9 ms·
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 w
by 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 agoOh 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 agoSame. 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 agoIt’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 agoYeah, 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.
- texasbigdata 4y agoYeah fair. I meant as a default (either) on/off filter but your point totally render mine moot :)
- yourusername 4y agoFor many of the topics i'm interested in videos made in the last 36 months are not better (if anything they are worse). If i'm looking up correct excercise form, how to cook a certain dish or perform a repair video's made 10 years ago are as good as video's made yesterday.
- viraptor 4y ago5 years, likely. 10 years is before 720p became common. Videos that came after 480p are actually better for things like repair videos. Also the speech sound quality is way better these days.
- hn_user2 4y agoYouTube is helping me build my house step by step. For framing, the first thing everyone recommends is “Framing Walls with Larry Haun” (1992). You even get the VHS tracking blips now and then from the video capture. To be fair it’s also good advice to then supplement Larry Haun’s videos with modern framing techniques but his videos are the first one should watch. Might just be a single example but it’s the first counterpoint that popped in my head. https://youtu.be/IQmt27qN6AI https://youtu.be/IQmt27qN6AI
- aulin 4y ago> if anything they are worse They are. People that started with the genuine intent of sharing their knowledge gradually turned into professional youtubers, and now it's all about hacking the algorithm, diluting content in multiple videos, selling you to their sponsors. Older videos are almost always better.
- tomrod 4y agoSolution to the unsolvable problem: have one swim lane of "watch again", another swim lane of "watch similar", then only subs+discovery. These are easy and solved already. Apply exponential weighted average for length since watch for sorting, with two peaks of a month ago and a year ago. I fear the YT folks have a hot mess and it will be twitterized at some point (the new tech lobotomized).
- Angostura 4y agoObligatory Ryan George video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8fJPvXyfc0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8fJPvXyfc0
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoStatistically, yeah. Because the most watched youtube videos are music videos, and people listen to the same music regularly. Also because some videos have been popular enough that people wanted to show that to their friends, and regular users don't know how to use the history, so they want to find it in their home page again. I assume the algo just doesn't know the difference between videos that are rewatchable and ones that are not, and does that on some statistical metrics that don't make sense in a lot of contexts. When you think something is stupid, the answer is usually there is something we don't know about it.
- Sharlin 4y agoAn algo that does not know what the user wants but tries to do something anyway, based on "some [..] metrics that don’t make sense [..]" is by definition "stupid".
- 2-718-281-828 4y agoyou have to be wrong as Google is the leading developer of AI technology globally </irony>
- rmak 4y agomaybe they need a "watch again" tab?
- RALaBarge 4y agoThere does exist a History section that offers just that.
- anticensor 4y agoYouTube truncates the History to last 2000 items, however. I need to be able to see my full, uncut history for audit and word-of-mouth purposes.
- 4y ago
- fphhotchips 4y agoThere's a filter for that on the home screen! It's called "new to me", and it shows up sometimes! Because why would you want something useful like that all the time? Nah much better to just hide it or not show it at all like 60% of the time.
- nolok 4y agoWhen A/B testing becomes a released feature !
- eimrine 4y ago> It's called "new to me", and it shows up sometimes! You can always chose the "new to me" saussage, it is always last in the line of sausages with some tags inside of them. The problem is that "new to me" stops showing really new content if you gonna use it heavily. Sometimes it gives video with that red line on the bottom of preview which means I watches this recently or videos from some channels I am subscribed to. So, this is option is a garbage as most of other YT options.
- kleiba 4y agoPlease start an open source project for such an extension and count me in. I'm so aggravated by YT's idiotic decision because I agree 100% with the usage pattern you describe. Over the years, that is exactly what I've done many, many times. Sure, I also watch random videos here and there from channels I never ever come back to. But if I ever want to look at the entirety of someone's uploaded videos and sort them by anything at all, it's always by "oldest first". The remaining two options are useful, too, for sure. But I've never actively sorted anything by popularity manually. Always "oldest first".
- 3np 4y agoThese two, together: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect Sounds like the changes you want should be possible to add to NewPipe.
- capableweb 4y agohttps://github.com/libredirect/libredirect https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect is a bit over-zealous. Love the idea, but I still want to be able to browse the homepages of the sites. After installing the addon and visiting just https://youtube.com https://youtube.com I get redirected to https://inv.vern.cc/ https://inv.vern.cc/ that just displays "Our main server's ISP is having issues, even router resets haven't fixed it. We apologize for this long downtime". Visiting https://twitter.com https://twitter.com I get redirected to https://twt.funami.tech/ https://twt.funami.tech/ which displays "502 Bad Gateway" Not a great experience to be honest. Still, love the idea, but execution is poor at best.
- cube00 4y agoDon't even bother, you only have to look at how often youtube-dl has to change to keep up with Google's infinite breaking UI changes. There's so many other open source projects that would benefit from your efforts that don't feed the Google machine.
- 4y ago
- texasbigdata 4y agosometimes for a giant database you’ll sort by most popular, but, for most, you’d want the most recent. It’s super confusing what YouTube is doing especially after the last change that outright broke the recommendation algorithm.
- jasode 4y ago> What kind of lunatic watches someone's uploads out of chronological order? For some type of channels such as latest technology reviews or news commentary, the sort by "Oldest" isn't as critical because the older vids have less and less value as time goes by. The default of showing the most recent newest vids works ok for that. E.g. sorting MKBHD tech channel[1] by Oldest would have brought up the old 2008 videos when he was a teenager reviewing products that are long obsolete. Good for nostalgia but not relevant to getting the latest info on Pixel 7 and Android 13 in 2022. With sort in chronological order, you'd have to hit the PgDn key a hundred times before you scroll down to the 2022 videos. That said, I personally used sort by Oldest all the time. E.g. I find a random house construction video so sort the channel vids by Oldest to start at the beginning where they cleared the land and poured the foundation. >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. Last time I tried this, Youtube had unstated rate limits for pulling lots of metadata like that. I did some experiments on music channels that had thousands of vids and both the API and manual UI (automate press PgDn key repeatedly) had invisible rate limiting where you couldn't reach the oldest vids. [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/mkbhd/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/mkbhd/videos
- chii 4y agoyoutube wants you to watch what they recommend. Removing the capability to browse, curate and choose your own watch lists is just a step in that direction. > Youtube may as well remove subscriptions and replace the home page with a big-ass "Random" button. don't give 'em any ideas!
- Kiro 4y agoI'm of the opinion that this change is catastrophic but... > You find a channel you really like, then you watch their content from first to last. I think that's very uncommon and that the majority of people sort by Popularity and start there.
- xdfgh1112 4y agoAgreed. For use cases where the order matters, the author can create a playlist right?
- eimrine 4y ago> 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. Wrong. There was an article on HN that no internet service allows you to open a 10000th page of any search. So, even if you have a really powerful device which is able to handle this amount of pages which are loading all at once (if you are travelling in endless mode as there is in Youtube), I am absolutely sure that at least for some creators' feed you just can not scroll it all without getting a 5xx error.
- xorcist 4y agoThe same persons who put all wood behind the Youtube Shorts arrow, probably. Given that everyone wants the retention of TikTok now, I don't think that big random button stays a joke for very long.
- lopis 4y ago> You know what makes more database queries than sorting by date? You seem to be forgetting the scale of these "databases". Lots of data these huge companies hoard is stored in slower, cheaper, storage. They know roughly what data should be kept cold and warm. And in general old videos can be left in cold storage, because people rarely watch them. While Youtube wants to control what you watch, I'm pretty sure this is a cost-cutting measure.
- coffeeblack 4y agoPlus, they know what videos generate more ad revenue. The user making up their own mind just interferes with that ad impression optimisation.
- OwlsParlay 4y ago> What kind of lunatic watches someone's uploads out of chronological order? Welcome to the TikTok algorithmic feed. Viewing videos in order and with context is so passe. That said, I rarely do this as well. If I've found somebody's content I like, I'll tend to then go see what playlists they've made for similar topics. Some channels will have over 500 videos dating back a decade at this point - I'm not going to watch that in order, but I'll at least browse by playlist.
- zozbot234 4y agoNot all users bother to make comprehensive playlists though. Sort by oldest is convenient when playlists are incomplete or missing altogether. I really don't think it's a serious burden on YT's infrastructure, since it just involves sorting some metadata by reverse order.
- Macha 4y agoYouTube wants in on this directly too with Shorts. It only allows you to dismiss the shorts widget on your logged in home page for a month at a time despite other boxes like channels or topics being possible to dismiss permanently
- fphhotchips 4y agoI would go so far as to flip it: What kind of lunatic watches someone's earliest content? A lot of these people have been doing this for 10 years at this point. They've learned a lot. Their style has matured. Their production values increased. Why would you go back and watch all the content when it was one dude with a handicam and a tripod when there's years of high quality (not to mention more relevant) content at the top of the Newest list?
- deltarholamda 4y ago>Viewing videos in order and with context is so passe Disordered minds are easier to control.
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y agoParadoxically, the best option when you find a channel you really like is to use youtube-dl.
- silon42 4y agoWe really need to start having bittorrent archives of channels (say, after > 1 month)
- type0 4y agoYeah, combined with RSS reader it is a good option for offline watching
- causi 4y agoAbsolutely. Among other things, creators remove their content when it stops being fashionable. Half of my personal video archive isn't online anymore because the creator decided it was too edgy.
- Crosseye_Jack 4y ago> How can you keep track of what you have and haven't seen YT does show you any progress you have made watching a video when viewing a channels video list > Youtube may as well remove subscriptions and replace the home page with a big-ass "Random" button. They are trying too. A number of YT’ers with partner managers or who have had conversations with staff, have said YT wished they could get rid of subscriptions entirely and rely on the algorithm instead. Tbf on this point, I hardly ever use the subscription page myself and either use the recommendation page or direct link/notifications, so I can see their point on not really caring about subscriptions, but you know we as humans do like to see numbers increase.
- YurgenJurgensen 4y agoThis would make me immediately drop YouTube for good. I only view videos via subscriptions and organic recommendations. No subscriptions basically means no YouTube for me.
- Crosseye_Jack 4y agoI don't believe subscriptions will be going away anytime soon. Creators still like the sub count even though it is pretty meaningless these days and YT themselves seem to have a love/hate relationship with it, while on one hand they want to do away with subscriptions, but on the other hand they still use the metric for things like being able to monetize content, access to features/services and they add things to the creator dashboard telling creators the percentage of viewer who are subed/unsubed and recently disabled to ability to hide your sub count from the public. And as you said there are viewers who exclusive use the subscriptions page, I used to be the same and had my default youtube "landing page" as the subs page. But YT changed something and broke that and before I could be bothered to fix it I found that I was enjoying atleast some of the content the algo was recommending to me so started using it more and more, and before I knew it I stopped using the subscriptions page entirely. So while they wish they could turn subscriptions off, I think they know it would cause too much backlash and would still have to still have to add a way for viewers to follow creators they want but make it more meaningful. I'm currently subscribed to over 500 channels but a lot of those channels could be removed from my list because it contains channels I no longer watch (be it because my tastes changed, the channels content changed, the channels are dead/retired) but I cba to go though the list and unsub. At which point a viewers sub list is just adding noise and delieverying (atleast some) content the viewer doesn't actually want to watch.
- nomilk 4y agoSame reason supermarkets place bread and milk far from the entrance, so you have to fuddle your way through the rest of their offerings before you get what you want. YouTube would have figured out if they make it really difficult to find good content, you'll get distracted looking at something else and then have to come back for whatever you wanted later anyway. Hot tip: I use regular google search like so to search youtube 'topic site:youtube.com'. It avoids all the clutter the YouTube search results provide. Afterthought: YouTube is getting so bad, I wonder if there's any third-party (paid or free) front end?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lopatin 4y agoThey probably asked the users. The users said, "yeah, we like sorting by oldest". Some design lead takes this opportunity to remind the team that users often don't know what they want. Everyone nods in agreement. Bye-bye sorting.
- coffeeblack 4y agoYou are not the customer. YouTube tells YOU what video to watch when.
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoThey probably looked at tik tok, and realized most people consumed recent content like bots. They then calculated the cost of sorting, and realized that it would save them more money than upsetting the users that like the function would cost. Then, A/B testing confirmed it for a few months. Then, tada, good bye features.
- wwtrv 4y agoSo if most people supposedly don't use the feature it probably doesn't cost that much to have it. Also now people who actually want to view videos starting from oldest will use a magnitude or two more resources just by needlessly scrolling for 5 minutes. Seems to me that it's more likely that google just has too many employees who just do idiotic/random changes to show that they are actually doing "actual" work...
- simion314 4y ago>They then calculated I mean they have sort by time, so you would just reverse the order. This stinks like GNOME mentality, giant ego designer needs something easy to do to justify it's salary so finds some button/option to remove,
- pixl97 4y agoGoogle: "we have determined that drivers only use their brakes 5% of the time versus the accelerator 60% of the time and therefore have decided to remove brakes from the car"
- vmilner 4y agoI watch a lot of tutorial channels and almost the first thing I (and I assumed everyone else!) do is sort by oldest first to find the start point... :-(
- jagged-chisel 4y agoYou can only write that extension if the original publication date is made available. The next step is to remove that bit of information from any APIs and from display on the page.
- PaulKeeble 4y agoI use subscriptions for everything I watch but I also track each channel with RSS. One of the things I have noticed is that even the subscriptions page is being manipulated and sometimes it doesn't contain all the videos. Its very common to then find the video that should have appeared on subscriptions under the home page as a recommendation some hours after it already appeared on the RSS stream. So while subscriptions is the best way on youtube its only about 95% accurate. The only way that I know that always works is RSS. Which frankly I think is nuts.
- mudrockbestgirl 4y agoThe funniest thing to me is YouTube's autoplay. I usually watch videos split into multiple parts (Lecture Part 1, Lecture Part 2, etc), but YouTube's algo is too smart to figure out that after part 1 I would probably like to watch part 2 and not some other random video. Sometimes it's so smart that it autplays part 4 after part 1, then part 5, and then 2. It's truly an incredible algorithm.
- nolok 4y agoSee my above comment above yours as I think it is linked: youtube made some clear changes to "break" the ability to follow an artist's music easily without subscribing to their paying music thingy, and because they never succeeded at properly separating music and video, it affects videos too. It used to always properly recommend the next part of a video like the case you mention, and even recommend previous part if you arrived on part 2 without seeing part 1 etc ...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zozbot234 4y agoAll of this is BS though. YouTube already has an easy way of annoying users who seem like they're leeching from their music service: just throw lots of unskippable ads (which sometimes happens anyway for other random reasons), or do any number of similar things. Breaking a major feature of the site is an absolute non-starter.
- Joker_vD 4y agoWell, that feature is broken (not to mention the feature discussed in the title: it was outright removed): I regularly, when watching a series of videos all titled "Series Name: Part X", get Parts 7, 8, 9, 2 and 14 as recommendations in the sidebar after watching Part 6. Amusingly, even if all those videos are actually part of an existing and properly sorted playlist, it still happens if I don't play it as a part of that playlist (that is, if I remove "&list=ZZZ&index=5" from the URL)! What a brilliant technology.
- nolok 4y agoThere is not just that. Another big reason is that youtube, despite all theirs tries, have never been able to separate their music part for which they want to sell subscription, from their video part. And some of the things they need to do to push subscription on their music premium thingy are contrary to the things they need to keep quality on the video side of things. For exemple, easily playing the video from an artist channel (or the many channels publishing music in a genre or publishers etc ... like Suicidesheep, NCS, Proximity, ...) is not something they want. So what did they do ? They removed the "play all" from the "uploads" page of a channel. This button played what was essentially a playlist of all the uploads of the channel, also allowing you all the playlist tool (repeat, shuffle, ...). Because you're supposed to do that through a youtube music (or red, or whatever the name is now) subscription, they gutted it, and now there is no way to easily watch all the videos of a channel unless the channel owner curates it himself into a playlist. (usually, music publisher channels have a playlist by genre/subgenre, or artists one by album etc..., and had the automatic "uploads" playlist for all of it, so they did not have a specific playlist for everything) As a side effect, you can't do that on video channel either anymore, oupsie ! (the reason I believe it was done on purpose for music is because there is no gain to change that for video channel, quite the contrary: if you use that feature on a video channel not only are they retaining you, but they should also be able to target you much more accurately with their ads, eg if I'm watching all of "mandalore gaming" videos then video games ads are clearly for me)
- eastbound 4y agoAmazon Prime does music very well. You click on a song, and another song of the same artist play, and you get a message saying you have to buy a supplementary fee to play what you want (I already pay for prime). Genius. Explicitly not do what the user wants.
- powvans 4y agoI’m so glad that I’m not the only one who thinks this is serious heavy duty dumb. Last night I saw an ad that seemed to imply Amazon Music would now be included with Prime. I thought, hmm, let me check if it still does the thing where you can’t play what you tap. Yup. Still does it. Tap a song and some other random song plays. Somewhere deep in the bowels of Amazon there is an exec who thinks this is a brilliant way to drive conversion. Probably has some data that somehow supports this notion. Amazing.
- hulitu 4y agoIf you follow the changes of their Android apps, they also have such "features". I guess there are people hired to come with new ideas.
- mywacaday 4y agoCouldn't agree with you more but I think the sociopath in this case is product owner forced to do something when do nothing is the right answer, either that or its some dark pattern where they remove the functionality to drive everyone to use it again when they restore it.
- jrochkind1 4y agoI actually usually want to watch the most recent videos from a new channel I've found. That is another use case for sorting by newest though. But I honestly already had a lot of trouble figuring out how to do this! I think I'm bad at using websites somehow.
- markus_zhang 4y agoI do the same whence I realized there is only "sort by upload date desc" option: I doom scrolled all the way to bottom.
- ht85 4y agoWhen I want to watch a new show I go to a blog or website that aligns with my taste and pick from there. When I need a new shampoo or a set of tires I try to find passionate, obscure, unmonetized content as a starter, then cross reference it with similar content. I do 95% of my shopping online and I can't remember the last time I saw an add that showed something that piqued my interest and that I wasn't already aware of. I spend most of my time online and have never clicked an ad. Advertisers need a certain audience profile. They need people who are easily influenced, who make emotional or rushed decision, who are not good at assessing the value of a product. Of course they can also sell to educated users, but that's not where almost all of the money is. In the digital world where most of the profit comes from advertisement, it's irremediable that product design will align with those characteristics, unfortunately :/
- ren_engineer 4y ago>What kind of lunatic watches someone's uploads out of chronological order? metrics probably showed people spent longer time on site trying to find videos, hence they push the change even if it makes a worse user experience. Somebody needs to make a new frontend for YT that just uses their embed feature for the actual playing of the video
- Forgeties79 4y agoI will download this extension in a heartbeat
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- api 4y agoThe target market for YouTube isn't people looking for information or good content. It's people going into a trance-like state infinitely scrolling and being guided by their nose by the YouTube algorithm, inflating YouTube ad view numbers and making them money.