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!
Privacy badger is redundant on top of Firefox's maximum setting for tracker protection and using the available blocklists in uBlock Origin.
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…
based on experience there could be a bunch of pretty innocuous reasons e.g. 1. some company wide simplification effort on user options 2. some weird coupling of the UI project to the backend project, where this functionality was an edge case that they could postpone til after launch
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…
The answer is money. It's always money. I absolutely 100% guarantee they ran some kind of analysis and found they made less money when people looked at older content per channel, on average.
Relevant tweet by YouTube CEO: https://twitter.com/nealmohan/status/1655999215515074561
It's astounding that such a simple feature was dropped, firstly, and then got a re-launch mentioned by the CEO himself "after hearing some great feedback"... it's just a sorting order, honestly this should have never been removed. Those big platforms really got to go.
I don't want to speculate baselessly but if you've worked in big companies you'll know seemingly simple features become complicated with scale. This is especially when you are YouTube. It could be that the old feature was causing production problems and had to be removed, while a more efficient re-implementation is underway. I mean just look at what Google's Cloud Spanner says about using timestamps as keys: https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/schema-design Having both sort by latest and sort by oldest in an efficient way could very well be a nontrivial problem.
And (for me at least) the Save to Watch Later button is no more when hovering the video thumbnail on the Subscriptions feed [1] :/ Now is behind the three dots drop-down menu, not as handy as before. [1] https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions (you must be logged in)
Making a quick queue from a selection of suggestions should really be YT’s bread and buttery, especially if they’re pivoting to a shorts focus, yet they removed that button (for me at least). I used that button all the time, it made it quick and easy to basically program my own block of television. Hope it comes back or I’ll have to look for an extension.
Relevant tweet by YouTube CEO: https://twitter.com/nealmohan/status/1655999215515074561
"This feature is set to launch in the coming months." It sounds like he wants a round of applause for this big deal release. They can't even admit that it was a mistake to remove it... or maybe he is like a lot of writers/directors for new games and movies in old franchises that were never fans/users of the original materials.
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 think inexperienced developers fall into the trap of implementing whatever they are told to, probably to show that they can. I think it's important that developers think about what they're being requested to do, and suggest alternatives if it makes the software crappier from the user's perspective.
Do you think an inexperienced developer at YT made this change?
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.
I think this hints at a concept I find very hard to articulate about letting metrics guide your design. You set out with metrics that seem plausible, you work to improve them, and if they do improve, you call the design a success. But then it actually turns out the metrics were no good in the first place because they “improve” for scenarios where you’ve most certainly made the user experience worse. Metrics proponents would argue that you should have had better metrics, but then I start to feel that the problem of selecting the right metrics becomes an art form just as subjective and complicated as designing a good UI in the first place, at which point they’re no help.