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YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

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Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use Chrome, YouTube Shorts Block [1] is a good extension for that, and removes (mostly) Shorts videos. Not perfect, still leaves some traces (e.g. empty spaces, channel titles in subscriptions), but it helps to declutter your user experience. And while we're talking about extensions to customize your YT experience, here's three more that I really enjoy: - Clickbait Remover [2], to remove the usually clickbait-…

Do we have equivalents for Firefox as well? I'm struggling to find them.

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Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The median persons rabbit hole was actually conspiracy theories, racism, and racist conspiracies. Just like TV, there's some amazing content, but there's also reality shows and guess what people watch the most.

Two questions: 1. Whose role is it to make judgements about whether people should be able to find certain kinds of content? 2. Do you think modern recommendation systems are better at keeping people away from that kind of content? The thing is, as of now, if a recommendation algorithm identifies you as someone that responds to that kind of content, whether negatively or positively, it'll show you so much of it that y…

>1. Whose role is it to make judgements about whether people should be able to find certain kinds of content?

Well for starters, there's the user. Once youtube decides you like a certain type of content that it wants to amplify, there is no "ok enough of this" button. You can't dismiss the categories it makes up for you.

And for enders, well your real question comes down to the question of if sufficiently effective psychological engineering contradicts, at least for some large fraction of people, personal agency. Suppose there was an adversarial patch we discovered that you could hide in a banner ad to make 15% of people read a completely different article than the one that is actually in front of them. That's may not be a highly efficient hack, but its more than the margins on nearly any election. How do we police these newly discovered neural-network hacks?

There's no question in my hypothetical on the matter of the victims personal agency in forming opinions and seeking information. I took care of that in the premise. They have no control, its a design flaw in the brain that is being exploited. But, where along the continuum of plausible technology does one draw the line between brains being hacked and people having agency in what they choose to see and believe?

I don't know either.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#163

Does anyone else find YouTube's search near-unusable for some topic domains?

This is deliberate. It's probably for the same reasons why comments are arbitrarily sorted and why live chat always sorts by "Top" rather than "Newest" (whatever "Top" even means to YouTube, idk)

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#164

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…

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Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#165

I would love to be able to hide Shorts for good instead of having to do it every 30 days. I wonder what technical issue is preventing them to accomplish such task.

Definitely... I built a mobile app for android to block me to go to Shorts and waste hours of doom-scrolling... I will release it on the Play Store if someone need it as well.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#166

I would love to be able to hide Shorts for good instead of having to do it every 30 days. I wonder what technical issue is preventing them to accomplish such task.

Assuming this is a serious question: it’s a marketing decision not a technical limitation. They want you to watch shorts, hence every month they reappear.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#167

Now for them to bring back the 5 star rating system and video replies!

I sometimes get a box asking me to rate a video I've watched earlier with stars, so that system is apparently not gone completely.

That's funny. So internally they agree that a stars system is more valuable, but for the broad public they have the like/(hidden) dislike.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#170
Does anybody know how to play all videos from channel in chronological order (from oldest-to-newest)? There is a trick to play them newest-to-oldest with some viewing page's source magic ('&list=UU...') and it works pretty reliably, but what about oldest-to-newest?
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