It's a reddit post[OP], that links to an article[1], that links to a specific comment in a reddit post[2] which is a reply to the actual comment[3] that contains the link[4] to a specific section of a YouTube video, which contains the actual confirmation.
After sifting through all that, they didn't give a reason, which is pretty lame, but alludes to the fact that it's helpful for them and not for you. Presumably this is step one in storing old videos on glacier-like storage so it costs them less (and inevitably will let them play you more ads while they retrieve it)
"Exploring how to bring these back" What, did they change something in the back end that made sorting videos by channel chronologically impossible? Were there fundamental issues with it? That kind of wording really gets me riled up, feels like such nonsense.
Genuinely though I'd like to know what the reason was for this, I'm sure it isn't anything technical but I'm not even sure what removing this feature accomplishes for them. Another comment suggested it might be to move old videos to less expensive, slow storage. Could it be simple as that?
Some sort of technical reasons seems most likely to me for now. They probably have some crazy denormalized/multi-level-cached storage where videos can be stored on different media or different locations. It's possible that "changing the query" requires some involved architecture changes in that system.
Why they weren't aware of this before adding the new feature is a different question.
Listen, I've arm chaired with the best of them, but I've learned it's not wise. You can pretend you have a better understanding of their architecture and numbers, but the reality is, getting riled up over this is the real nonsense.
eg a (presumably reasonable?) use case: watching a video, posted more than a year ago, and you want to see the either (1) immediately previously posted; or (2) immediately next posted video. Because they are part of a series, or mention each other. It's extremely difficult to do.
Some really weird product decisions this year. E.g. they are also hellbent on showing me "shorts" in my search results. I can't think of a single occasion lately when I didn't want to see the full description and comments and they make it hard to get directly to the video. Worse still they are applying this "shorts" concept retrospectively to any video that happens to be short in length, meaning I get videos that were never intended for that format by the creator.
Fortunately this bookmarklet (which i've named "eat my shorts" in my bookmarks) does the job:
While I opened this thread I felt an restless rage rising at yet another fuck the user decision from Google, but this joke made me laugh and defused the situation. Thanks. The Macbook won't be thrown across the room in a fit of nerdrage today.
These AB tests where they force you to engage in some new medium of content that they want you to become accustomed to is reminiscent of that scene in A Clockwork Orange where they force Alex to watch film of violent images.
Could be worse - recently Android YouTube (or some A/B test of it) opens links with the tiny thumbnail at the bottom - like it reduces to when you go back to search results or something usually, but it's not maximisable, not dismissible, it just sits there tinily playing its ad.
I have to back out of the app and open link in new tab (so it plays in the browser instead) if I want to see it, but usually I just bounce, and am slowly learning not to bother clicking in the first place.
I'll load the URL directly either in mpv (desktop or Mobile via Termux), or VLC.
Fuck YouTube entirely.
The pain of using the Web interface is precisely the point, as someone's KPIs are steering users to apps. That's succeeding, though it's not YT's apps which are substituting....
I still miss the mps-yt app, though I'd found an alternative recently, yewtube (still need to try it out).
I strongly recommend using iOS Safari, 1Blocker and Vinegar. Between them you get pure HTML video with picture-within-picture support etc and no ads. Feels like you YouTube used to be.
Does it still do that silly thing where it opens fullscreen videos in portrait?
That along with the lack of swipe up/down to toggle fullscren made Safari YouTube a no-go for me.
This is what I do, I just wish that YouTube didn't only support 720P as maximum resolution on iOS safari; happens on everything from an iPod touch & iPad Pro to iPhone pro max, at least for me.
Vinegar has the option to force 1080p, via adaptive bitrate streaming, with the possible downside that the stream may start at lower quality, although I haven’t experienced that downside for some reason. Although perhaps that caveat only applies when using airplay. Either way, check the Vinegar settings from within Safari to find/set 1080p.
That page tells me nothing about what ReVanced does, except that it's a continuation of Vanced (and has a lot of icons for various services). I'm guessing it's a kind of meta-social thing that gloms each of those services? And from your comment, I guess is provides more settings?
Second worst thing. Worst thing was that up until very recently a portrait 1080p monitor did not render Shorts correctly and cut off the like/dislike/comment buttons. I literally had the correct hardware to watch Shorts on a desktop but nobody bothered to test for it!
Shorts is extremely frustrating and has nothing I would have ever asked for or desired.
Further it decreases the likelihood that I would consider paying for YouTube services.
I was almost ready to try a paid version when Shorts starting showing up with a totally unfamiliar and unwelcome UX. Completely unattractive and therefore NOISE.
Just like a monopoly, they long ago stopped tweaking the product to improve your experience, and instead for years now all the product changes have been to improve theirs. As another example, I’ve noticed they’ve started hiding when videos were published too
Even on my phone I prefer landscape. The few shorts I’ve seen would have been better if they were landscape. The ones I saw could have been trimmed down to 1:1 or 4:3 and would have been essentially the same.
I’m the opposite, reading is easier in non-landscape and when watching videos on YouTube or Reddit it’s annoying to have to turn your phone sideways and hope you don’t have ‘lock’ on… then if you do you hope it works properly and doesn’t take forever.
Mostly a pain but obviously some video content doesn’t make sense without landscape mode.
Mostly because these are people who willfully wanted to create On Youtube, not tiktok. They probably don't want to make portrait content at all. But if they ignore this new feature google is desperate to make happen, they'll be punished.
They also have the stupid "Posts" section where content creators are supposed to post little blurbs and tweet like things. Totally superfluous but right there on your home page. Oh that's okay, there's an X to get rid of it.
"Hid for 30 days" Fucking excuse me? No, I told you I don't want this and you IGNORE ME? The insane level of arrogance and hubris to just IGNORE a direct user action like that....
Thank you very much for this, I too despise the shorts interface with a passion, I have been manually frobanzing the url back to the desktop page for a while now, while i have been meaning to investigate what it would take to do a bookmark or user script(easier than I thought) I never got around to it.
I use this to remove shorts from my subscriptions view. You have to click it every time it loads more, but it clears up the clutter. I call it "no shorts"
javascript:(function(){ var els = document.querySelectorAll('[href^="/shorts/"]'); for (var i = 0; i < els.length; i++) { if (els[i]) els[i].closest('ytd-grid-video-renderer').remove(); } })();
They don’t even need this. If they brought back whatever algorithm magic they were doing in 2015 they’d pick up a massive boost in engagement. They won’t though since they’re too busy making the world safe for democracy.
On my work computer, I am not signed into a Google account in the profile I use Youbtube in. Youtube has apparently decided that I would be most likely to engage with Shorts that feature scantily clad women and clear sexual innuendos.
My only guess is it has grouped me in with the crowd that watches metal machining videos.
The machining industry is largely/almost exclusively male. Several of the large social media influencers in the industry still have pinups in their shops.
this is sad because youtube is and always has been extremely resistant to public pressure. it doesn’t matter how much people complain, this is going to happen. same for removing dislikes to protect corporations from negative press, same for every piss-poor UI redesign, same for hiding viewer totals, same for desperately trying to copy tiktok
tangentially, there is one lesson content providers need to learn from tiktok. listen up, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and Youtube, and no doubt soon Twitter: Improve. Your. Algorithm. you do not need twist your content into a copycat format, like a teenage girl following fashion trends. tiktok is successful because it has an incredibly effective algorithm. that’s it. it’s no more complex than that
it’s insane to me that these platforms with masses of content freely available to them are so delighted to jump straight to abandoning all of that and cloning another app. just use the content that is already there, but show it to me better
I regularly go to my youtube recommended feed. what do I see? 5 videos I’ve already watched. 4 videos I’ve passed up on watching countless times. 3 videos I have no interest in, and maybe 1 that I might consider watching. why? because youtube’s algorithm is awful. the solution to this is not for them to pivot to stupid information bytes, but for them to make a better damn algorithm
> the solution to this is not for them to pivot to stupid information bytes, but for them to make a better damn algorithm
Keep in mind that the best algorithm is always the human mind. People know what they like and that makes them happy. If you're following creators X, Y, and Z, you don't need a fancy algorithm to expose their videos to their followers, you just a place to show their videos in the order published.
Better YouTube algorithms might help in some cases like discovery of totally new channels and creators that people might be interested in. YouTube should go nuts and do whatever crazy experiments they want on some recommendations page. But the solution of trying to dictate precisely what users see all of the time through making the entire site a big algorithm-festival will always be suboptimial.
These established sites are now designed to show you content most profitable to them, not the content you’re most likely to like.
This is why YouTube will endlessly recommend news videos to me. I’ve never watched a news video on YouTube, and any time I see it on my “Home Screen” I flag it as “Don’t show me this.” Is the algorithm comically idiotic? No, it’s trying to shove profitable (for them) content down my throat.
These platforms are fundamentally broken and we’re just waiting around for the actual implosion.
>this is sad because youtube is and always has been extremely resistant to public pressure. it doesn’t matter how much people complain, this is going to happen.
Well of course they are. YouTube isn't a public utility. And we aren't its customers, we're its product.
I think Instagram, youtube, and even a couple of porn sites have realized that they get really good engagement out of their product (users) with shorts and that's why they're doing it.
HN folks are not the target demographic, and we're a tiny minority, so they don't care what we think, even if we're justifiably annoyed.
I'd love to see a better algorithm on youtube too, but that's not their priority.
>same for removing dislikes to protect corporations from negative press
I like how the internet accepts this as a fact, despite there being zero evidence for this. It doesn't matter that corporations were historically a lot less likely to hide dislikes than independent creators. It doesn't matter that corporations that get a lot of dislikes aren't ones that that advertise much on Youtube (e.g. CNN), so they wouldn't have any leverage. It doesn't matter if they threatened to stop advertising, they'd hurt themselves as much as they'd hurt Google because the existence of the dislike button doesn't make ads any less valuable. What matters is that Google is a big corporation, and big corporations are all friends with each other.
People, think this sort of vague outrage towards "the elite" is productive, but ironically it just screws them over. Any sleazy politician or cryto influencer can peddle the same vague outrage to easily amass support.
Care to address all the reasons why I described this is unlikely?
> What's your explanation, then?
The simplest explanation is their official one that they want to protect smaller creators from brigading. The simplest cynical explanation is that they noticed from A/B tests that hiding dislikes increases user retention, which is more profitable for them. It's likely a mix of both.
IIRC that decision was made shortly after Wojcicki (YT chief at the time) posted a video that got some incredibly huge quantity of dislikes vs likes, and/or Biden had the same issue. Don't recall the exact timeline. Dislikes disappeared shortly afterwards. Seems more likely it was in response to powerful people being upset at being disliked than commercial imperatives.
> It doesn't matter that corporations were historically a lot less likely to hide dislikes than independent creators
Is there data on this? I've seen hiding the likes bar to be significantly more common in videos published by corporations. Especially when it's a video talking about a product.
News media like CNN usually had the bar enabled, but nearly every other genre of corporate videos had the bar disabled.
It's bad enough that they remove the feature, but I'm also honestly puzzled by Google's communication strategy here. According to the article, Google's responses to the issue over time have been flipping between all of the following:
- it's an intentional change, they are planning to remove the feature.
- there is no change at all, if you don't see the option, clear your cookies.
- it's a bug and they are currently investigating it.
- they have found the bug, fixed the issue and everything is back to normal now. (except users report it isn't)
- it really was an intentional change - but a temporary one, in order to isolate/fix another bug. The other bug got fixed, they reverted the change and everything is back to normal now! (except users still report it isn't)
- they didn't want to remove the option, but they had to disable it for the time being, because it's breaking another feature.
- the option is somehow gone for good, but they'd consider reimplementing it if there is enough demand.
Either Google's PR department is engaging in russian propaganda levels of gaslighting here or there is enormous chaos going on inside YouTube and no one knows what the other is doing.
Whenever you see this thrashy comms, it’s bc this wasn’t rolled out like a new feature with documentation and blog posts, so you’re seeing different support people who don’t know what’s happening try to explain it.
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.
95% of the Youtube content I want to see is either educational or created by friends/family. I don't want TikTok-style algorithmic content.
At this point, I think there's a business model in making a Youtube front-end which is designed to be not horrible for niche users like myself.
I suspect I'm a small enough percentage of the market to not be worth bothering with for a $1T company, but plenty enough to sustain a mid-sized startup.
Last time I checked the API was very restrictive towards building custom clients that are somewhat complete. There was no endpoint for getting the subscription feed and the discussion about it had been open for years already. So you have to use a lot of quota to construct it manually. iirc they had some weird rules about caching the results of API calls as well, but I could be mistaking that with something else.
I suspect curated creators would be interested in managing their content. Youtube is a bad experience on both sides. And I suspect they'd need to, if nothing else, to do quality content-tagging. Some of this could be crowdsourced too.
I do the same thing. Reeder even has some adblock magic. In Firefox I use Unhook to just allow search. I do admit, however, that I barely find anything new anymore now that everything's blocked. Have to figure out new ways to find inspriation.
As with most Google companies the packet promotion process is decreasing the quality of the product and the user experience.
YT is clearly pandering to advertisers. I feel a little (ok, a lot) of schadenfreude every time I hear about a move that makes advertisers uncomfortable..
The internet used to be made by users for users. Commerce has ruined software development and the general experience on the web for many.
I can’t think of a world where uBlock doesn’t work anymore. I think I’d leave the business and find a new career doing something physical where I don’t have to be subjected to this crap.
... I'm not sure about that. Most of my problems with Youtube have much more to do with me being a niche customer than anything.
I honestly believe most of the world most wants to see stupid cat videos, videos of people embarrassing themselves, videos which will make them feel validated, and so on.
The older I get, the less faith I have in humanity.
HN is a funny place. Each time one of these billion (or trillion) dollar scumbag companies does something scumbaggy, people come out of the woodwork and wish there was an alternative frontend. Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Facebook... it has happened before and it will happen again. YET there's a A LOT of people here who get incredibly butthurt as soon as you mention the crazy idea of public website crawling being explicitly encoded into law as allowed. The only entities that would be hurt by this would be these fucking evil corps who abuse and evade the law all the time and are conspiring to extract as much money from the population as they can in countless shady ways.
In regards to alternative Youtube clients. Not sure if it fits your requirements but I've used MiniTube which is pretty decent: https://flavio.tordini.org/minitube
This is almost the exact opposite of what I want. A lot of screentime is not healthy, and I don't want an interface which encourages that. This is based on the model of a TV running.
I want to be very deliberate about what I watch, when I watch it, and why I watch it. I don't want anything which will lead me to watching more videos or to watching them casually.
For the most part, I have specific times when I watch specific videos with family. I also use videos as a work break when I burn down. An ideal work break is 5-20 minutes, and I don't want to be pulled into any more.
It seems like a good tool, but for the opposite niche.
Between shorts and stupid recommendations it's really harming my yt experience. By recommendations I mean content not directly related to the search but videos yt thinks I might want to watch mixed with search results.
Another thing that bothers me a lot is yt showing results of videos in a language different from the search query. I live in Mexico and very often half of the results are in Spanish. I'm from Spain, I speak Spanish, but more often than not Spanish videos in the topics that interest me are very bad.
I started using Google for searching Youtube videos, I get much better/comprehensive results and relevant results aren't cut off after 10 videos or so.
Since they removed the dislike counts, I've been getting more crap and scam videos with no value, and they're now removing date sorting, another important feature.
It's time to begon looking for alternatives. The old YT is not coming back. :(
The search is surprisingly horrible! The sad thing is, the engine itself works great. I can input "eh eh eh ah ah ah" and the first result is "Million voices", the song where they loop this vocal sample a lot. But the presentation of the results is just.... Netflix-level. As all majorly popular apps will be in the future, I think. The web was just too good otherwise, too much power "to the people". They'll find that people tolerate a lot more abuse, so these anti-features won't ever go away.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
I'm not sure what's the end goal, but YouTube has become unusable at this point. Play/Pause button gone on TV app, search results prioritise absolute shite of a content. You need to watch 5 videos on any subject and that's all you'll ever see. Now this. I used to watch way more of if, but nowadays I only tune in for a couple of channels I know, so they definitely not making more money from me.
The recommendations have gotten far worse too. Once upon a time they were filled with interesting things I wanted to watch, now as of a few months ago they are filled with garbage I’d never watch. No amount of saying I’m not interested fixes this.
If there’s 100 videos I scroll through at this point 1 might be worth clicking.
I recently tweeted them regarding this. They replied, to their credit, and said the feature was removed due to problems implementing it on mobile. But they were "looking into" ways of restoring it.
Hopefully it doesn't take the dev team too long to put an 'ORDER BY DATE DESCENDING' clause into the SQL.
About 6 years ago Twitch removed the random directory, which was just a list of random streams. That was my preferred way of finding new content to watch. I sent monthly emails for 2 years asking for it to come back, the response always was "looking into it" and it never came back.
Obviously there's something else going on here. As someone else suggested, possibly old videos getting purged/archived so they'd have to change the UI to reflect that. You're not the customer here so why would they make it convenient for you?!
Good god these lines of excuses really disappoints me from YouTube. These are the issues I'm really bothered by from the past few years, as an avid, paying, YouTube audience:
- Removal of annotations
- Removal of fan-submitted subtitles
-- (Not specifically few years) Limited choice of subtitle format. There is no way for dynamically placed/formatted subtitles, worse than FTA TV has available
- Removal of dislike counts
- Wildly varying recommendation quality, worsening a lot in the past year/6 month
-- Shorts. It's a pretty good product and there's a lot of good content, but the recommendation engine kneecapped it.
- No watch queues in the mobile app, even after 1 year of release on desktop
-- Inconsistent experience of queues in YT desktop, please just automatically queue any video i play so it continuously play, instead of having to queue -> play it
- Inconsistent sort by capabilities, especially no way to sort my own downloads (come on shouldn't list/playlist component be same/similar??)
- UI/UX obsession with line-count capping text. Component can be varying height and it's fine! I can't sort through all the great and free conference talks because the complete title is never readable on any view except when I open up the video.
- Bitrates. <<% wants 4k, most of the audience wants higher bitrate.
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?
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.
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.
Not at all surprising as Google has been slowly removing all features that let you control your viewing experience. I’m still annoyed that they removed subscription collections over 7 years ago. They publicly promised to replace it with something better, but that never materialized[1]. I would bet money on these sorting options to never return no matter how much feedback users send in. Google has a history of lying about listening to user feedback.
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
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
Just give me a table with sort by on column headers, a search box, and a little modal to choose columns I want to show/hide. The best UX for this was solved in like 1995.
There aren't technical decisions driving this, they are in the business of advertising.
But yeah, pretty much this. We have access to billions of hours of video, but without advanced filter controls, most of it is inaccessible. Same problem with search engines in general.
I would like that better, too, but it doesn't really work with an infinite scroll. I would be overjoyed if the web changed back to pagination, but it doesn't excite that dopamine center as well or something I guess.
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...
If this is true - whoever is making product decisions at youtube is sending it to irrelevance. Its such a wannabe tiktok clone move no differentiation.
Amazing iPad apps released in the 2010-2015 era are impossible to run thanks to Apple, there are fewer advanced search options, everything smart crashes, $1000 home routers are less reliable…
Did things cross a complexity/business-model barrier and we are never going back?
YouTube has been unusable for the last 3-4 years. All the outdoors, ASMR, and cooking content has been invaded by naked girls trying to sell their OnlyFans or irrelevant videos.
YT recommends content based on what you watch and what you say you don't like. If that's all you're getting it's a reflection of what you watch.
I'm not saying they're good at recommendations, they're not. I get tons of recommendations that I have no interest in. I still get some of those garbage ASMR recommendations but most is related content.
I hate how Big Tech is so adamant about viewing and interacting through algorithms instead of allowing you to do basic sorting according to a certain order you choose.
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
At some point the search filed stooped searching. It is something like:
* Here is the most popular results that are slightly relevant to your query. E.g. African war lord will pull up a gamer playing pranks on other gamers.
* Then, we give up. Here is some unrelated videos we hope will distract you searching what you are looking for.
Is this what tech should look like? Search has been purposely broken.
One feature I wish YouTube had would be the ability to filter videos by time on a particular channel. Right now there is an option to sort by most popular and this shows the videos from all time. Something like "sort by most popular within the last year" would be great for channels which have hundreds and thousands of videos.
To my knowledge Amazon (via Twitch), Meta (via Facebook), and Microsoft (live streaming only, via Mixer) have all played with user-generated video with limited success
Thanks for the shout-out! We're seeing a huge influx of users at the moment due to so many people jumping on the Mastodon band-wagon (where we communicate actively under @tilvids@mstdn.social). It's been incredibly fun building a creator-focused video community with the goal of helping raise edutainment creators up, and eventually helping them move to control the hosting of their own content!
So they want to control what you see. Netflix showed them the way and it took them all these years to get there. This is what turned me off Netflix. I am just shown the same kind of content over and over and it quickly got boring. There was no way to discover new content at all. The worst part is the top ten lists also seem to catered to my past views. The moment I realized it, I cancelled Netflix. For YouTube this is the moment regulators should step in and talk about algorithms and echo chambers. I don’t expect them to but they should
Someone needs to make a user-friendly (AKA democratic) social media platform, compared to the autocratic, user-hostile platforms we're forced to use.
I don't hate Instagram because of the ads, I hate Instagram because they force "suggested posts" into my feed that I don't want to see. At least YouTube isn't inserting videos into my subscriptions.
YouTube search, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. They're all terrible because they don't give me any power to find the videos/content I actually want to watch.
Wonder how many 'we removed the dislike button because our advertising clients asked us to' bullshits we get before we see a Twitter style exodus to Odysee...
There comes a time where it is hard to add something to a popular platform to improve it. All low and medium hanging fruit are picked. But the teams that grew in the meantime need something to do... So they start redesigns that nobody wants and optimizations that improve nothing.
I've been rebuilding my command line YT client based on mpv, fzf, and yt-dlp (compatible with youtube-dl in all the ways that matter). Here's my search command:
Finally, since I often don't care about saving results, wanting instead to just view the playlist,
yt
==
ytsearch "$@" | ytplaylist
So, if I want to search for videos on butchering cows, I might do
$ yt 5 butcher cow
as a preliminary to make sure I'm getting the sorts of results I want, then do
$ yt 50 butcher cow
and get myself a beer. I could also save the results
$ ytsearch 50 butcher cow > deadbeef.json
and view the results at my leisure with
$ ytplaylist deadbeef.json
`deadbeef.json` will have extensive metadata for each video found, including a channel URL. Suppose with a bit of jq I find the URL for a really good channel; I can then
$ yt-dlp -j $CHANNEL_URL > cool-channel.json
to get a playlist for the entire channel, then operate on it like the results coming back from `ytsearch`.
which is handy for listing entire channels. The downside of using --flat-playlist is that the upload_date ends up null, so `ytplaylist` is modified to cope:
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.
Question: What’s the easiest way to watch a channel in chronological order? The “sort by oldest” option helps for the first couple of videos, but once you’re in the middle of a hundreds-of-videos channel neither sort option is practical.
I was just bit by this. I found an old friends channel and he has like daily uploads for 12 years and I was trying to find the start of the videos and I sure as hell didn’t want to scroll down through years of uploads…
"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.
This is the perfect moment to create a library of YouTube links with metadata. After they remove more search options, or search al together, you would still be able to search in this meta-youtube
Tangentially related: I noticed Google maps reviews has a “bug” on iOS when you are scrolling. When it comes to a bad review (1 or 2 stars), it jumps past it to a good review.
They seem to be removing or hiding features for more advanced users.
I am big user of saved lists where I keep all sorts of stuff from recipes to various ideas for the home I am preparing to build to financial or parenting advice to programming tutorials, etc.
Now on mobile there is no way to save it to the playlist. The only way is when it is still in search results (but you can't get back there after you clicked the video or from history!) So the best way for me to do it is to get myself to the laptop and save it from there.
Try tap+holding the "+ Save" button. If you just tap it the video goes to Watch Later but if you tap+hold it should show you a list of your playlists.
That said, the behavior's really janky. When I do this on my iPad you kinda have to 'hold+smudge' your finger around before it'll reveal the list for some reason and sometimes it just wants to save to Watch Later no matter what you do.
Sooner or later every social website adopts "driving away users" as its primary goal. YouTube isn't there yet, but they've finally started moving in that direction.
I think I'm at the point of just creating my own UI for YouTube. I'll keep track of my favorites, history, watch later, liked videos, etc. on my local machine.
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..
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.
Looks like along with filters they've removed the whole search. No results are shown in firefox or falkon. Although both are pretty outdated, everything worked until now. Youtube is broken as %s...
Advertising only makes money for the platforms if we don't have non-ad options. So, now that the pandora's box of ad-driven internet has been opened, good luck putting it away. At this point, you will have to kill all social media.
checks economy
Well, it looks like we've got a running start if we want to give it a go.
Youtube shorts is the most addictive thing I have ever used. I clicked it once to see what it was, and it hasn't turned off since.
The videos are exactly the same length as my attention span has shrunk to. They are all vertical, so, I'm probably doing it wrong using a desktop computer like some lunk from the twentieth century, but I can't stop myself.
I've fallen into a box I cannot crawl out of and have no desire to. I'm in trouble.
I would rather quit YT or use it only as a source of links for yt-dlp if I meet this restriction. I usually watch it in 2x-3.5x with some custom one-liner in bookmark which edits a special parameter for achieving more than 2x speed, but sometimes I really need 0.75x if a quality of sound is far from decent.
all platforms are addsales platforms,
how much they can optimize for add sales depends only on the userbase (with cable TV we have seen that anything goes, you can have 5min of movies between commerical blocks and people will still use it)
I am so glad I didn't remove YouTube Vanced when it got taken down. Before their NFT fracas they added SponsorBlock and Dislikes and it remains my go to YouTube Client. Hopefully AdVanced picks up where they left off.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some month ago they removed the Speed Up option when watching YT on TV.
This basically costs me hours of my life as I normally watch videos on 1.5 speed...
It seems to reappear and disappear and seems dependent on devices: the Onn Google tv stick seems to have had it disabled permanently but on the Chromecast with Google tv it still works fine. I also watch at 1.5 and would stop watching if I could no longer do that.
unrelated, but I really wish people would stop using old.reddit.com links.
reddit has support for user-preferences for exactly this. if you want the old site, you can make reddit.com resolve to the old site, or resolve to the new site, depending on your preference.
It also helps spreading the knowledge that there is this usable alternative under the "old." subdomain.
They could silently depreciate it if no one used it.
YouTube is a big platform. Rather than understanding and allowing for a diversity of viewers with different watching preferences, the platform wants everyone to be the same homogenous consumer without realizing that kids and adults are different!
It's so disappointed to have people with the power of propaganda misinform everyone that regression is progress!
Also a side effect of the move-fast, break-things-often hyper-"agile" mentality that treats the customer as the product, the advertiser as "king", shareholders over employees, and faceless customer service megabrands that provide their users zero recourse. This seems to be the current favored pattern for Silicon Valley-style companies.
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?
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".
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.
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…
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');
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.)
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
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... :-(
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"
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...
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.
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.
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 :/
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 am slightly depressed at how content on the web has evolved in the last decade. More and more content providers (youtube, Hulu, Netflix, etc) make their platforms harder and harder to search. They continue to promote what essentially they want you to consume.. and actual content your looking for is buried.
The other day I wanted to watch the last season of Legion (forget never finished the series) and was looking around for it. Turns out it is indeed on Hulu (which I have) however you would never just stumble on this. Despite my history of watching just about ever comic book series and comic book movie there is. Its almost like they don't have a true interest in pulling up what I want. Instead literally the front page is full of stuff I have zero interest in watching.
It's hard not to get a bit pessimistic about where this is all going, no? It's incredibly frustrating already, that many topics are almost impossible to search for nowadays (just on your favorite search engine). Adding `site:reddit.com` or whatever is the crutch many of us use, but in the end the fundamental problem is of course that less and less content is even available in places anymore that can be properly indexed. Only so much discussion happens on reddit or whatever. :(
I much prefer the old times of searching for some topic on google and if nothing came up, it was really because there likely wasn't significant discussion happening about said topic.
There is no new format [1]. Just stop referring to reddit.com when you think about the site. Go to https://old.reddit.com, and redirect everyone you know to it. Use an extension to redirect when you're not logged in [2]. Also change your site preferences to keep the old version when you are logged in. Everything works as expected.
Side note: If anyone in your life says "I like New Reddit", you have now identified a fundamental point of difference in taste with that person. Use this information wisely.
Reddit needs to realize the asinine mistakes that they have made in this "redesign" that no one asked for. The moment they remove or screw with the old site in any way, I'm gone and never coming back.
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[1] Just in case it isn't clear; this comment contains hyperbole for the sake of a little humor
The redesign does the important job of making the app look better in comparison, as you are reminded every time you load a page (if it loads properly).
I build and play lyres, and there's a thriving community of lyre players in Japan who have put a lot of videos on YouTube. None of them show up in my searches for lyre music, which quickly devolve into people playing funk bass and flying homebuilt airplanes, both of which I like, but still! I had to use NewPipe to search for them, go to YouTube, search for the user name, and subscribe to them before I could find them through YouTube's interface.
I'd search for keyword 'X'. There are some relevant results in the first dozen results, fine. And then I scroll on because I know that there is more, but the search results just... end? Like there's only ever going to be a dozen valid results for any search?
It is a sad day when I have to flip over to bing or somewhere to do a deeper search, rather than staying on-site.
(This is in general a kind of “life hack” — people who speak other languages will often use their own language to title+tag stuff even on otherwise English-language websites; so if you want to find stuff from a specific country, you can often surface higher-relevance content if you put your search keywords in the language that country speaks.)
I'm... honestly not sure. I think I got the right word, but I don't know a breath of Japanese, so I might have copied the wrong one. At any rate, the results of trying it just now were seriously underwhelming.
The trouble with Japanese in particular, but ideograph languages generally, is that the lack of explicit spaces makes tokenization nontrivial (you essentially need to parse words out using a model built on a dictionary) — and English-language websites don’t even bother to think about doing this when trying to build their search engines; they just throw things into Lucene or Postgres tsvector and think the problem solved. This results in indexing document titles in these languages as if they were bags of individual characters (i.e. splitting on every character.)
Other ideograph languages (e.g. Chinese) aren’t so bad when you do this, because enough information is captured per ideograph that losing ordering doesn’t actually change meaning that much. But Japanese is especially bad, because it often “reverts” to the hiragana or katakana alphabets for long strings of words, while still not putting any explicit word-break markers between saidwords. So you end up indexing a “bag of letters.” You can imagine the uselessness of such results.
Or, to put that another way: Japanese-language search “works” on English-language sites when you’re searching a term expressed in kanji. But when the term you want turns out to only have a katakana representation, it’s mostly not going to work.
And yes, Google themselves know all this and have solved all these problems for Google Search long ago. Apparently, the relevant tech never made it into YouTube.
I share the concern but as a web developer, it's pretty clear that keeping people watching a tight, edge-cacheable pool of videos is far cheaper than actual organic usage.
This is a great point. And additionally, when the storage and compute are cloud-based, and they get charged on a per-compute basis, you can start to see why every platform's search has gotten worse: they're incentivized to restrict the amount of searching that happens, because each search requires more compute, and probably compute of things that aren't cached already?
So you limit the amount of search and recommend the cache-able content, and cha-ching.
This is why searching for transactions in Stripe is a disaster, or finding email history in SendGrid is a pain, or any other search function on a sufficiently large data set.
Remember the compute costs: that's why it's purposefully built to be hard to find what you're looking for.
This is my hunch too. By heavily curating all content, a tiny portion will be served to a significant fraction of users, keeping costs lower by reducing the long tail as much as possible.
This started me wondering how Shorts/Reels/etc play into that paradigm. They're a major part these sites these days.
But they're shorter, smaller videos with tighter compression. 1min ~= 5MB, and it's easier to mix people through a pool of these (even allowing for content skews) with a little 200TB edge cluster able to hold 76 years of contiguous programming. Probably more efficient than full-format videos.
Tell me about it. I feel sorry for kids these days who never experienced the golden era. So innocent and simple and fun and curious.
Not good for the mass amounts of information available today, I'm not saying we should "go back to that" but I certainly do miss waking up with hot chocolate in the winter, dialing up 56K and when it finally connects I get a dopamine rush as the world opens up before my fingertips... a world of bad blinking alarm gifs, wild backgrounds, bright times new roman text, and very gray table borders.
I googled Legion, and there's a contextual box that shows it's on Hulu, among other services. I searched DDG for legion, no relevant hits, but when I searched for legion streaming, one of the ads shown is for Legion streaming on Hulu and the first non-ad result is Hulu as well.
I guess my point is, searching for something you want and manually scrolling through a catalog hoping the algorithm bestows a blessing upon you are two different things. If you know what you want to watch, you can find it easily via search. If you don't know what you want to watch, then really, you probably don't want to watch anything, so do what you do want to do. Take an active role in deciding what to do with your free time. Don't rely on some algorithm to make your decisions for you.
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.
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.
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)
For an entity that keeps posturing how they want to organize the worlds data, Google is really falling apart at the seams when it comes to making all that information, knowledge and content that people entrusted them with available in a basic, organized way. Especially when it comes to Youtube.
Hiding dislikes made entire genres on Youtube worthless and gave so much room to grifters. Now that you're forced to do your own curation, they make that harder, too. That's on top of the fact that the recommended sidebar has been a failed experiment at best for a decade and a half now, subscriptions at some point became nothing more than a soft recommendation unless you manually go through each and every one of them and subscribe to their notifications. The homepage is really just... sad.
I do not doubt for one second that Youtube is a beast among beasts to keep alive and the fact that it still exists is a feat itself.
But man, some of these decisions of the past few years, especially, really make it tough to look at the timeline of how that platform developed and keep a positive image of Google. I can only conclude that Google would rather be just-another-attention-parasite than a company that brings value to the world, if it means marginally more profit.
They do organize the worlds data. They organize it to best ensure that advertisements displayed next to the data are the most likely to affect the user on the site. They organize it at the request of corporations and governments. They organize it to be addictive, flashy, entertaining, divisive, and time consuming.
> subscriptions at some point become nothing more than a soft recommendation
The subscription feed isn't 100% rock solid, but I've used it pretty consistently, almost every day for at least the past decade, and find it quite reliable. It's reliable to the point that I don't think this is even a legitimate criticism: if you want videos from channels you've subscribed to, go to the page that is both easily accessible and expressly for that purpose. https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
I also dislike users that think that the home page is the subscriptions page, and complaining that they are missing videos (go to the subscriptions page!).
But I have personally seen on my own account videos from channels I follow that weren't displayed on the subscriptions page, and I noticed because they were displayed on the home page.
I have not visited the homepage other than by accident in many years, FYI. I am talking about results being omitted from the sub feed. This is related to the whole "notification bell" thing. Unless you turn on notifications - manually - for every channel, their uploads may be omitted in the feed. Unless something has changed at some point that I missed.
I agree that for me youtube's recommendations for me at least is spot on, so much so I watch more Youtube than any streaming service by a wide margin. But I do think that removing newest/oldest and downvote sucks, I love engaging in the comment section specially for scientific discussions since I like to gauge people's consensus and look for interesting interpretations.
One feature I wish YouTube would add is maybe a mood/topic setting so that when I am in the food to watch dense technical podcasts I can set YouTube to primarily prioritize those recommendations. Conversely on a lazy Sunday I may want to watch more casual fun topics, or maybe history focused content. Right now the recommendations are heavily swayed by my last Youtube binge, so on a Monday when I want to dive into technical topics, my recommendations are very lazy Sunday heavy.
This may depend on the amount of channels you're subscribed to. I've got a lot of subscriptions (423) , split mostly between music and educational channels.
Some of the channels that post less frequently just don't show up in my feed at all, which happen to be the more educational ones that I interact with the most. It is known among content creators that Youtube's algorithm highly prefers frequency and consistency, and I suspect that includes the subscription feed in cases where some results are omitted. I've gone to channels manually and realized I've missed the last five or six most recent uploads so many times now, and I check the subscriptions page almost daily and have been, for a long time.
On a side note, my bookmark points right to the subscription feed, because I think the homepage is an abomination. I can only recommend that to anyone.
I agree. What I don't understand is why don't they make these features they removed available in their paid plans. As much as I'd hate to admit it, I would probably pay to have these removed features and more.
It's a reddit post[OP], that links to an article[1], that links to a specific comment in a reddit post[2] which is a reply to the actual comment[3] that contains the link[4] to a specific section of a YouTube video, which contains the actual confirmation.
After sifting through all that, they didn't give a reason, which is pretty lame, but alludes to the fact that it's helpful for them and not for you. Presumably this is step one in storing old videos on glacier-like storage so it costs them less (and inevitably will let them play you more ads while they retrieve it)
[1] https://piunikaweb.com/2022/11/10/youtube-sorting-option-for...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/tx0uln/question_ha...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/tx0uln/question_ha...
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0WYt7hgXhQ&t=48s