?
But my point is also that in case of compromise of the (2FA with physical key, but still, Google can mess stuff up) account nobody can see what I watched.
Same reason supermarkets place bread and milk far from the entrance, so you have to fuddle your way through the rest of their offerings before you get what you want. YouTube would have figured out if they make it really difficult to find good content, you'll get distracted looking at something else and then have to come back for whatever you wanted later anyway.
Hot tip: I use regular google search like so to search youtube 'topic site:youtube.com'. It avoids all the clutter the YouTube search results provide.
Afterthought: YouTube is getting so bad, I wonder if there's any third-party (paid or free) front end?
So if most people supposedly don't use the feature it probably doesn't cost that much to have it. Also now people who actually want to view videos starting from oldest will use a magnitude or two more resources just by needlessly scrolling for 5 minutes.
Seems to me that it's more likely that google just has too many employees who just do idiotic/random changes to show that they are actually doing "actual" work...
Google: "we have determined that drivers only use their brakes 5% of the time versus the accelerator 60% of the time and therefore have decided to remove brakes from the car"
I watch a lot of tutorial channels and almost the first thing I (and I assumed everyone else!) do is sort by oldest first to find the start point... :-(
You can only write that extension if the original publication date is made available. The next step is to remove that bit of information from any APIs and from display on the page.
I use subscriptions for everything I watch but I also track each channel with RSS. One of the things I have noticed is that even the subscriptions page is being manipulated and sometimes it doesn't contain all the videos. Its very common to then find the video that should have appeared on subscriptions under the home page as a recommendation some hours after it already appeared on the RSS stream. So while subscriptions is the best way on youtube its only about 95% accurate. The only way that I know that always works is RSS.
The funniest thing to me is YouTube's autoplay. I usually watch videos split into multiple parts (Lecture Part 1, Lecture Part 2, etc), but YouTube's algo is too smart to figure out that after part 1 I would probably like to watch part 2 and not some other random video. Sometimes it's so smart that it autplays part 4 after part 1, then part 5, and then 2. It's truly an incredible algorithm.
See my above comment above yours as I think it is linked: youtube made some clear changes to "break" the ability to follow an artist's music easily without subscribing to their paying music thingy, and because they never succeeded at properly separating music and video, it affects videos too.
It used to always properly recommend the next part of a video like the case you mention, and even recommend previous part if you arrived on part 2 without seeing part 1 etc ...
All of this is BS though. YouTube already has an easy way of annoying users who seem like they're leeching from their music service: just throw lots of unskippable ads (which sometimes happens anyway for other random reasons), or do any number of similar things. Breaking a major feature of the site is an absolute non-starter.
Well, that feature is broken (not to mention the feature discussed in the title: it was outright removed): I regularly, when watching a series of videos all titled "Series Name: Part X", get Parts 7, 8, 9, 2 and 14 as recommendations in the sidebar after watching Part 6. Amusingly, even if all those videos are actually part of an existing and properly sorted playlist, it still happens if I don't play it as a part of that playlist (that is, if I remove "&list=ZZZ&index=5" from the URL)! What a brilliant technology.
Strange. I rememberer this problem a long time ago but then it was fixed for the longest time. It seems that video series would almost always recommend the next video in order. Of course it wasn't perfect, sometimes it just can't link the videos together, but it was close enough.
If this is a common problem you are seeing it must have regressed.
It happens all the time for me, and the videos are clearly titled as "XX part 1", "XX part 2", etc. I'd say YouTube gets the order wrong more than 50% of the time.
This used to work just fine. If you were watching Part 3, the suggested videos would be "part 4, part 2, part 5, part 1, part 6" as their titles diverged in similarity. They broke it on purpose.
Or it broke because a lot of people got distracted, clicked on another shiny video and thereby fed the algo data that people don't actually want to watch the next episode?
Youtube algo gains sentience and assumes humans are worthless scum with zero attention span, Youtube algo becomes Skynet, it destroys the world but plays cat videos to distract us, and it works
But after a while it runs out of effective Cat videos and has to start manually generating them. At first they're better than the real ones. But then true to style, it starts to drift as the incomprehensible goals of the god-mind slowly change. The videos look less and less like cats, more and more like amalgamations of strange cat like features, somehow playing out in _more_ humorous and engaging and strangely calming and sedating ways then before. Few people notice. Eventually everyone who still watches is transformed into brainless sacs, watching static mutate and vomit formless half concepts slow enough to not trigger any defense reflexes, let alone original thought.
Consider what the Youtube algo considers the desperately overloaded words "destroy", "murder", or "fail" to mean. Those who didn't fall prey to the cat videos, grittily forming some sort of Resistance, would have an even chance of being ruthlessly hunted by Terminators, tastelessly pranked, or excoriated by talking-head rhetoric without being given a chance to get a word in edgewise.
I'm watching a video about Z and the algorithm thinks that people who watched Z will also like X. Meanwhile there are ad bids for people who like Z, and also for people who like both Z and X. The Z+X auction outbids the Z-only buyers. If I click the next Z video instead of X, Google only gets paid the lower bid.
There is not just that. Another big reason is that youtube, despite all theirs tries, have never been able to separate their music part for which they want to sell subscription, from their video part.
And some of the things they need to do to push subscription on their music premium thingy are contrary to the things they need to keep quality on the video side of things.
For exemple, easily playing the video from an artist channel (or the many channels publishing music in a genre or publishers etc ... like Suicidesheep, NCS, Proximity, ...) is not something they want.
So what did they do ? They removed the "play all" from the "uploads" page of a channel. This button played what was essentially a playlist of all the uploads of the channel, also allowing you all the playlist tool (repeat, shuffle, ...). Because you're supposed to do that through a youtube music (or red, or whatever the name is now) subscription, they gutted it, and now there is no way to easily watch all the videos of a channel unless the channel owner curates it himself into a playlist.
(usually, music publisher channels have a playlist by genre/subgenre, or artists one by album etc..., and had the automatic "uploads" playlist for all of it, so they did not have a specific playlist for everything)
As a side effect, you can't do that on video channel either anymore, oupsie !
(the reason I believe it was done on purpose for music is because there is no gain to change that for video channel, quite the contrary: if you use that feature on a video channel not only are they retaining you, but they should also be able to target you much more accurately with their ads, eg if I'm watching all of "mandalore gaming" videos then video games ads are clearly for me)
Amazon Prime does music very well. You click on a song, and another song of the same artist play, and you get a message saying you have to buy a supplementary fee to play what you want (I already pay for prime).
I’m so glad that I’m not the only one who thinks this is serious heavy duty dumb.
Last night I saw an ad that seemed to imply Amazon Music would now be included with Prime. I thought, hmm, let me check if it still does the thing where you can’t play what you tap. Yup. Still does it. Tap a song and some other random song plays.
Somewhere deep in the bowels of Amazon there is an exec who thinks this is a brilliant way to drive conversion. Probably has some data that somehow supports this notion. Amazing.
That's what powvans is referring to with "brilliant way to drive conversion". Measure "engagement" by "how many songs the user starts playing" and combine that with "clicking on a song the first time actually plays a different song" and you'll get more clicks to start songs as the user tries to correct their problems. This isn't a good thing, the metric has been over-optimized, but if you're paid by metrics this is what happens.
Likely there is a programmer or two well aware of the issue and the presumably 1-10 line fix, but has either tried it and been told to revert it, or simply knows they can't push it, because they know what it would do to the metrics.
Probably a good number of the complaints people are leveling here against Amazon services source from that. For instance, mixing paid options into the list as quickly as possible when you explicitly asked for free stuff can't hardly help but "convert better" than letting the user truly browse through the free stuff; if so much as one person ever gives in and buys something that way, or even browses, leaves, comes back to the same screen later and forgot they were supposedly looking at free stuff and buys something, boom, better conversion rate than pure free. Doesn't take much to move the needle off of "zero". But it's still not what we asked for. (& yes, I know that it's non-free stuff in the recommendations when viewing a free option, not unfree stuff mixed right into free carousel, but I think it's fair to say customers are definitely interested in a "free only right now please" view and a good percentage of them probably think that's what they're getting when they're in the "free" tabs.)
The whole galaxy of Prime services surrounding package delivery would never survive on its own -- or, another way to see it is that they don't have the market pressure necessary to improve/get fixed due to how they are tied to the package delivery.
Prime music for the reason you give, Prime video who keeps finding way to suggest you movies you need to pay extra for (you go specifically to "free/included", you click a couple times, and you're being recommended extra costs things ...), Amazon Drive keeps your file "forever" but then no sorry we're deleting them we stop this but then wait no we're making Amazon Photos now your photos will be kept everything else deleted but wait no only some photos will be transfered ...
The people managing those services are coasting on other people's success.
Agreed. I see the other 'prime' labeled services as a negative value frankly, because I know that the entire intent is to make the process frustrating enough to upsell me to their amazon branded services which are universally inferior to the other options I would have picked in the absence of the 'free' 'prime' offering. I've finally converted enough of my online shopping to target and Walmart that this is the year I'm doing away with amazon prime for good.
>have never been able to separate their music part
They could and they should - and is simple: just remove all music from www.youtube.com. This is what they should have done when then created music.youtube.com.
The reason they don't, I believe, is because they may lose their leader position if they do that. The reason the artists are there, and don't bite to any of the "let's push you into a separate page", is because they want the eyeballs. Youtube "normal" pages have the eyeballs.
When you see how youtube "live gaming" section is failing despite being so much technically superior to the competition on the video side, I don't think the artists are wrong on that one.
But yes, I agree that they absolutely should, and it would make the experience so much better ... Another exemple is how your "my subscription" page, meant for checking all the channels you're subscribed at once to not miss any content that you're interested in, becomes utterly useless once you sub to a couple decently active music channels, which tends to publish much much more frequently than regular video channels.
If by "eyeballs" you mean discovery and recommendations, I also don't see how staying on the main site helps artists. It has a crappy music experience for the consumer. And I, the consumer, generally know what I want to listen to and will search for it.
I'm not sure how to answer your question as it seems to me it makes no sense in the context of the conversation we're having.
Issue: music video are mixed with normal video on the high traffic site
Solution: separate them on a separate site (which is essentially what your subdomain idea is)
Issue with the solution: music video channels don't want that, because they want to be on the high traffic site, and they've already seen with live streaming that no people don't go out of their way to find them back once they're removed from the high traffic parts
So, "which pages", well the high traffic youtube page, which they wouldn't be on if they're relegated to music.youtube.com only.
Ah man, i hate this. It also used to (may still) randomly end the loop in the playlist and kick you to some suggested video instead. Absolutely awful UX
Oh yes I didn't get into details but it's still there. More specifically, if you know or reconstruct the urls to it, it's there and working including videos added or channels created after the removal (probably because they don't want all those devides like the TV you mentionned not working anymore).
They just removed the button on the interface, which shows it wasn't a technical need or anything like that, it was on purpose to stop people being able to enjoy that feature.
Did they keep this feature for people who do in fact subscribe to their music premium thingy? That would be the logical approach to add another reason to subscribe. But I guess they provide an alternative way to do that for music and didn't think about the video use case. Sloppy...
(Disclosure/clarification for those who know from other comments that I once worked at Google: I never worked for them in any YouTube-related role, have no inside information on this, and haven't worked at Google at all for over 7 years now. Definitely not speaking for them here.)
Ah. That doesn't solve it for non-music videos, I assume? Anyway, from some of the many updates in the original article, it seems they want to bring it back after fixing some technical issues, and presumably for prioritization reasons, are encouraging people who care about this to submit feedback. Not as bad as we feared.
Couldn't agree with you more but I think the sociopath in this case is product owner forced to do something when do nothing is the right answer, either that or its some dark pattern where they remove the functionality to drive everyone to use it again when they restore it.
I actually usually want to watch the most recent videos from a new channel I've found. That is another use case for sorting by newest though. But I honestly already had a lot of trouble figuring out how to do this! I think I'm bad at using websites somehow.
When I want to watch a new show I go to a blog or website that aligns with my taste and pick from there. When I need a new shampoo or a set of tires I try to find passionate, obscure, unmonetized content as a starter, then cross reference it with similar content.
I do 95% of my shopping online and I can't remember the last time I saw an add that showed something that piqued my interest and that I wasn't already aware of. I spend most of my time online and have never clicked an ad.
Advertisers need a certain audience profile. They need people who are easily influenced, who make emotional or rushed decision, who are not good at assessing the value of a product. Of course they can also sell to educated users, but that's not where almost all of the money is.
In the digital world where most of the profit comes from advertisement, it's irremediable that product design will align with those characteristics, unfortunately :/
The target market for YouTube isn't people looking for information or good content. It's people going into a trance-like state infinitely scrolling and being guided by their nose by the YouTube algorithm, inflating YouTube ad view numbers and making them money.
Business idea: make an app to browse Youtube channels with efficient filtering and sorting, like "most popular video in the last 3 months", I believe it's impossible on Youtube right now.
I used to use NewPipe when I had an Android. It was great for "subscribing" to creators without needing a Google account. Youtube kept breaking it. Don't know if it still works. https://newpipe.net/
I use NewPipe daily. It works pretty stable and the developers are working on it very active. As soon as Youtube breaks it (once every 1-2 months), the developers release a new version mostly next day.
Personally I would've just been fine with them saying that it's feature creep and maintenance burden they don't want, I'm sure newpipe is already more than enough work to keep up with in it's current state, but there you go.
I'm with NewPipe on this one. Although I've never seen any sponsor-pauses relevant to me. And despite the fact that they consume my time and traffic. Sponsor mentions are OK because they don't invade my privcy (ok, there's the rewind/skip forward stat histogram). But there's one exception I've seen a few times: concealed advertisement. And that is what I really hate. While video catches your attention the advertised material keeps creeping into your mind, and by the time you realize it, it's too late. I'd just blacklist such youtubers on the spot.
It's a pity that YT is being so obnoxious with their search and directory pages. I find myself often searching for things that i shouldnt be searching. They overemphasize creators that post new content even when they (must) know that i m binging on a specific channel's older videos. Search is broken btw, things do not show up, and sometimes i had to ask google to find a video for me. Why is it so hard to give us simple controls?
Recently it seems that Youtube have started to suggest me some old videos of 10 or so years. But funny thing is I don't think they are in any fresh cache so it takes tens or seconds or what feels like minutes for them to start streaming...
Maybe they try to avoid getting stuff from cold storage...
It's still impossible to search by oldest first though.
There are popular channels with well over 10,000 videos - if I want to go back and watch their early videos what am I meant to do? Leave a brick on my mouse and wait for 3 hours for the feed to scroll to the end? No doubt it would crash before then anyway.
it's seriously ironic - and kind of humurous - how a service starts out striving for the best and most convenient features and user experience, grows humongously big because of those and then becomes so gigantic that they think they have to cut back on the same...
eventually it will have 5 billion users and just serve a single, bland feed of random videos with no options and choices ...
... wait, no it will probably die before that happens.
It's not really, the service is designed to make money, it makes money from ads, it can only do this if the eyeballs stay on the service. If you can go from start to finish you might leave when you're done. Hard to leave when you only have a scatter gun way to view the content.
Unfortunately that's a small subset of users. MKBHD calculated it to be about $20 mil in revenue for paid users, compared to $2.6 bil from ads. His analysis is around the 8m30s mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1qsF0WQy8c
From my pov they are an advertising company, they want users to spend as long as possible on the site inorder to view those ads.
I can sort of understand rewarding regular uploads from that pov, a new video by X comes out, you go to view it and then watch a few more videos.
This model doesn't explain other things though. If I find a new channel and want to binge, why stop me watching from oldest first?
Why remove downvotes? If I watch a video that has a lot of invisible downvotes, I get pissed because it's rubbish, it seems a toss up whether I watch another vid, or leave the site. That risk rises exponentially with every rubbish vid I come across.
Lol. This was probably true in 2000s. But their main goal is not ads. User data gathering, processing, human behavior studying is much, much more important business. Google was into ML right at the beginning. When scientific papers on the subjects were still a bit "exotic". I was almost dragged into that.
Out of date time wasting clickbait. The actual news is this:
TeamYouTube:
>we added new tabs for different content types & when adding these tabs, we ran into issues keeping all the sorting options you're used to (like oldest to newest). as an FYI, if you want to find videos around a certain date, you can search "before:" ex. "dog videos before:2017"
>So to confirm there is no longer a sorting option, like oldest to newest.
>we know sorting options are important & we’re still exploring how to bring these back
I search Youtube for reviews of products.. I always wait a few weeks or more so real reviews come out ( not sponsored,paid or free sample) easiest way to finde them is by sorting by new..
I guess they want to push the paid content... gr8..
"When you use google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that's a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world because we should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant you should look for information and we should give it exactly right and we should give it to you in your language and we should never be wrong."
Google see themselves as custodians of truth. They know the truth, and it is their job to give it to you.
Now you might wonder 'how do they know what they truth is'. For google there is no ambiguity, there are not multiple narratives or explanations. The truth is what they say the truth is.
Dopamine is chemical that makes you feel good. The algorithms are made to increase engagement. Some of the most engaging content is content that makes people angry or shocked. Look at the YouTube homepage when you're not signed in. YouTube's algorithms are not necessarily made to give people content they want to watch and were thinking of watching. And often times not content that makes them feel good.
Edit: maybe I'm half asleep and not getting what you're saying lol
"Let's move on to the next question... how would you design a sort-by-date feature for a video streaming service? We have 15 minutes before the next interviewer comes in, so get started."
Apparently the correct answer is “I wouldn’t, because someone in Retention has a ‘better idea’ for how to keep eyes on the site.”
But just for giggles, I’d have placed all video metadata into a relational database (the interviewer grimaces), and use
SELECT * FROM metadata /* a WHERE clause here to match the user’s actual search */ ORDER BY creation_date;
And I’m not being offered the job because I didn’t use a NoSQL store and didn’t consider writing a DSL to make queries and no mention of inverted binary trees to sort the data by “relevance” according to Retention.
Youtube wants to be much like Tiktok, barely any search capability, just a stream of ML generated OR recommended videos, anything else outside of a constant, continuous video stream generated based on your metadata and other PII is considered "overhead" by these cyborgs, search for relevant videos? overhead, sorting videos? overhead, let the algo do.
These changes also render the site nearly unusable if you have a triple digit iq.
p.s. Youtube's search, much like Gooogle's, is pure dog shit by the way. Neither of them fill the function of a search at this point, you'd have to remove SEO and ML optimizations from them to get them working again. I search for "X" in youtube, I get 2-3 videos vaguely related to it, and then like 50 "videos you watched", "videos others searching for X watched". It's so fucking bad its unreal, makes me think what kind of a brain dead adderall crack addict they have QA testing this there.
Well, consider what portion of population does not run ad blocker. Consider what portion of population is likely to click on ads. That's the audience YouTube is being built based on. There's really no reason to expect it to get any better.
It's not even that much of a senseless decision considering that half of the population has a double digit IQ (100 is the median by definition, half is below half is above)
Yup - I just skip over youtube shorts if they come up. There is no indication how long they are, neither can I seek. I don't know if I'm about to watch a 5 second video, or a 2 minute one (or whatever the max length of shorts is). I'm not going to sit there like a drooling idiot and find out. If the content I'm looking for doesn't present itself within the first 2 seconds, I bail. and since it almost never does, I just skip shorts entirely.
My theory is they want to move old videos to glacial/cheap storage and make them essentially unavailable. It makes sense, to be fair. There's probably 100 videos uploaded every day about how to put up a shelf, but we only really need one.
It's so weird. So many videos talk about "in my last video", yet Youtube is hellbent on you not going there. The same for "this is part one of 2".
If 10 videos has been uploaded since then, Youtube _really_ don't want you to go see part 2. It is so difficult to see the chronology around the current video.
Since I am ranting, I'll also mention how weird the recommendation engine is for not suggesting music videos related to the current video. If you are watching a 30 minute documentary on how "Bohemian Rhapsody" was recorded, the video itself will contain no audio from the song because that will demonetize the video, but there are also no links pointing to the music video anywhere.
There’s also the dynamic of the creator and YouTube at play. I’m imagine the creators will do the same thing recipe do… have a 5 minute description of how they made coffee for the first time, then get to the point in part 2.
I have started "unplugging" from google's service (drive, email...) since they killed inbox. Along side with privacy issues, for me they don't seem like a reliable service provider.
No question the alternative services will do it better. The problem is there are so many channels, comments and videos of historical interest on YouTube. And many curious types like me get their kicks from seeing how far we've come, or enjoying old classics.
This is a slap in the face to having information at your fingertips, the spirit of the Internet and web 2.0 optimism. The user is factored out of the equation; we're just to be passive endless consumers.
468 comments
[ 35.0 ms ] story [ 8378 ms ] thread> TeamYouTube has confirmed that they are working to bring the sorting options back to the platform. Furthermore, they said that the options were removed due to some issues.
It's not clear if they wanted to remove it and reverted due to backlash, or if there were genuine technical issues/limitations that needed to be addressed.
This is amazing, I wanna use it someday. Were the issues technical? Maybe. Were the issues problematic decision makers who've been overridden? Also maybe.
We'll never know
"We'll show them ads in the logout menu. What are they gonna do? Switch to Linux?"
I can't even imagine what can be a technical limitation to break sorting on something what worked for more than a decade.
The default sort (which is reverse chronological) is more likely cached than chronological order. It could be that it's not really about if it could be done but assuming this is really a good-faith problem it could be that the chip crunch made optimising performance a priority and removing effectively-uncacheble (or alternatively space-consuming) chronological order did remove some pressure.
OK this kind of grandiose framing makes me giggle
How messed up does your DB schema need to be that you have issues with ordering entries by date?
Some things that are easy with one DB, get surprisingly hard when you scale up. Lets give them the benefit of the doubt regarding technical issues here.
I dunno seems clear as day to me... Like what are the odds the company that processes the largest amount of data in the world on a daily basis can't sort some results by date.
It used to be a drop-down box, now it's pill buttons that (confusingly) are usually used for filtering rather than sorting.
So I'm assuming it was something to do with the UX rewrite getting in the way.
I'm guessing they'll end up killing it.
The default position should be that if the video is on YouTube, they're happy to serve it. If YouTube doesn't want to serve a video it makes more sense to simply not host it. And indeed they routinely get rid of videos that they think will lose them money.
Seems unlikely to me.
Google has the competence to build a good product, they just don't have the leadership to do it while maximizing data collection and ads.
You know what makes more database queries than sorting by date? Making me manually scroll through thousands of videos to the bottom and loading thumbnails for all of them. I don't care how restrictive they make the API, they can't stop me from writing a "start from oldest" extension that gives you a button to just automatically scroll to the bottom.
What kind of goddamn sociopath OK's a change like this?
Personally, unless I’m quering something that’s fairly narrow, for recommendations you push to me please never show me anything older than 36 months. No, I don’t want an 8 year old video on this topic.
And for age, it is also fairly normal to listen to music older then 36 months. And to watch educational videos older then that. Or crafting videos older then that. Or tutorial videos older then that. Most of time, I am cool with old videos.
For framing, the first thing everyone recommends is “Framing Walls with Larry Haun” (1992). You even get the VHS tracking blips now and then from the video capture.
To be fair it’s also good advice to then supplement Larry Haun’s videos with modern framing techniques but his videos are the first one should watch.
Might just be a single example but it’s the first counterpoint that popped in my head.
https://youtu.be/IQmt27qN6AI
They are. People that started with the genuine intent of sharing their knowledge gradually turned into professional youtubers, and now it's all about hacking the algorithm, diluting content in multiple videos, selling you to their sponsors. Older videos are almost always better.
These are easy and solved already. Apply exponential weighted average for length since watch for sorting, with two peaks of a month ago and a year ago.
I fear the YT folks have a hot mess and it will be twitterized at some point (the new tech lobotomized).
Because the most watched youtube videos are music videos, and people listen to the same music regularly.
Also because some videos have been popular enough that people wanted to show that to their friends, and regular users don't know how to use the history, so they want to find it in their home page again.
I assume the algo just doesn't know the difference between videos that are rewatchable and ones that are not, and does that on some statistical metrics that don't make sense in a lot of contexts.
When you think something is stupid, the answer is usually there is something we don't know about it.
You can always chose the "new to me" saussage, it is always last in the line of sausages with some tags inside of them. The problem is that "new to me" stops showing really new content if you gonna use it heavily. Sometimes it gives video with that red line on the bottom of preview which means I watches this recently or videos from some channels I am subscribed to. So, this is option is a garbage as most of other YT options.
I'm so aggravated by YT's idiotic decision because I agree 100% with the usage pattern you describe. Over the years, that is exactly what I've done many, many times.
Sure, I also watch random videos here and there from channels I never ever come back to. But if I ever want to look at the entirety of someone's uploaded videos and sort them by anything at all, it's always by "oldest first". The remaining two options are useful, too, for sure. But I've never actively sorted anything by popularity manually. Always "oldest first".
https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe
https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect
Sounds like the changes you want should be possible to add to NewPipe.
After installing the addon and visiting just https://youtube.com I get redirected to https://inv.vern.cc/ that just displays "Our main server's ISP is having issues, even router resets haven't fixed it. We apologize for this long downtime". Visiting https://twitter.com I get redirected to https://twt.funami.tech/ which displays "502 Bad Gateway"
Not a great experience to be honest. Still, love the idea, but execution is poor at best.
That said, being able to sort comments chronologically here on HN would be nice too, so people in glass houses…
Twitter, Facebook, Insta: try finding back a tweet of yours from last month, or explore the early posting of Guido van Rossum.
This is basically the main reason I wrote https://ditzes.com, be able to read HN while offline + chronological order of the comments without putting any importance on points (edit: and well, to have a dark UI to be able to read after the sun goes down too). Here is this comment thread in ditzes: https://ditzes.com/item/33558531
I mainly use it via a browser bookmark that redirects me from HN to Ditzes. If I find a comment I like, click the date with middle-mouse to open the comment in proper HN to comment.
Here's the bookmark in case people wanna use it:
For some type of channels such as latest technology reviews or news commentary, the sort by "Oldest" isn't as critical because the older vids have less and less value as time goes by. The default of showing the most recent newest vids works ok for that. E.g. sorting MKBHD tech channel[1] by Oldest would have brought up the old 2008 videos when he was a teenager reviewing products that are long obsolete. Good for nostalgia but not relevant to getting the latest info on Pixel 7 and Android 13 in 2022. With sort in chronological order, you'd have to hit the PgDn key a hundred times before you scroll down to the 2022 videos.
That said, I personally used sort by Oldest all the time. E.g. I find a random house construction video so sort the channel vids by Oldest to start at the beginning where they cleared the land and poured the foundation.
>I don't care how restrictive they make the API, they can't stop me from writing a "start from oldest" extension that gives you a button to just automatically scroll to the bottom.
Last time I tried this, Youtube had unstated rate limits for pulling lots of metadata like that. I did some experiments on music channels that had thousands of vids and both the API and manual UI (automate press PgDn key repeatedly) had invisible rate limiting where you couldn't reach the oldest vids.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/mkbhd/videos
> Youtube may as well remove subscriptions and replace the home page with a big-ass "Random" button.
don't give 'em any ideas!
> You find a channel you really like, then you watch their content from first to last.
I think that's very uncommon and that the majority of people sort by Popularity and start there.
Wrong. There was an article on HN that no internet service allows you to open a 10000th page of any search. So, even if you have a really powerful device which is able to handle this amount of pages which are loading all at once (if you are travelling in endless mode as there is in Youtube), I am absolutely sure that at least for some creators' feed you just can not scroll it all without getting a 5xx error.
Given that everyone wants the retention of TikTok now, I don't think that big random button stays a joke for very long.
You seem to be forgetting the scale of these "databases". Lots of data these huge companies hoard is stored in slower, cheaper, storage. They know roughly what data should be kept cold and warm. And in general old videos can be left in cold storage, because people rarely watch them.
While Youtube wants to control what you watch, I'm pretty sure this is a cost-cutting measure.
Welcome to the TikTok algorithmic feed. Viewing videos in order and with context is so passe.
That said, I rarely do this as well. If I've found somebody's content I like, I'll tend to then go see what playlists they've made for similar topics. Some channels will have over 500 videos dating back a decade at this point - I'm not going to watch that in order, but I'll at least browse by playlist.
Disordered minds are easier to control.
YT does show you any progress you have made watching a video when viewing a channels video list
> Youtube may as well remove subscriptions and replace the home page with a big-ass "Random" button.
They are trying too. A number of YT’ers with partner managers or who have had conversations with staff, have said YT wished they could get rid of subscriptions entirely and rely on the algorithm instead. Tbf on this point, I hardly ever use the subscription page myself and either use the recommendation page or direct link/notifications, so I can see their point on not really caring about subscriptions, but you know we as humans do like to see numbers increase.
And as you said there are viewers who exclusive use the subscriptions page, I used to be the same and had my default youtube "landing page" as the subs page. But YT changed something and broke that and before I could be bothered to fix it I found that I was enjoying atleast some of the content the algo was recommending to me so started using it more and more, and before I knew it I stopped using the subscriptions page entirely.
So while they wish they could turn subscriptions off, I think they know it would cause too much backlash and would still have to still have to add a way for viewers to follow creators they want but make it more meaningful. I'm currently subscribed to over 500 channels but a lot of those channels could be removed from my list because it contains channels I no longer watch (be it because my tastes changed, the channels content changed, the channels are dead/retired) but I cba to go though the list and unsub. At which point a viewers sub list is just adding noise and delieverying (atleast some) content the viewer doesn't actually want to watch.
Not if you disabled history
Fancy downloading your YouTube data checkout to verify?
But my point is also that in case of compromise of the (2FA with physical key, but still, Google can mess stuff up) account nobody can see what I watched.
Hot tip: I use regular google search like so to search youtube 'topic site:youtube.com'. It avoids all the clutter the YouTube search results provide.
Afterthought: YouTube is getting so bad, I wonder if there's any third-party (paid or free) front end?
Some design lead takes this opportunity to remind the team that users often don't know what they want. Everyone nods in agreement.
Bye-bye sorting.
YouTube tells YOU what video to watch when.
They then calculated the cost of sorting, and realized that it would save them more money than upsetting the users that like the function would cost.
Then, A/B testing confirmed it for a few months.
Then, tada, good bye features.
Seems to me that it's more likely that google just has too many employees who just do idiotic/random changes to show that they are actually doing "actual" work...
I mean they have sort by time, so you would just reverse the order.
This stinks like GNOME mentality, giant ego designer needs something easy to do to justify it's salary so finds some button/option to remove,
Which frankly I think is nuts.
It used to always properly recommend the next part of a video like the case you mention, and even recommend previous part if you arrived on part 2 without seeing part 1 etc ...
If this is a common problem you are seeing it must have regressed.
But it is said there are those who resist...
And some of the things they need to do to push subscription on their music premium thingy are contrary to the things they need to keep quality on the video side of things.
For exemple, easily playing the video from an artist channel (or the many channels publishing music in a genre or publishers etc ... like Suicidesheep, NCS, Proximity, ...) is not something they want.
So what did they do ? They removed the "play all" from the "uploads" page of a channel. This button played what was essentially a playlist of all the uploads of the channel, also allowing you all the playlist tool (repeat, shuffle, ...). Because you're supposed to do that through a youtube music (or red, or whatever the name is now) subscription, they gutted it, and now there is no way to easily watch all the videos of a channel unless the channel owner curates it himself into a playlist.
(usually, music publisher channels have a playlist by genre/subgenre, or artists one by album etc..., and had the automatic "uploads" playlist for all of it, so they did not have a specific playlist for everything)
As a side effect, you can't do that on video channel either anymore, oupsie !
(the reason I believe it was done on purpose for music is because there is no gain to change that for video channel, quite the contrary: if you use that feature on a video channel not only are they retaining you, but they should also be able to target you much more accurately with their ads, eg if I'm watching all of "mandalore gaming" videos then video games ads are clearly for me)
Genius. Explicitly not do what the user wants.
Last night I saw an ad that seemed to imply Amazon Music would now be included with Prime. I thought, hmm, let me check if it still does the thing where you can’t play what you tap. Yup. Still does it. Tap a song and some other random song plays.
Somewhere deep in the bowels of Amazon there is an exec who thinks this is a brilliant way to drive conversion. Probably has some data that somehow supports this notion. Amazing.
Likely there is a programmer or two well aware of the issue and the presumably 1-10 line fix, but has either tried it and been told to revert it, or simply knows they can't push it, because they know what it would do to the metrics.
Probably a good number of the complaints people are leveling here against Amazon services source from that. For instance, mixing paid options into the list as quickly as possible when you explicitly asked for free stuff can't hardly help but "convert better" than letting the user truly browse through the free stuff; if so much as one person ever gives in and buys something that way, or even browses, leaves, comes back to the same screen later and forgot they were supposedly looking at free stuff and buys something, boom, better conversion rate than pure free. Doesn't take much to move the needle off of "zero". But it's still not what we asked for. (& yes, I know that it's non-free stuff in the recommendations when viewing a free option, not unfree stuff mixed right into free carousel, but I think it's fair to say customers are definitely interested in a "free only right now please" view and a good percentage of them probably think that's what they're getting when they're in the "free" tabs.)
Prime music for the reason you give, Prime video who keeps finding way to suggest you movies you need to pay extra for (you go specifically to "free/included", you click a couple times, and you're being recommended extra costs things ...), Amazon Drive keeps your file "forever" but then no sorry we're deleting them we stop this but then wait no we're making Amazon Photos now your photos will be kept everything else deleted but wait no only some photos will be transfered ...
The people managing those services are coasting on other people's success.
They could and they should - and is simple: just remove all music from www.youtube.com. This is what they should have done when then created music.youtube.com.
When you see how youtube "live gaming" section is failing despite being so much technically superior to the competition on the video side, I don't think the artists are wrong on that one.
But yes, I agree that they absolutely should, and it would make the experience so much better ... Another exemple is how your "my subscription" page, meant for checking all the channels you're subscribed at once to not miss any content that you're interested in, becomes utterly useless once you sub to a couple decently active music channels, which tends to publish much much more frequently than regular video channels.
Issue: music video are mixed with normal video on the high traffic site
Solution: separate them on a separate site (which is essentially what your subdomain idea is)
Issue with the solution: music video channels don't want that, because they want to be on the high traffic site, and they've already seen with live streaming that no people don't go out of their way to find them back once they're removed from the high traffic parts
So, "which pages", well the high traffic youtube page, which they wouldn't be on if they're relegated to music.youtube.com only.
(Instead of actually shuffling the playlist, it sets the next video based on some criteria, so if two point at each other...)
They just removed the button on the interface, which shows it wasn't a technical need or anything like that, it was on purpose to stop people being able to enjoy that feature.
(Disclosure/clarification for those who know from other comments that I once worked at Google: I never worked for them in any YouTube-related role, have no inside information on this, and haven't worked at Google at all for over 7 years now. Definitely not speaking for them here.)
I do 95% of my shopping online and I can't remember the last time I saw an add that showed something that piqued my interest and that I wasn't already aware of. I spend most of my time online and have never clicked an ad.
Advertisers need a certain audience profile. They need people who are easily influenced, who make emotional or rushed decision, who are not good at assessing the value of a product. Of course they can also sell to educated users, but that's not where almost all of the money is.
In the digital world where most of the profit comes from advertisement, it's irremediable that product design will align with those characteristics, unfortunately :/
metrics probably showed people spent longer time on site trying to find videos, hence they push the change even if it makes a worse user experience.
Somebody needs to make a new frontend for YT that just uses their embed feature for the actual playing of the video
and I don't get why the NewPipe devs are against upstreaming it... kudos to polymorphicshade, updates in NewPipe get handed over pretty fast.
Personally I would've just been fine with them saying that it's feature creep and maintenance burden they don't want, I'm sure newpipe is already more than enough work to keep up with in it's current state, but there you go.
Recently it seems that Youtube have started to suggest me some old videos of 10 or so years. But funny thing is I don't think they are in any fresh cache so it takes tens or seconds or what feels like minutes for them to start streaming...
Maybe they try to avoid getting stuff from cold storage...
Someone who has uploaded videos in their Youtube account - are there still ways to sort them chronologically?
If yes then it is clearly not a metadata/technical issue *grin*
There are popular channels with well over 10,000 videos - if I want to go back and watch their early videos what am I meant to do? Leave a brick on my mouse and wait for 3 hours for the feed to scroll to the end? No doubt it would crash before then anyway.
eventually it will have 5 billion users and just serve a single, bland feed of random videos with no options and choices ...
... wait, no it will probably die before that happens.
From my pov they are an advertising company, they want users to spend as long as possible on the site inorder to view those ads.
I can sort of understand rewarding regular uploads from that pov, a new video by X comes out, you go to view it and then watch a few more videos.
This model doesn't explain other things though. If I find a new channel and want to binge, why stop me watching from oldest first?
Why remove downvotes? If I watch a video that has a lot of invisible downvotes, I get pissed because it's rubbish, it seems a toss up whether I watch another vid, or leave the site. That risk rises exponentially with every rubbish vid I come across.
But if it was removed to hit some type of OKR internally to have users engage more on the platform, it’s another story.
Not a fan of the redesign on mobile because nothing works if you have turned off watch history and other privacy settings.
TeamYouTube: >we added new tabs for different content types & when adding these tabs, we ran into issues keeping all the sorting options you're used to (like oldest to newest). as an FYI, if you want to find videos around a certain date, you can search "before:" ex. "dog videos before:2017"
>So to confirm there is no longer a sorting option, like oldest to newest.
>we know sorting options are important & we’re still exploring how to bring these back
https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1590386502865129472
The
Actual
F...
I search Youtube for reviews of products.. I always wait a few weeks or more so real reviews come out ( not sponsored,paid or free sample) easiest way to finde them is by sorting by new..
I guess they want to push the paid content... gr8..
Don't believe me? Hear it in Schmidt's own words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4 (30 sec clip)
"When you use google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that's a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world because we should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant you should look for information and we should give it exactly right and we should give it to you in your language and we should never be wrong."
Google see themselves as custodians of truth. They know the truth, and it is their job to give it to you.
Now you might wonder 'how do they know what they truth is'. For google there is no ambiguity, there are not multiple narratives or explanations. The truth is what they say the truth is.
Edit: maybe I'm half asleep and not getting what you're saying lol
But just for giggles, I’d have placed all video metadata into a relational database (the interviewer grimaces), and use
And I’m not being offered the job because I didn’t use a NoSQL store and didn’t consider writing a DSL to make queries and no mention of inverted binary trees to sort the data by “relevance” according to Retention.These changes also render the site nearly unusable if you have a triple digit iq.
p.s. Youtube's search, much like Gooogle's, is pure dog shit by the way. Neither of them fill the function of a search at this point, you'd have to remove SEO and ML optimizations from them to get them working again. I search for "X" in youtube, I get 2-3 videos vaguely related to it, and then like 50 "videos you watched", "videos others searching for X watched". It's so fucking bad its unreal, makes me think what kind of a brain dead adderall crack addict they have QA testing this there.
Google PMs now investigating new ways to reduce users’ IQs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33560024
I think the increased adoption of WASM will be a net negative for users.
I’m heavily opinionated on communication centric UX, it should work for me not the other way around.
I disallow all notifications, for example. I refuse to be forced into engagement..
If 10 videos has been uploaded since then, Youtube _really_ don't want you to go see part 2. It is so difficult to see the chronology around the current video.
Since I am ranting, I'll also mention how weird the recommendation engine is for not suggesting music videos related to the current video. If you are watching a 30 minute documentary on how "Bohemian Rhapsody" was recorded, the video itself will contain no audio from the song because that will demonetize the video, but there are also no links pointing to the music video anywhere.
This is a slap in the face to having information at your fingertips, the spirit of the Internet and web 2.0 optimism. The user is factored out of the equation; we're just to be passive endless consumers.