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YouTube confirms that it has removed the “sort by oldest/newest” option

• switch007 4y ago
  Tangentially related: I noticed Google maps reviews has a “bug” on iOS when you are scrolling. When it comes to a bad review (1 or 2 stars), it jumps past it to a good review.
• ryankrage77 4y ago
  It seems the feature has been restored. As of the November 7th update: > TeamYouTube has confirmed that they are working to bring the sorting options back to the platform. Furthermore, they said that the options were removed due to some issues. It's not clear if they wanted to remove it and reverted due to backlash, or if there were genuine technical issues/limitations that needed to be addressed.
  • kasabali 4y ago
    Why do you think it "has been restored"? In the quote it says " they are working ". I can confirm Youtube web site viewed on Firefox still lacks the option.
  • willsmith72 4y ago
    > due to some issues This is amazing, I wanna use it someday. Were the issues technical? Maybe. Were the issues problematic decision makers who've been overridden? Also maybe. We'll never know
    • texasbigdata 4y ago
      Lehman Brothers was temporarily disrupted due to “some issues”. Did it come back? Irrelevant.
    • kleiba 4y ago
      Right, that's only half a step up from "due to reasons".
    • Gareth321 4y ago
      This is what happens when a company becomes a monopoly. They don't give a fuck anymore because "what are you going to do? Leave? Lol."
      • maximus-decimus 4y ago
        Windows isn't technically a Monopoly, but that's still how it feels? "We'll show them ads in the logout menu. What are they gonna do? Switch to Linux?"
  • justsomehnguy 4y ago
    > were genuine technical issues/limitations I can't even imagine what can be a technical limitation to break sorting on something what worked for more than a decade.
    • eurasiantiger 4y ago
      The fun thing is, it’s probably because they stuff everything into a big giant database and that just doesn’t play well with the fact that any user ever accesses a millionth of a millionth of a percent of those database rows.
    • zinekeller 4y ago
      > I can't even imagine what can be a technical limitation to break sorting on something what worked for more than a decade. The default sort (which is reverse chronological) is more likely cached than chronological order. It could be that it's not really about if it could be done but assuming this is really a good-faith problem it could be that the chip crunch made optimising performance a priority and removing effectively-uncacheble (or alternatively space-consuming) chronological order did remove some pressure.
  • rroot 4y ago
    >due to some issues How messed up does your DB schema need to be that you have issues with ordering entries by date?
    • hjanssen 4y ago
      I think with the scale requirements of YouTube, we can not assume that the search is powered by one single DB or any traditional, relational DB at all. Some things that are easy with one DB, get surprisingly hard when you scale up. Lets give them the benefit of the doubt regarding technical issues here.
      • soulofmischief 4y ago
        I don't give them the benefit of the doubt, because they should have had proper testing in place before anything like this reached production. This is either intentional or grossly negligent.
        • pixl97 4y ago
          What are you going to do, go somewhere else?
          • soulofmischief 4y ago
            I've written a YouTube clone, so yes, that's my plan eventually. That's the same argument used in domestic abuse situations.
      • dontlaugh 4y ago
        Going by Vitess, they may still be using heavily sharded MySQL.
        • osser 4y ago
          Not any more https://github.com/vitessio/vitess/pull/9760#issue-1147218047 https://github.com/vitessio/vitess/pull/9760#issue-114721804...
  • seydor 4y ago
    > TeamYouTube has confirmed that they are working to bring the sorting options back to the platform. OK this kind of grandiose framing makes me giggle
    • superdisk 4y ago
      They're leveraging new ORDER BY technology to deliver amazing product experiences.
      • ajsnigrutin 4y ago
        Somebody should probably patent those "DESC" and "ASC" things...
  • whywhywhywhy 4y ago
    > It's not clear if they wanted to remove it and reverted due to backlash, or if there were genuine technical issues/limitations that needed to be addressed. I dunno seems clear as day to me... Like what are the odds the company that processes the largest amount of data in the world on a daily basis can't sort some results by date.
  • crazygringo 4y ago
    I think it's UX rather than technical. It used to be a drop-down box, now it's pill buttons that (confusingly) are usually used for filtering rather than sorting. So I'm assuming it was something to do with the UX rewrite getting in the way.
    • moffkalast 4y ago
      Well I for one, like that it's now possible to sort channel videos at all on mobile. The dropdown was completely missing before in Vanced, but the pill buttons show up now.
  • hedora 4y ago
    The thread later says they're running a poll asking users for feedback. Do you really use "sort by oldest"?, etc. I'm guessing they'll end up killing it.
    • Robotbeat 4y ago
      I do!
• nokeya 4y ago
  I think it is simply bad for business to have this sort option, thats why they tried to remove it. When users wants to sort video order backwards, they have to do additional queries to db (costs money) instead of showing cached page, find and load video from disk (costs money) instead of showing cached from memory, deliver this video to user from central servers (costs money) instead of delivering it from cache server located on the last mile. So, removing backward sorting means less money spent on servers, simplier code and faster further development (less money spent on developers). And later they will say something like "it was used by 0,001% of our users, nobody will miss it". Just business.
  • user_named 4y ago
    It's not about reducing the costs you mention it's about showing only what they want to show the users, because those videos somehow make more money for them.
    • nokeya 4y ago
      "A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned", you know.
      • user_named 4y ago
        Still not what it's about
  • roenxi 4y ago
    This theory, that a company dedicated to serving videos struggles technically to serve videos in a cost-effective way, seems unlikely. The default position should be that if the video is on YouTube, they're happy to serve it. If YouTube doesn't want to serve a video it makes more sense to simply not host it. And indeed they routinely get rid of videos that they think will lose them money.
    • nokeya 4y ago
      Also I have noticed several times that if they did not get rid of the whole video, they get rid of the hi quality versions of it, eventually that leads to video being 360p only, when originally it was 1080p.
• causi 4y ago
  Do they not actually want people to use the service? You find a channel you really like, then you watch their content from first to last. What kind of lunatic watches someone's uploads out of chronological order? How can you keep track of what you have and haven't seen if you do that? Youtube may as well remove subscriptions and replace the home page with a big-ass "Random" button. You know what makes more database queries than sorting by date? Making me manually scroll through thousands of videos to the bottom and loading thumbnails for all of them. I don't care how restrictive they make the API, they can't stop me from writing a "start from oldest" extension that gives you a button to just automatically scroll to the bottom. What kind of goddamn sociopath OK's a change like this?
  • cruano 4y ago
    Oh it's way worse than random, I think half my home page are videos I've already watch so surely I'd just LOVE to watch them again right ?
    • causi 4y ago
      Same. I don't know why nobody at youtube understands that, yes, I might want to watch a funny 53-second video again but I probably don't want to spend an hour re-watching part nine of a Let's Play from 2015.
    • texasbigdata 4y ago
      It’s probably a unsolveable computer science problem to add a filter that says “how many times does this user rewatch content, or dismiss recommended content she has already seen” and then not serving stale content. Personally, unless I’m quering something that’s fairly narrow, for recommendations you push to me please never show me anything older than 36 months. No, I don’t want an 8 year old video on this topic.
      • watwut 4y ago
        Yeah, but normal people watch/listen the same music video 300 times, but then see the comedy video or documentary video only once. And for age, it is also fairly normal to listen to music older then 36 months. And to watch educational videos older then that. Or crafting videos older then that. Or tutorial videos older then that. Most of time, I am cool with old videos.
• Zealotux 4y ago
  Business idea: make an app to browse Youtube channels with efficient filtering and sorting, like "most popular video in the last 3 months", I believe it's impossible on Youtube right now.
  • seydor 4y ago
    "Youtube blocks access to BusinessIdea.com" -- because our search is better(TM)
  • afandian 4y ago
    I used to use NewPipe when I had an Android. It was great for "subscribing" to creators without needing a Google account. Youtube kept breaking it. Don't know if it still works. https://newpipe.net/ https://newpipe.net/
    • akpa1 4y ago
      It does still work, though sometimes it can be a little hit-or-miss. I'd say it does what I want about 70% of the time.
    • Run_DOS_Run 4y ago
      I use NewPipe daily. It works pretty stable and the developers are working on it very active. As soon as Youtube breaks it (once every 1-2 months), the developers release a new version mostly next day.
      • daef 4y ago
        I really <3 the fork with sponsorblock support: https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe/ https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe/ and I don't get why the NewPipe devs are against upstreaming it... kudos to polymorphicshade, updates in NewPipe get handed over pretty fast.
        • worble 4y ago
          They made a whole blog post explaining it: https://newpipe.net/blog/pinned/newpipe-and-online-advertising/ https://newpipe.net/blog/pinned/newpipe-and-online-advertisi... Personally I would've just been fine with them saying that it's feature creep and maintenance burden they don't want, I'm sure newpipe is already more than enough work to keep up with in it's current state, but there you go.
• seydor 4y ago
  It's a pity that YT is being so obnoxious with their search and directory pages. I find myself often searching for things that i shouldnt be searching. They overemphasize creators that post new content even when they (must) know that i m binging on a specific channel's older videos. Search is broken btw, things do not show up, and sometimes i had to ask google to find a video for me. Why is it so hard to give us simple controls?
  • Gareth321 4y ago
    Google search now works MILES better than YouTube search for content. That's pathetic.
• Ekaros 4y ago
  Hmm, the old ones might have a point. Recently it seems that Youtube have started to suggest me some old videos of 10 or so years. But funny thing is I don't think they are in any fresh cache so it takes tens or seconds or what feels like minutes for them to start streaming... Maybe they try to avoid getting stuff from cold storage...
  • tzfld 4y ago
    May be a paid feature in the future, seeing videos older than x years.
• justsomehnguy 4y ago
  Ask HN: Someone who has uploaded videos in their Youtube account - are there still ways to sort them chronologically? If yes then it is clearly not a metadata/technical issue *grin*
  • vouaobrasil 4y ago
    You can also create a playlist and put all your videos there, which I believe also gives an oldest to newest list.
• HelloNurse 4y ago
  As of right now, on Firefox the "videos" tab in a channel has a "Recently Uploaded" button that appears to sort videos by date newest first.
  • bspammer 4y ago
    It's still impossible to search by oldest first though. There are popular channels with well over 10,000 videos - if I want to go back and watch their early videos what am I meant to do? Leave a brick on my mouse and wait for 3 hours for the feed to scroll to the end? No doubt it would crash before then anyway.
  • Gigachad 4y ago
    The only thing dropped seems to be the oldest first view. I assume it was rarely used.
• vrnmh 4y ago
  Reminds me of 1st image of https://bonkersworld.net/guns-and-roses https://bonkersworld.net/guns-and-roses
• jdthedisciple 4y ago
  it's seriously ironic - and kind of humurous - how a service starts out striving for the best and most convenient features and user experience, grows humongously big because of those and then becomes so gigantic that they think they have to cut back on the same... eventually it will have 5 billion users and just serve a single, bland feed of random videos with no options and choices ... ... wait, no it will probably die before that happens.
  • cube00 4y ago
    It's not really, the service is designed to make money, it makes money from ads, it can only do this if the eyeballs stay on the service. If you can go from start to finish you might leave when you're done. Hard to leave when you only have a scatter gun way to view the content.
    • thallium205 4y ago
      But they are removing these features from people who pay them $20+/mo also…
      • dbmnt 4y ago
        Unfortunately that's a small subset of users. MKBHD calculated it to be about $20 mil in revenue for paid users, compared to $2.6 bil from ads. His analysis is around the 8m30s mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1qsF0WQy8c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1qsF0WQy8c
• benj111 4y ago
  What does YouTube think it's business is? From my pov they are an advertising company, they want users to spend as long as possible on the site inorder to view those ads. I can sort of understand rewarding regular uploads from that pov, a new video by X comes out, you go to view it and then watch a few more videos. This model doesn't explain other things though. If I find a new channel and want to binge, why stop me watching from oldest first? Why remove downvotes? If I watch a video that has a lot of invisible downvotes, I get pissed because it's rubbish, it seems a toss up whether I watch another vid, or leave the site. That risk rises exponentially with every rubbish vid I come across.
  • li4ick 4y ago
    Their business is whatever their metrics say it is. In this case, TikTok is eating their lunch, so their business is to replicate TikTok.
    • benj111 4y ago
      But you can replicate tiktok whilst not shafting your existing users.
  • IYasha 4y ago
    Lol. This was probably true in 2000s. But their main goal is not ads. User data gathering, processing, human behavior studying is much, much more important business. Google was into ML right at the beginning. When scientific papers on the subjects were still a bit "exotic". I was almost dragged into that.
• thenerdhead 4y ago
  I could understand if this was missed during the major redesign. But if it was removed to hit some type of OKR internally to have users engage more on the platform, it’s another story. Not a fan of the redesign on mobile because nothing works if you have turned off watch history and other privacy settings.
• carrolldunham 4y ago
  Out of date time wasting clickbait. The actual news is this: TeamYouTube: >we added new tabs for different content types & when adding these tabs, we ran into issues keeping all the sorting options you're used to (like oldest to newest). as an FYI, if you want to find videos around a certain date, you can search "before:" ex. "dog videos before:2017" >So to confirm there is no longer a sorting option, like oldest to newest. >we know sorting options are important & we’re still exploring how to bring these back https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1590386502865129472 https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1590386502865129472
• Bombthecat 4y ago
  What The Actual F... I search Youtube for reviews of products.. I always wait a few weeks or more so real reviews come out ( not sponsored,paid or free sample) easiest way to finde them is by sorting by new.. I guess they want to push the paid content... gr8..
  • Gigachad 4y ago
    You can still sort channels by newest. It used to have newest, most watched, and oldest. They have only dropped the oldest first view.
    • Bombthecat 4y ago
      More often than not, I don't know the channel..
• verisimi 4y ago
  I really think people have missed the point of Google and this sort of change. They are about constraining and managing what you can think. Don't believe me? Hear it in Schmidt's own words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4 (30 sec clip) "When you use google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that's a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world because we should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant you should look for information and we should give it exactly right and we should give it to you in your language and we should never be wrong." Google see themselves as custodians of truth. They know the truth, and it is their job to give it to you. Now you might wonder 'how do they know what they truth is'. For google there is no ambiguity, there are not multiple narratives or explanations. The truth is what they say the truth is.
  • sydbarrett74 4y ago
    Yep. Google is the Ministry of Truth that Orwell warned us about.
• Havoc 4y ago
  Only dopamine optimised AI feeds allowed
  • poopooracoocoo 4y ago
    Dopamine is chemical that makes you feel good. The algorithms are made to increase engagement. Some of the most engaging content is content that makes people angry or shocked. Look at the YouTube homepage when you're not signed in. YouTube's algorithms are not necessarily made to give people content they want to watch and were thinking of watching. And often times not content that makes them feel good. Edit: maybe I'm half asleep and not getting what you're saying lol
• conradfr 4y ago
  Maybe the constant disappointment of having all your favourite software constantly degrading/changing do wonder for our brain plasticity!
• globular-toast 4y ago
  My theory is they want to move old videos to glacial/cheap storage and make them essentially unavailable. It makes sense, to be fair. There's probably 100 videos uploaded every day about how to put up a shelf, but we only really need one.
• khazhoux 4y ago
  "Let's move on to the next question... how would you design a sort-by-date feature for a video streaming service? We have 15 minutes before the next interviewer comes in, so get started."
  • jagged-chisel 4y ago
    Apparently the correct answer is “I wouldn’t, because someone in Retention has a ‘better idea’ for how to keep eyes on the site.” But just for giggles, I’d have placed all video metadata into a relational database (the interviewer grimaces), and use SELECT * FROM metadata /* a WHERE clause here to match the user’s actual search */ ORDER BY creation_date; And I’m not being offered the job because I didn’t use a NoSQL store and didn’t consider writing a DSL to make queries and no mention of inverted binary trees to sort the data by “relevance” according to Retention.
• oxff 4y ago
  Youtube wants to be much like Tiktok, barely any search capability, just a stream of ML generated OR recommended videos, anything else outside of a constant, continuous video stream generated based on your metadata and other PII is considered "overhead" by these cyborgs, search for relevant videos? overhead, sorting videos? overhead, let the algo do. These changes also render the site nearly unusable if you have a triple digit iq. p.s. Youtube's search, much like Gooogle's, is pure dog shit by the way. Neither of them fill the function of a search at this point, you'd have to remove SEO and ML optimizations from them to get them working again. I search for "X" in youtube, I get 2-3 videos vaguely related to it, and then like 50 "videos you watched", "videos others searching for X watched". It's so fucking bad its unreal, makes me think what kind of a brain dead adderall crack addict they have QA testing this there.
  • 127 4y ago
    Well, consider what portion of population does not run ad blocker. Consider what portion of population is likely to click on ads. That's the audience YouTube is being built based on. There's really no reason to expect it to get any better.
  • geo-matik 4y ago
    It's not even that much of a senseless decision considering that half of the population has a double digit IQ (100 is the median by definition, half is below half is above)
  • unicornmama 4y ago
    > These changes also render the site nearly unusable if you have a triple digit iq. Google PMs now investigating new ways to reduce users’ IQs.
  • sschueller 4y ago
    At least TikTok lets you seek in any video. Youtube does not in their shorts. One huge reason people don't use it.
    • valdiorn 4y ago
• wodenokoto 4y ago
  It's so weird. So many videos talk about "in my last video", yet Youtube is hellbent on you not going there. The same for "this is part one of 2". If 10 videos has been uploaded since then, Youtube _really_ don't want you to go see part 2. It is so difficult to see the chronology around the current video. Since I am ranting, I'll also mention how weird the recommendation engine is for not suggesting music videos related to the current video. If you are watching a 30 minute documentary on how "Bohemian Rhapsody" was recorded, the video itself will contain no audio from the song because that will demonetize the video, but there are also no links pointing to the music video anywhere.
  • Spooky23 4y ago
    There’s also the dynamic of the creator and YouTube at play. I’m imagine the creators will do the same thing recipe do… have a 5 minute description of how they made coffee for the first time, then get to the point in part 2.
• DarthNebo 4y ago
  Another thing along the 'not allowed to right click & save BS' track of unwarranted change to function
• jablala 4y ago
  Additionally it seems they have removed the "sort by most popular" on channels. Incredibly fustrating.
  • LegitShady 4y ago
    still there for me, they just changed how the buttons look and moved it to thee upper left side of the video.
• google234123 4y ago
  God damnit!!! I also hate their stupid topic music channels that didnt even allow sorting by popularity!
• windex 4y ago
  I think the google model is to figure out what works and then break it or kill it.
  • gabrielgio 4y ago
    I have started "unplugging" from google's service (drive, email...) since they killed inbox. Along side with privacy issues, for me they don't seem like a reliable service provider.
    • HeckFeck 4y ago
      No question the alternative services will do it better. The problem is there are so many channels, comments and videos of historical interest on YouTube. And many curious types like me get their kicks from seeing how far we've come, or enjoying old classics. This is a slap in the face to having information at your fingertips, the spirit of the Internet and web 2.0 optimism. The user is factored out of the equation; we're just to be passive endless consumers.
• oh_my_goodness 4y ago
  Sooner or later every social website adopts "driving away users" as its primary goal. YouTube isn't there yet, but they've finally started moving in that direction.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• julienreszka 4y ago
  Completely idiotic. They keep deleting basic features for no obvious reasons.
• BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Just a reminder for video creators out there : non-platform solutions to distribute your videos not only exist, they also work well these days ! For instance, PeerTube : https://joinpeertube.org/en https://joinpeertube.org/en
  • eterps 4y ago
    Also be sure to check out the https://tilvids.com https://tilvids.com instance (tech/TIL focused)
    • tilvids 4y ago
      Thanks for the shout-out! We're seeing a huge influx of users at the moment due to so many people jumping on the Mastodon band-wagon (where we communicate actively under @tilvids@mstdn.social). It's been incredibly fun building a creator-focused video community with the goal of helping raise edutainment creators up, and eventually helping them move to control the hosting of their own content!
• type0 4y ago
  They want to push youtube shorts on everyone to compete with tiktok so it makes perfect sense from to them
  • digitalsushi 4y ago
    Youtube shorts is the most addictive thing I have ever used. I clicked it once to see what it was, and it hasn't turned off since. The videos are exactly the same length as my attention span has shrunk to. They are all vertical, so, I'm probably doing it wrong using a desktop computer like some lunk from the twentieth century, but I can't stop myself. I've fallen into a box I cannot crawl out of and have no desire to. I'm in trouble.
  • lawn 4y ago
    Youtube shorts is an abomination as well.
    • cpsns 4y ago
      All short form video content is an abomination. Cancer in video form.
• nathias 4y ago
  all platforms are addsales platforms, how much they can optimize for add sales depends only on the userbase (with cable TV we have seen that anything goes, you can have 5min of movies between commerical blocks and people will still use it)
• nottorp 4y ago
  I have a tangential question: Say you find an youtube channel you like. It has 800 videos, or so Google says when you search for the channel name in youtube. Can I be sure that when I click on the videos tab on the channel's page I get access to all those 800 videos?
  • wiseleo 4y ago
    31 videos have been hidden out of 32 possible.
• germandiago 4y ago
  Some months ago they removed the dislike number of votes.
• technoooooost 4y ago
  It's a feature of capitalism boys, not a bug. They are actively trying to self destruct and ruin their product to give competitors a chance
  • rexreed 4y ago
    Also a side effect of the move-fast, break-things-often hyper-"agile" mentality that treats the customer as the product, the advertiser as "king", shareholders over employees, and faceless customer service megabrands that provide their users zero recourse. This seems to be the current favored pattern for Silicon Valley-style companies.
• cosmodisk 4y ago
  I'm not sure what's the end goal, but YouTube has become unusable at this point. Play/Pause button gone on TV app, search results prioritise absolute shite of a content. You need to watch 5 videos on any subject and that's all you'll ever see. Now this. I used to watch way more of if, but nowadays I only tune in for a couple of channels I know, so they definitely not making more money from me.
  • cpsns 4y ago
    The recommendations have gotten far worse too. Once upon a time they were filled with interesting things I wanted to watch, now as of a few months ago they are filled with garbage I’d never watch. No amount of saying I’m not interested fixes this. If there’s 100 videos I scroll through at this point 1 might be worth clicking.
• EDEdDNEdDYFaN 4y ago
  KPInfor time spent browsing channel goes way up when users are forced to look for older content manually! Epic product manager win
• SCdF 4y ago
  The OP link is...not great. It's a reddit post[OP], that links to an article[1], that links to a specific comment in a reddit post[2] which is a reply to the actual comment[3] that contains the link[4] to a specific section of a YouTube video, which contains the actual confirmation. After sifting through all that, they didn't give a reason, which is pretty lame, but alludes to the fact that it's helpful for them and not for you. Presumably this is step one in storing old videos on glacier-like storage so it costs them less (and inevitably will let them play you more ads while they retrieve it) [1] https://piunikaweb.com/2022/11/10/youtube-sorting-option-for-viewing-oldest-video-missing-heres-why/ https://piunikaweb.com/2022/11/10/youtube-sorting-option-for... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/tx0uln/question_has_youtube_removed_the_option_to_view/i3l9j7n/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/tx0uln/question_ha... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/tx0uln/question_has_youtube_removed_the_option_to_view/i3iu7q8/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/tx0uln/question_ha... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0WYt7hgXhQ&t=48s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0WYt7hgXhQ&t=48s
  • aquova 4y ago
    Not only that the original article was written back in May, this story is 6 months old.
    • pelagic_sky 4y ago
      The original article is old, but contains time stamped updates until present.
  • jasonlotito 4y ago
    They also said: https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1590393940402147328 https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1590393940402147328 "we know sorting options are important & we’re still exploring how to bring these back"
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • 4y ago
• boringg 4y ago
  If this is true - whoever is making product decisions at youtube is sending it to irrelevance. Its such a wannabe tiktok clone move no differentiation.
• JofArnold 4y ago
  Some really weird product decisions this year. E.g. they are also hellbent on showing me "shorts" in my search results. I can't think of a single occasion lately when I didn't want to see the full description and comments and they make it hard to get directly to the video. Worse still they are applying this "shorts" concept retrospectively to any video that happens to be short in length, meaning I get videos that were never intended for that format by the creator. Fortunately this bookmarklet (which i've named "eat my shorts" in my bookmarks) does the job: javascript:(function()%7Bwindow.location.href %3D window.location.href.replace(%2Fshorts%5C%2F(.*)%2F%2C "watch%3Fv%3D%241")%7D)() raw: window.location.href = window.location.href.replace(/shorts\/(.*)/, "watch?v=$1")
  • WASDx 4y ago
    I use this userscript to auto-redirect: https://openuserjs.org/scripts/cliff_barr/Redirect_YouTube_Shorts https://openuserjs.org/scripts/cliff_barr/Redirect_YouTube_S...
  • user3939382 4y ago
    Recently they have iOS YouTube (or some A/B test of it) automatically opening shorts on full screen when you launch the app. Totally obnoxious.
    • ianai 4y ago
      That tells me they’re absolutely freaked out over TikTok. Ridiculous. Like an F150 trying to masquerade as a Miata.
    • INeedMoreRam 4y ago
      If I use YouTube on mobile, I access by opening a new tab in Brave. I deleted the app well over a year ago. I am never force fed anything by Shorts.
      • dredmorbius 4y ago
        I'll load the URL directly either in mpv (desktop or Mobile via Termux), or VLC. Fuck YouTube entirely. The pain of using the Web interface is precisely the point, as someone's KPIs are steering users to apps. That's succeeding, though it's not YT's apps which are substituting.... I still miss the mps-yt app, though I'd found an alternative recently, yewtube (still need to try it out). <https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube/issues/1191 https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube/issues/1191> <https://iamtalhaasghar.github.io/yewtube/#installation https://iamtalhaasghar.github.io/yewtube/#installation>
• twawaaay 4y ago
  They seem to be removing or hiding features for more advanced users. I am big user of saved lists where I keep all sorts of stuff from recipes to various ideas for the home I am preparing to build to financial or parenting advice to programming tutorials, etc. Now on mobile there is no way to save it to the playlist. The only way is when it is still in search results (but you can't get back there after you clicked the video or from history!) So the best way for me to do it is to get myself to the laptop and save it from there.
  • benjaminpv 4y ago
    Try tap+holding the "+ Save" button. If you just tap it the video goes to Watch Later but if you tap+hold it should show you a list of your playlists. That said, the behavior's really janky. When I do this on my iPad you kinda have to 'hold+smudge' your finger around before it'll reveal the list for some reason and sometimes it just wants to save to Watch Later no matter what you do.
• NightlyNorth 4y ago
  One feature I wish YouTube had would be the ability to filter videos by time on a particular channel. Right now there is an option to sort by most popular and this shows the videos from all time. Something like "sort by most popular within the last year" would be great for channels which have hundreds and thousands of videos.
• newsclues 4y ago
  YouTube is a big platform. Rather than understanding and allowing for a diversity of viewers with different watching preferences, the platform wants everyone to be the same homogenous consumer without realizing that kids and adults are different! It's so disappointed to have people with the power of propaganda misinform everyone that regression is progress!
• permo-w 4y ago
  this is sad because youtube is and always has been extremely resistant to public pressure. it doesn’t matter how much people complain, this is going to happen. same for removing dislikes to protect corporations from negative press, same for every piss-poor UI redesign, same for hiding viewer totals, same for desperately trying to copy tiktok tangentially, there is one lesson content providers need to learn from tiktok. listen up, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and Youtube, and no doubt soon Twitter: Improve. Your. Algorithm. you do not need twist your content into a copycat format, like a teenage girl following fashion trends. tiktok is successful because it has an incredibly effective algorithm. that’s it. it’s no more complex than that it’s insane to me that these platforms with masses of content freely available to them are so delighted to jump straight to abandoning all of that and cloning another app. just use the content that is already there, but show it to me better I regularly go to my youtube recommended feed. what do I see? 5 videos I’ve already watched. 4 videos I’ve passed up on watching countless times. 3 videos I have no interest in, and maybe 1 that I might consider watching. why? because youtube’s algorithm is awful. the solution to this is not for them to pivot to stupid information bytes, but for them to make a better damn algorithm
  • logicalmonster 4y ago
    > the solution to this is not for them to pivot to stupid information bytes, but for them to make a better damn algorithm Keep in mind that the best algorithm is always the human mind. People know what they like and that makes them happy. If you're following creators X, Y, and Z, you don't need a fancy algorithm to expose their videos to their followers, you just a place to show their videos in the order published. Better YouTube algorithms might help in some cases like discovery of totally new channels and creators that people might be interested in. YouTube should go nuts and do whatever crazy experiments they want on some recommendations page. But the solution of trying to dictate precisely what users see all of the time through making the entire site a big algorithm-festival will always be suboptimial.
    • hedora 4y ago
      If only there were a podcasts application for video. RSS, etc surely support such things, right?
• blagie 4y ago
  95% of the Youtube content I want to see is either educational or created by friends/family. I don't want TikTok-style algorithmic content. At this point, I think there's a business model in making a Youtube front-end which is designed to be not horrible for niche users like myself. I suspect I'm a small enough percentage of the market to not be worth bothering with for a $1T company, but plenty enough to sustain a mid-sized startup.
  • MildlySerious 4y ago
    Last time I checked the API was very restrictive towards building custom clients that are somewhat complete. There was no endpoint for getting the subscription feed and the discussion about it had been open for years already. So you have to use a lot of quota to construct it manually. iirc they had some weird rules about caching the results of API calls as well, but I could be mistaking that with something else.
    • blagie 4y ago
      I suspect curated creators would be interested in managing their content. Youtube is a bad experience on both sides. And I suspect they'd need to, if nothing else, to do quality content-tagging. Some of this could be crowdsourced too.
    • ThatMedicIsASpy 4y ago
      There is Youtube.js using the private api. https://github.com/LuanRT/YouTube.js https://github.com/LuanRT/YouTube.js
  • good8675309 4y ago
    In regards to alternative Youtube clients. Not sure if it fits your requirements but I've used MiniTube which is pretty decent: https://flavio.tordini.org/minitube https://flavio.tordini.org/minitube
    • blagie 4y ago
      This is almost the exact opposite of what I want. A lot of screentime is not healthy, and I don't want an interface which encourages that. This is based on the model of a TV running. I want to be very deliberate about what I watch, when I watch it, and why I watch it. I don't want anything which will lead me to watching more videos or to watching them casually. For the most part, I have specific times when I watch specific videos with family. I also use videos as a work break when I burn down. An ideal work break is 5-20 minutes, and I don't want to be pulled into any more. It seems like a good tool, but for the opposite niche.
• rkagerer 4y ago
  Hi, I'm Google! Nice to meet you, user. Here's a nice big shiny ball of poo just for you.
• dddrh 4y ago
  Looks like the YouTube team suggested sending feedback as way to gauge user demand for sort by oldest… https://twitter.com/teamyoutube/status/1590519893962653696 https://twitter.com/teamyoutube/status/1590519893962653696
  • HeckFeck 4y ago
    I recently tweeted them regarding this. They replied, to their credit, and said the feature was removed due to problems implementing it on mobile. But they were "looking into" ways of restoring it. Hopefully it doesn't take the dev team too long to put an 'ORDER BY DATE DESCENDING' clause into the SQL.
    • plopz 4y ago
      About 6 years ago Twitch removed the random directory, which was just a list of random streams. That was my preferred way of finding new content to watch. I sent monthly emails for 2 years asking for it to come back, the response always was "looking into it" and it never came back.
      • HeckFeck 4y ago
        This reminds me of a Bernard quote from Yes Minister: "Well, 'under consideration' means we've lost the file; 'under active consideration' means we're trying to find it."
      • thinkingemote 4y ago
        They have a kind of discovery / recommendation thing now which is pretty basic, but I guess a little bit better than nothing.
    • bakabakabaka 4y ago
      With 60% of YouTube’s watch time now on mobile, why go through the work of creating annotations that won’t even reach the majority of your audience?
      • 4y ago
• est 4y ago
  Gosh think of the ads we can sneak in when user scrolls videos over by "recent"
• kodisha 4y ago
  While I live somewhere in 3rd world country, and have no idea who OK'd this kind of change, I am sure many of you know. So yeah, we should not all be like - oh, how stupid of YouTube to do this, like youtube is some conscious entity. No, a person did this, a person with a name did this.
• valdiorn 4y ago
  At this point, just get rid of search entirely and force feed me the one exact video that maximises your ad revenue. Stop beating around the bush.
• goda90 4y ago
  They also removed the ability to change the viewing speed when casting or in the Android TV app.
  • eimrine 4y ago
    I would rather quit YT or use it only as a source of links for yt-dlp if I meet this restriction. I usually watch it in 2x-3.5x with some custom one-liner in bookmark which edits a special parameter for achieving more than 2x speed, but sometimes I really need 0.75x if a quality of sound is far from decent.
• ur-whale 4y ago
  This is what you get when product managers run a company.
• NayamAmarshe 4y ago
  YouTube desparately needs a leadership change. They make so many weird decisions that piss everybody off. It's sad what YouTube has become. World's greatest educational resource turning into dust.
• dtx1 4y ago
  Youtube wants to become tictoc and everything they do is for that reason
• anxiously 4y ago
  I was just bit by this. I found an old friends channel and he has like daily uploads for 12 years and I was trying to find the start of the videos and I sure as hell didn’t want to scroll down through years of uploads…
• Khaine 4y ago
  Its like youtube's management are deliberately trying to ruin YouTube in some attempt to bankrupt google.
• jbirer 4y ago
  YouTube has been unusable for the last 3-4 years. All the outdoors, ASMR, and cooking content has been invaded by naked girls trying to sell their OnlyFans or irrelevant videos.
  • egeozcan 4y ago
    I really want "Botched by Babish" section from the "Binging with Babish" to make a comeback.
  • Spooky23 4y ago
    That’s usually because of the user. My aunt had a similar complaint about TikTok. “It’s all teenage girls in crop tops shaking their assets.” Missing context: nephew was futzing with her phone.
    • jbirer 4y ago
      Aunt is right, maybe I am aging and it's causing lower testosterone but, the amount of naked bodies without content is tiring.
    • maximus-decimus 4y ago
      What does it say about me if YouTube kept recommending me a short of a girl with a pink tuque and a hoodie pretending to be a vagina? I never clicked on it and yet it kept showing it to me FOR A MONTH. I WON'T CLICK ON YOUR VAGINA, GOOGLE!
      • Spooky23 4y ago
        Some ML algorithm decided that you attention would be best stolen by a vagina hoodie! Twitter thought I needed some advanced chemotherapy drug somehow. Fortunately Elon scared them away so that ad is gone.
  • driverdan 4y ago
    YT recommends content based on what you watch and what you say you don't like. If that's all you're getting it's a reflection of what you watch. I'm not saying they're good at recommendations, they're not. I get tons of recommendations that I have no interest in. I still get some of those garbage ASMR recommendations but most is related content.
• sebastialonso 4y ago
  This is the perfect moment to create a library of YouTube links with metadata. After they remove more search options, or search al together, you would still be able to search in this meta-youtube
• MildlySerious 4y ago
  For an entity that keeps posturing how they want to organize the worlds data, Google is really falling apart at the seams when it comes to making all that information, knowledge and content that people entrusted them with available in a basic, organized way. Especially when it comes to Youtube. Hiding dislikes made entire genres on Youtube worthless and gave so much room to grifters. Now that you're forced to do your own curation, they make that harder, too. That's on top of the fact that the recommended sidebar has been a failed experiment at best for a decade and a half now, subscriptions at some point became nothing more than a soft recommendation unless you manually go through each and every one of them and subscribe to their notifications. The homepage is really just... sad. I do not doubt for one second that Youtube is a beast among beasts to keep alive and the fact that it still exists is a feat itself. But man, some of these decisions of the past few years, especially, really make it tough to look at the timeline of how that platform developed and keep a positive image of Google. I can only conclude that Google would rather be just-another-attention-parasite than a company that brings value to the world, if it means marginally more profit.
  • delecti 4y ago
    > subscriptions at some point become nothing more than a soft recommendation The subscription feed isn't 100% rock solid, but I've used it pretty consistently, almost every day for at least the past decade, and find it quite reliable. It's reliable to the point that I don't think this is even a legitimate criticism: if you want videos from channels you've subscribed to, go to the page that is both easily accessible and expressly for that purpose. https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
    • TrianguloY 4y ago
      I also dislike users that think that the home page is the subscriptions page, and complaining that they are missing videos (go to the subscriptions page!). But I have personally seen on my own account videos from channels I follow that weren't displayed on the subscriptions page, and I noticed because they were displayed on the home page.
• chrismarlow9 4y ago
  Just give me a table with sort by on column headers, a search box, and a little modal to choose columns I want to show/hide. The best UX for this was solved in like 1995.
  • leeches 4y ago
    There aren't technical decisions driving this, they are in the business of advertising. But yeah, pretty much this. We have access to billions of hours of video, but without advanced filter controls, most of it is inaccessible. Same problem with search engines in general.
  • godshatter 4y ago
    I would like that better, too, but it doesn't really work with an infinite scroll. I would be overjoyed if the web changed back to pagination, but it doesn't excite that dopamine center as well or something I guess. What have we done to ourselves?
• Eupraxias 4y ago
  I know I'm missing something here, but I still see the option to sort by upload date. This shows me the most recently posted results. There are other granular options for upload date, like last hour, today, etc. I'm about as far as you can get from an apologist for these folks, but what am I missing?
  • cpncrunch 4y ago
    they may have just removed the ability to sort by oldest uploads.
• roody15 4y ago
  I am slightly depressed at how content on the web has evolved in the last decade. More and more content providers (youtube, Hulu, Netflix, etc) make their platforms harder and harder to search. They continue to promote what essentially they want you to consume.. and actual content your looking for is buried. The other day I wanted to watch the last season of Legion (forget never finished the series) and was looking around for it. Turns out it is indeed on Hulu (which I have) however you would never just stumble on this. Despite my history of watching just about ever comic book series and comic book movie there is. Its almost like they don't have a true interest in pulling up what I want. Instead literally the front page is full of stuff I have zero interest in watching.
  • Exuma 4y ago
    Tell me about it. I feel sorry for kids these days who never experienced the golden era. So innocent and simple and fun and curious. Not good for the mass amounts of information available today, I'm not saying we should "go back to that" but I certainly do miss waking up with hot chocolate in the winter, dialing up 56K and when it finally connects I get a dopamine rush as the world opens up before my fingertips... a world of bad blinking alarm gifs, wild backgrounds, bright times new roman text, and very gray table borders.
    • ugjka 4y ago
      The web is dead, it is all about "apps" now
      • undersuit 4y ago
        Pay no attention to the web behind the curtain!
  • JasonFruit 4y ago
    I build and play lyres, and there's a thriving community of lyre players in Japan who have put a lot of videos on YouTube. None of them show up in my searches for lyre music, which quickly devolve into people playing funk bass and flying homebuilt airplanes, both of which I like, but still! I had to use NewPipe to search for them, go to YouTube, search for the user name, and subscribe to them before I could find them through YouTube's interface.
• plaguepilled 4y ago
  Wonder how many 'we removed the dislike button because our advertising clients asked us to' bullshits we get before we see a Twitter style exodus to Odysee...
  • fortran77 4y ago
    That was Netflix (and Amy Schumer). I wonder if this contributed in any meaningful way to Nexflix's decline.
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• fortran77 4y ago
  Is this a cost-saving move, or a revenue enhancing move?
• p0pcult 4y ago
  Advertising only makes money for the platforms if we don't have non-ad options. So, now that the pandora's box of ad-driven internet has been opened, good luck putting it away. At this point, you will have to kill all social media. checks economy Well, it looks like we've got a running start if we want to give it a go.
• Beldur 4y ago
  Some month ago they removed the Speed Up option when watching YT on TV. This basically costs me hours of my life as I normally watch videos on 1.5 speed...
  • abawany 4y ago
    It seems to reappear and disappear and seems dependent on devices: the Onn Google tv stick seems to have had it disabled permanently but on the Chromecast with Google tv it still works fine. I also watch at 1.5 and would stop watching if I could no longer do that.
• theknocker 4y ago
• pier25 4y ago
  Yt search has become infuriating lately. Between shorts and stupid recommendations it's really harming my yt experience. By recommendations I mean content not directly related to the search but videos yt thinks I might want to watch mixed with search results. Another thing that bothers me a lot is yt showing results of videos in a language different from the search query. I live in Mexico and very often half of the results are in Spanish. I'm from Spain, I speak Spanish, but more often than not Spanish videos in the topics that interest me are very bad.
  • nixass 4y ago
    I started using Google for searching Youtube videos, I get much better/comprehensive results and relevant results aren't cut off after 10 videos or so.
  • neop1x 4y ago
    It's becoming unusable. Since they removed the dislike counts, I've been getting more crap and scam videos with no value, and they're now removing date sorting, another important feature. It's time to begon looking for alternatives. The old YT is not coming back. :(
  • npteljes 4y ago
    The search is surprisingly horrible! The sad thing is, the engine itself works great. I can input "eh eh eh ah ah ah" and the first result is "Million voices", the song where they loop this vocal sample a lot. But the presentation of the results is just.... Netflix-level. As all majorly popular apps will be in the future, I think. The web was just too good otherwise, too much power "to the people". They'll find that people tolerate a lot more abuse, so these anti-features won't ever go away.
• booleandilemma 4y ago
  I think I'm at the point of just creating my own UI for YouTube. I'll keep track of my favorites, history, watch later, liked videos, etc. on my local machine.
• johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago
  I wish everyone would start using Twitch, so that we can have a proper alternative of Google/Youtube.
• yalogin 4y ago
  So they want to control what you see. Netflix showed them the way and it took them all these years to get there. This is what turned me off Netflix. I am just shown the same kind of content over and over and it quickly got boring. There was no way to discover new content at all. The worst part is the top ten lists also seem to catered to my past views. The moment I realized it, I cancelled Netflix. For YouTube this is the moment regulators should step in and talk about algorithms and echo chambers. I don’t expect them to but they should
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• hysan 4y ago
  Not at all surprising as Google has been slowly removing all features that let you control your viewing experience. I’m still annoyed that they removed subscription collections over 7 years ago. They publicly promised to replace it with something better, but that never materialized[1]. I would bet money on these sorting options to never return no matter how much feedback users send in. Google has a history of lying about listening to user feedback. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19952930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19952930
• CosmicShadow 4y ago
  So much for tech working for us, even in the slightest. "We know what you want, and it's what we want to show you"
• mensetmanusman 4y ago
  Why do so many of my software tools get worse? Amazing iPad apps released in the 2010-2015 era are impossible to run thanks to Apple, there are fewer advanced search options, everything smart crashes, $1000 home routers are less reliable… Did things cross a complexity/business-model barrier and we are never going back?
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• WmyEE0UsWAwC2i 4y ago
  At some point the search filed stooped searching. It is something like: * Here is the most popular results that are slightly relevant to your query. E.g. African war lord will pull up a gamer playing pranks on other gamers. * Then, we give up. Here is some unrelated videos we hope will distract you searching what you are looking for. Is this what tech should look like? Search has been purposely broken.
• ViceCitySage 4y ago
  I hate how Big Tech is so adamant about viewing and interacting through algorithms instead of allowing you to do basic sorting according to a certain order you choose.
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• saos 4y ago
  why???? They've been force feeding me ads, premium upsell banners, pip behind a paywall and now this??????? I cannot take it anymore > Isit going to become a premium feature Not surprised someone said that
• amir734jj 4y ago
  I have been using YouTube for entertainment, educational, news for the past 10 years and I am seeing it's try to slowly become TikTok. It's sad.
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• 65 4y ago
  Someone needs to make a user-friendly (AKA democratic) social media platform, compared to the autocratic, user-hostile platforms we're forced to use. I don't hate Instagram because of the ads, I hate Instagram because they force "suggested posts" into my feed that I don't want to see. At least YouTube isn't inserting videos into my subscriptions. YouTube search, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. They're all terrible because they don't give me any power to find the videos/content I actually want to watch.
• xg15 4y ago
  It's bad enough that they remove the feature, but I'm also honestly puzzled by Google's communication strategy here. According to the article, Google's responses to the issue over time have been flipping between all of the following: - it's an intentional change, they are planning to remove the feature. - there is no change at all, if you don't see the option, clear your cookies. - it's a bug and they are currently investigating it. - they have found the bug, fixed the issue and everything is back to normal now. (except users report it isn't) - it really was an intentional change - but a temporary one, in order to isolate/fix another bug. The other bug got fixed, they reverted the change and everything is back to normal now! (except users still report it isn't) - they didn't want to remove the option, but they had to disable it for the time being, because it's breaking another feature. - the option is somehow gone for good, but they'd consider reimplementing it if there is enough demand. Either Google's PR department is engaging in russian propaganda levels of gaslighting here or there is enormous chaos going on inside YouTube and no one knows what the other is doing.
  • kleinsch 4y ago
    Whenever you see this thrashy comms, it’s bc this wasn’t rolled out like a new feature with documentation and blog posts, so you’re seeing different support people who don’t know what’s happening try to explain it.
• andrewstuart 4y ago
  I’m tired of feeling outrage at colossal stupid. Who would this make sense to? Oh, GOOGLE of course. If they’re not cancelling entire services they’re cancelling basic functionality.
• northernexposur 4y ago
  We need a Wikipedia / Archive.org situation for every media type, now. Any entity with centralized control is now flexing autocratic muscles.
• andrewstuart 4y ago
  I just don’t understand why a total of ZERO big companies have tried to compete with YouTube directly. Not Amazon, not Microsoft, not Apple, not Netflix, not Spotify etc etc
  • infinityio 4y ago
    To my knowledge Amazon (via Twitch), Meta (via Facebook), and Microsoft (live streaming only, via Mixer) have all played with user-generated video with limited success
• dredmorbius 4y ago
  For what it's worth, this also seems to affect alternatives such as Invidious. In the channel overview page, "newest" and "oldest" remain visible alternatives, but the sort order doesn't actually change: Oldest: <https://yewtu.be/channel/UC2C_jShtL725hvbm1arSV9w?page=1&sort_by=oldest https://yewtu.be/channel/UC2C_jShtL725hvbm1arSV9w?page=1&sor...> Newest: <https://yewtu.be/channel/UC2C_jShtL725hvbm1arSV9w?page=1&sort_by=newest https://yewtu.be/channel/UC2C_jShtL725hvbm1arSV9w?page=1&sor...> (HN's URL truncates, but these include '&sort_by=oldest' and '&sort_by=newest' arguments, respectively.)
• layer8 4y ago
  Question: What’s the easiest way to watch a channel in chronological order? The “sort by oldest” option helps for the first couple of videos, but once you’re in the middle of a hundreds-of-videos channel neither sort option is practical.
• _jal 4y ago
  My use of Youtube is really limited to following links in, but they're getting obnoxious enough that I prefer a command line UI. youtube-dl www.youtube.com/whatever has yet to annoy me, aside from "adult" videos that require a logged in cookie.
  • progman32 4y ago
    Yt-dlp fork can read cookies right out of your browser if you ask it to.
• kmstout 4y ago
  I've been rebuilding my command line YT client based on mpv, fzf, and yt-dlp (compatible with youtube-dl in all the ways that matter). Here's my search command: ytsearch ======== #! /bin/bash nresults=$1; shift query="$@" yt-dlp -j ytsearch${nresults}:"${query// /+}" This will give back my results as JSON, which I can save to a file or pipe to `ytplaylist`: ytplaylist ========== #! /bin/bash jq -r '"\(.upload_date) \(.id) \(.duration)\t\(.title)"' "$@" \ | sort | uniq \ | fzf --bind "enter:execute(ytplay {+2})" Note that, because of the layout of the lines, records get sorted based first on date. Streaming is done via mpv: ytplay ====== #! /bin/bash id=$1; shift mpv "ytdl://$id" --ytdl-format='best[height<=720]' "$@" Finally, since I often don't care about saving results, wanting instead to just view the playlist, yt == ytsearch "$@" | ytplaylist So, if I want to search for videos on butchering cows, I might do $ yt 5 butcher cow as a preliminary to make sure I'm getting the sorts of results I want, then do $ yt 50 butcher cow and get myself a beer. I could also save the results $ ytsearch 50 butcher cow > deadbeef.json and view the results at my leisure with $ ytplaylist deadbeef.json `deadbeef.json` will have extensive metadata for each video found, including a channel URL. Suppose with a bit of jq I find the URL for a really good channel; I can then $ yt-dlp -j $CHANNEL_URL > cool-channel.json to get a playlist for the entire channel, then operate on it like the results coming back from `ytsearch`. Happy Friday.
  • kmstout 4y ago
    For anyone who finds this, here's a much faster ytsearch: ytsearch ======== #! /bin/bash nresults=$1; shift query="$@" yt-dlp -j --flat-playlist ytsearch${nresults}:"${query// /+}" I now also have ytgetlist ========= #! /bin/bash yt-dlp -j --flat-playlist "$@" which is handy for listing entire channels. The downside of using --flat-playlist is that the upload_date ends up null, so `ytplaylist` is modified to cope: ytplaylist ========== #! /bin/bash jq -r '"\(.upload_date // .playlist_index) \(.id) \(.duration)\t\(.title)"' "$@" \ | sort -k1n | uniq \ | fzf --bind "enter:execute(ytplay {+2})" The playlist indices so far reflect the order one would get by sorting on upload date.
• thrillgore 4y ago
  I am so glad I didn't remove YouTube Vanced when it got taken down. Before their NFT fracas they added SponsorBlock and Dislikes and it remains my go to YouTube Client. Hopefully AdVanced picks up where they left off.
• mrguyorama 4y ago
  Youtube search is nonfunctional anyway. After about 3 results, it literally just says "screw you watch these popular creators instead"
• wmichelin 4y ago
  unrelated, but I really wish people would stop using old.reddit.com links. reddit has support for user-preferences for exactly this. if you want the old site, you can make reddit.com resolve to the old site, or resolve to the new site, depending on your preference. /endrant
  • neop1x 4y ago
    It also helps spreading the knowledge that there is this usable alternative under the "old." subdomain. They could silently depreciate it if no one used it.
  • mafuy 4y ago
    That requires an account, does it not?
• draebek 4y ago
  Should we consider the possibility that 1. Google's best people are not working on the YouTube team, or at least not on this part of it and/or 2. The YouTube code base may be so gnarly after all these years that they are truly having trouble fixing this
• smsm42 4y ago
  There comes a time where it is hard to add something to a popular platform to improve it. All low and medium hanging fruit are picked. But the teams that grew in the meantime need something to do... So they start redesigns that nobody wants and optimizations that improve nothing.
• Transisto 4y ago
  Slave to their suggestion black box. Makes sense...
• IYasha 4y ago
  Looks like along with filters they've removed the whole search. No results are shown in firefox or falkon. Although both are pretty outdated, everything worked until now. Youtube is broken as %s...