YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby • Hacker News Board

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#181

Post by jeron » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 6:56 PM UTC

jamespullar wrote: post #118

cesarvarela wrote: post #115

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.

I doubt it's a technical issue. The current YouTube CEO, Neal Mohan, has made a big push for Shorts. This is almost certainly a business decision.

it's a business decision that makes sense. Short form entertainment is a huge market that TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat have been cashing in on. It may be annoying to users but to those that adopt, YouTube stands to gain a lot from it

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#182

Post by bad_username » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 7:29 PM UTC

IIAOPSW wrote: post #140

FullstakBlogger wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The negatives being what? Technical? Social? Having a traversable landscape of content is incredibly valuable. I think "search results as search criteria"/"traversal by adjacency" is the only real feasible way to organize the web, and the fact that we've moved away from that is the reason google search is often now useless. ChatGPT is valuable as a search replacement/amplifier because it reproduces that adjacency in…

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.

That is a terrible justification. "We can't have nice things because dumb people exist"

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#183

Post by junon » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 8:42 PM UTC

411111111111111 wrote: post #172

junon wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your threat model?

The thread model is that maintainers of popular extensions get offers of several thousand $ all the time to pass over ownership. And there have been several incidents in which the new owners added trackers to the extension itself, tracking the user across all domains. These extensions usually have full access to the DOM, so they can do everything they want to. So their question is very much warrented: installing as n…

That's not a threat model, at all.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#184

Post by orf » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 9:42 PM UTC

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"

I imagine the cost of the index used to store videos by oldest uploaded outweighed the likely marginal number of users who used it?

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#185

Post by shultays » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 2:43 AM UTC

charcircuit wrote: post #127

bongobingo1 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the far more experienced HN audience, is there a viable technical reason for this to not stick past 30 days? I would cynically assume it's a solely dark pattern, but I have never built at such a scale as youtube.

Shorts is a growing format on YouTube. The inventory of videos is increasing over time. If someone clicks the X button indicating the recommended shorts are not relevant after 30 days there will be many more new videos. Potentially some of these new videos will now be relevant enough to show the user. Additionally the X button is not labelled unless you o haver over it after which it says "Not interested." If it were…

How many times users has to click "don't recommend shorts" before youtube decides it is not for them? By that logic, no user setting should be permanent.

  Growing format

Hard for it not to considering youtube tries its best to mark videos as short. Some of my older videos are now shorts and I can't convert them

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#186

Post by shultays » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 2:52 AM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #99

qiqitori wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Maybe? Generally bad UX decisions are opposed by more experienced devs, often because of the edge cases that are not considered by designers, while less experienced devs just do it.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#187

Post by pcurve » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 4:25 AM UTC

IIAOPSW wrote: post #54

youtube is quickly approaching feature parity with mid 2000s youtube. Same for Google maps and even Gmail.

Remember there used to be a visual graph of view count trend for each video? That was neat.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#188

Post by nurettin » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 4:28 AM UTC

junon wrote: post #183

411111111111111 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thread model is that maintainers of popular extensions get offers of several thousand $ all the time to pass over ownership. And there have been several incidents in which the new owners added trackers to the extension itself, tracking the user across all domains. These extensions usually have full access to the DOM, so they can do everything they want to. So their question is very much warrented: installing as n…

That's not a threat model, at all.

The threat is what's important. Nobody will give you a six slide c-level powerpoint presentation.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#189

Post by edanm » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 7:23 AM UTC

badtension wrote: post #82

adamsvystun wrote: post #69

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.

> Those big platforms really got to go.

I mean, you say that, but... what is the alternative? YouTube is the host of some of the most valuable content on the internet, in my opinion, and some (some!) of the most valuable content produced by humanity. And it allows anyone to access it for free, with incredible technical specs. This is a non-trivial problem, and incredibly expensive.

Sure, I dislike that they play around with features that I think are valuable. But given everything else I get from YouTube, I'm not exactly complaining, and for sure I wouldn't wish them gone without having some idea of what could replace them (and I don't think that exists).

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#190

Post by junon » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 10:17 AM UTC

nurettin wrote: post #188

junon wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a threat model, at all.

The threat is what's important. Nobody will give you a six slide c-level powerpoint presentation.

I mean... I don't really have a response to this. This is security modeling 101. To different threat models, this is a varying degree of a threat - anywhere from "not a threat" to "unacceptable threat".

You cannot universally answer the question "how much of a threat are chrome extensions".