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YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#121

Post by ehnto »

ninkendo wrote: post #102
Solvency wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anecdotally, there must be some difference, as it often takes longer to get a video started if it's old.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#122

Post by chii »

ninkendo wrote: post #100
KeepFlying wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proponent…

> selecting the right metrics becomes an art form just as subjective and complicated as designing a good UI in the first place

this is absolutely the truth!

I would say that perhaps what is lacking is a clear vision of the product. Steve jobs didn't use metrics for the initial design of the iphone.

I suspect that as a company grows bigger and bigger, the product loses the initial visionary that created the success in the first place. May be the "founder" (of the product, not necessarily of the actual company) left, or moved on, and what remains is just diluted responsibility between a few different people. Therefore, they resort to metrics, as they have no idea what works, nor have a vision.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#123

Post by bongobingo1 »

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.

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.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#124

Post by JKCalhoun »

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'm not sure, I mean I'm no Dennis Ritchie, but I feel like if I got into the code I might be able to push it out to 45 days. Waddaya say, Google?

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#125

Post by throwaway0223 »

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.

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-ish video thumbnails

- Unhook [3], to remove the recommended videos entirely. This extension helped me reduce the time spent on YT. I now browse recommendations on my phone much more quickly, add what I want to check out to Watch Later queue, so on desktop I only search, check subscriptions, or consume my WL queue

- Video Speed Controller [4]. This one is super popular, so probably you already have it installed.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-shorts-blo...

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickbait-remover-...

[3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...

[4] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#126

Post by thrdbndndn »

kccqzy wrote: post #94
badtension wrote: post #82

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://…

I agree with you in general, but in this particular case? No, I really don't believe it's a technical issue.

It of course may not be as simple as your random hobby projects, but Google has the manpower that is proportional to the complexity of YouTube.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#127

Post by charcircuit »

bongobingo1 wrote: post #123
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.

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 permanent people may accidently click this button and then they will never be recommended shorts even if they enjoy them. People's opinions about shorts way change over time. After a month they may actually want to engage with the format. Having to go search through some menu buried somewhere to enable shorts on the home page again is not user friendly.

Being able to do exploration is an important part of recommendation systems. Allowing a user to do just exploitation is going to lead to a worse experience in them long term.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#128

Post by antegamisou »

normaldist wrote: post #113

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

I can search for a specific term and a few scrolls later I'll get videos I previously watched or liked as search results, which never have any relevance to the term I entered.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#129

Post by briga »

bongobingo1 wrote: post #123
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.

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.

Tiktok makes big money and is a direct competitor to YouTube, so YouTube is pushing the format to capture that audience back. It’s a far more engaging pattern that what existed before. Remember when YouTube forced autoplay on everyone? Doesn’t make for a better experience, but if users are more engaged that’s all that counts for execs at YouTube

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#130

Post by andersrs »

stefanos82 wrote: post #20
BasedAnon wrote: post #15

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

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

I don't know what is up with companies wanting to ban the dislike emotion. Spotify used to have a dislike button for that one awful song your favourite musician produced. No longer, I have to skip the same song over and over.
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