Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 199 posts

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#61

Post by yafbum »

usui wrote: post #44
stefanos82 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really need to fix this, because I have lost counting how many times I've got click-baited with a video that contained either violence in it or its content was completely unrelated to its thumbnail...therefore a visible dislike counter would have saved me from giving them views when they should have removed them from the platform as a whole. If any YouTube developer is reading this, please fix this dangerous beh…

I'm not sure how to say this without being at least a little offensive: If the above request is in earnest, it is incredibly naïve. You don't think they know this is a problem for users, or that legions of other users share this thought, or more charitably, do you think that sharing this thought will make a difference? Google doesn't want to solve the fact that users spend more time watching clickbait and low quality…

I think YouTube cares quite a bit about clickbait. Just looking at its recommendations vs everything else I see online, it seems fairly tame in terms of clickbaitiness. Check out the trash labeled "powered by Outbrain" across the web...

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#62

Post by rand0mx1 »

stefanos82 wrote: post #38
93po wrote: post #27

Great. Can we get Amazon to have price sorting work too please? And have it actually accurately show cost per unit across similar products? I have to believe it's deliberately broken in both cases which is fucking annoying.

TIL...that Privacy Badger extension and uBlock Origin affect the "Sort by" options in Amazon! I have disabled both of them and got my results properly sorted by "Price: Low to High" while with both extensions on, it defaults to Featured!

This is false information, ublock origin doesn't affect 'Sort by' feature.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#64

Post by KeepFlying »

autoexec wrote: post #52
crazygringo wrote: post #40

Confirmed. Now I'm just curious what the justification was for removing it, because it baffles me. The option was removed as part of a general UX refresh that moved from a sort drop-down to pill buttons -- this general drop-down -> pill thing seeming to be a general trend on apps and websites now. But it's hard to imagine why it was removed in the first place. Saving a minuscule amount money by reducing views of less…

I'm guessing someone (or something) made the argument that forcing people to scroll through every video uploaded to a channel just to get to the oldest ones "increased engagement"

If it's anything like redesign work I'm used to, someone redesigned and just happened to remove it with little reason for it. Then the numbers went up as people had to scroll so they assumed everyone loved the redesign and didn't question why.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#65

Post by KeepFlying »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #43
skeaker wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video replies was a crazy idea in retrospect. Being able to anchor arbitrary videos to any other video at will is insanely ripe for abuse. If the feature existed today you would surely see thousands of spam videos with no relevance to the content they're replying to stuck underneath anything remotely popular. It's a wonder it ever worked as intended at all.

I think it could be a neat idea if you allowed the creator to choose which videos are posted as replies. I know there's so many times where a youtuber mentions something like "if I'm wrong/ignorant post me a link", and the ability to point to a video providing a better method would be invaluable. OFC, I'm assuming a utopic world here. There's no incentive for neither Youtube nor the creator to do this, as opposed to…

I'm curious if there's a good way to extend this to reply videos that refute the main video. If you lock it to the original authors control then if someone e disagrees with them and is fact checking their BS that reply would never get seen.

Maybe an author's hilight section and then an "other replies" that's more open.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#66

Post by stefanos82 »

rand0mx1 wrote: post #62
stefanos82 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL...that Privacy Badger extension and uBlock Origin affect the "Sort by" options in Amazon! I have disabled both of them and got my results properly sorted by "Price: Low to High" while with both extensions on, it defaults to Featured!

This is false information, ublock origin doesn't affect 'Sort by' feature.

It does affect it, at least under Firefox; check your web developer tools.

Here's a tiny portion of a massive error message:

    Error logged with the Track&Report JS errors API(http://tiny/1covqr6l8/wamazindeClieUserJava): {"m":"undefined Unknown error","name":"Error","csm":"v5 ueLogError stack","logLevel":"ERROR","attribution":"APE-safeframe","pageURL":"https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mastering+perl&s=price-asc-rank&ds=v1%3ANxZp5S66jp%2F1FIQyOG0JNqN4D96zzLqBks5YP1xArBo","f":"https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mastering+perl","l":2039,"s":["logError eval:1:372"

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#67

Post by jsnell »

crazygringo wrote: post #40

Confirmed. Now I'm just curious what the justification was for removing it, because it baffles me. The option was removed as part of a general UX refresh that moved from a sort drop-down to pill buttons -- this general drop-down -> pill thing seeming to be a general trend on apps and websites now. But it's hard to imagine why it was removed in the first place. Saving a minuscule amount money by reducing views of less…

My guess is that it was a feature that was used rarely and only by a tiny proportion of the userbase. That kind of feature is always at a high risk of being cut if it causes even the tiniest problem. In this specific case, if an option that's used 0.01% of the time is making the UI look cramped when the contents of a dropdown get inlined, why not remove it? Nobody's going to care.

Except that sometimes people do care. It's pretty hard to know in advance whether https://xkcd.com/1172/ will apply or not. You can't run any kind of UX study because odds are that the only way you get people to interact with the feature is by making up an artificial scenario that basically forces them to use it. You can't even run an A/B test because every fewer people will actually reduce their YouTube usage over this. They might be unhappy, but their level of happiness doesn't show up in metrics.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#68

Post by ralusek »

crazygringo wrote: post #40

Confirmed. Now I'm just curious what the justification was for removing it, because it baffles me. The option was removed as part of a general UX refresh that moved from a sort drop-down to pill buttons -- this general drop-down -> pill thing seeming to be a general trend on apps and websites now. But it's hard to imagine why it was removed in the first place. Saving a minuscule amount money by reducing views of less…

I suspect that YouTube would much prefer to move away from being considered a video repository, and instead be considered a video feed.

I don't know the figure, but if I had to guess, I would wager that 95% of their views at any given time go to videos produced in the most recent month. Video is incredibly expensive to store, and almost all of what they're storing is basically sitting in a graveyard.

Post reply on HN