Live data from Hacker News

YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

news.ycombinator.com

101–110 of 199 posts

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and the dislike counting! I don't want to depend on an extension to know whether a video worth to watch or not.

The problem with dislike counting is that the customers of Youtube (advertisers) do not want it, because they are spooked to have their ads associated with perceived negativity.

They already turn off engagement with some of the YouTube short ads, why not do it for all ads?

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#102

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.

I always wonder about YouTube’s storage infrastructure and whether they move old videos to cold storage in a way that is costly to recover, and that maybe that’s why they try to discourage watching older videos… but that is probably a bit oversimplified.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#103
post #92
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Postpone until after launch" === "Never build"

Perhaps not in this case, since it's now back.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#104
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I'm aware, that feature never worked. Who knows why they even keep it. Surely they don't actually think we're that stupid that we won't notice that the price sorting doesn't work.

The problem is search is incredibly fuzzy and only saved by relevance filtering. So if you sort by price you get the strangest crap at the cheapest end.

[deleted]

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#105
post #75

The pinnacle of perf-driven-development! PM lists an OKR for increasing engagement. PM launches a new version without the feature. New version shows engagement(or whatever corpspeak metric) increased by N%. PM gets a promotion. Dev sees a missing feature, launches the feature. Dev shows M people are using this new feature. Dev gets a promotion for 'impact'. And the cycle repeats, with minor variations for mature prod…

OKR surfing

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#106
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://…

Isn't that the type of sorting you basically only need to do once? Or I guess in the rare cases when a video gets taken down, privated or relisted? I know it's not super rare but it would still be a much rarer event than users sorting by old. So they can just keep the list or set of video IDs, no need for expensive db operations right?

(I'm being a complete armchair expert here, since I have no idea of the actual state of the YouTube backend. It might look simple to me but I'm sure it's not in reality . I'm curious to see what would be the best way to optimize a feature like this one!)

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#107
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with dislike counting is that the customers of Youtube (advertisers) do not want it, because they are spooked to have their ads associated with perceived negativity.

Advertisers have always had ways to block likes and dislikes. The problem was that dislike counts were abused by people driving dislikes on videos for inauthentic reasons (YouTuber supports cause X, we disagree with X, therefore let's all go dislike all of this YouTuber's videos). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_brigading Removing public dislike counts takes a good amount of wind out of such campaigns

Hiding dislikes just showed the content was unpopular.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#109

Are you talking about the mobile native app? Because at least for me, on desktop web is still only Latest and Popular https://imgur.com/a/XBFvmen [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/@theneedledrop/videos

"Oldest" shows on Windows using Chrome for me.

Oh, I'm on Windows too but using Firefox.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#110

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"

Knowing Google, it was probably a feature that someone didn’t think was important enough in a UI refresh to spend time on and was added now because the team happened to have time (or the interns have started).
Post reply on HN