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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
by 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 agoIt'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 agoStill not what it's about
- roenxi 4y agoThis 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 agoAlso 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.
- silon42 4y agoI probably watch most videos on 720p, many on 480p. Maybe once a week or less I switch to 1080p.
- ramraj07 4y agodo you really think YouTube, which carries 5-10% of all internet bandwidth, removed a sort feature on its METADATA because it will cost them too much? Lol.
- nokeya 4y agoOn their scale this crumbs of money can go huge.
- kasabali 4y agoSort by oldest is equally cache-able as sort by newest.
- nokeya 4y agoBut much less likely to be called and will be evicted fast.
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y agoI think we all feel this could be the cause. Someone decided they can optimize because less than 5% used this sort order. So they knew they would be uproar, but a small, 5%-ish uproar. And now once someone uploads a video they have to rebuild only two caches (recent and popular), not three.
- michaelt 4y agoYou think they've got the big data chops to serve me a 300 megabyte video on ad revenue alone, but they're struggling with the cost of sorting a list of a few hundred URLs? Seems unlikely to me.
- kleiba 4y agoWhat kind of company would give preference to what's easier to implement technically over what users actually want? I can only think of two kinds: those that will quickly disappear and then - unfortunately so - those that are so big that they can give a flying f about users without really feeling any impact.
- iLoveOncall 4y agoEven if your theory was right, and it is obviously not for the reasons other commenters have pointed out, they could just... cache the reversed order?
- vehemenz 4y agoIt could be a nice side effect, but it's probably not the primary reason. Zoomers and gen alpha users are fickle consumers, and engagement drops when they are presented with "old" content. Google has the competence to build a good product, they just don't have the leadership to do it while maximizing data collection and ads.