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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

#131

Post by abnercoimbre »

throwaway0223 wrote: post #125
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-…

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

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#132

Post by atdt »

throwaway0223 wrote: post #125
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-…

Fantastic list, thank you. I didn't know about most of these. What's the benefit of the video speed controller over the playback speed controls provided by YouTube?

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#133

Post by crazygringo »

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"

That wouldn't make sense. YouTube wants you to watch ads, not click around the UX.

Time spent scrolling is not time spent watching ads. So that is definitely not a metric YouTube is optimizing for.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#135

Post by seanhunter »

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.

Yup. Hate shorts. Hate the "mix" things that appear in the middle of my feed also.

There are a couple of blocker addons for firefox (eg youtube-shorts-block) which I'm going to try out.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#136

Post by FullstakBlogger »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #114
FullstakBlogger wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't wait for them to bring back the old related videos list. When is the last time you've heard someone use the term "youtube rabbit hole"? The effect is so lost, people who never experienced it don't even use the term wrongly to describe how things are now.

They removed it for a reason. Hard to imagine having the rabbit hole effect while avoiding all the negatives of it too.

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 a roundabout way.

If you want to know what kind of quality a given printer produces, good luck finding a picture on google. All you'll see is ad-infested, auto-generated top-n lists.

Applying the old youtube related model, you'd just have to find one picture to be a few degrees of separation from a picture of a print job from any printer ever manufactured.

The idea of objective universal ranking is a wash, and ranking based on N paramaters isn't much better.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#137

Post by Wunderdeer »

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.

This has always been my suspicion, considering older videos (or just videos with not a lot of views in general) tend to take noticeably longer to load.

My immediate assumption is these videos are not edge cached, so naturally they want their platform to avoid delivering these types of videos. They would rather stick to the well-cached, proven popular videos that are currently circulating.

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#138

Post by Scarlxd »

throwaway0223 wrote: post #125
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-…

For android BlockerHero [1]

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blockerher...

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#139

Post by Fatnino »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #116
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.

There is no technical issue, they realized that shorts make them more money, so they are pushing that.

How do shorts make money?

I thought shorts is just a way for YouTube to make sure everyone knows tiktok exists. They all end with an ad for tiktok

Re: YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

#140

Post by IIAOPSW »

FullstakBlogger wrote: post #136
eddythompson80 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They removed it for a reason. Hard to imagine having the rabbit hole effect while avoiding all the negatives of it too.

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.
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