12 ms·

YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby

441 points by stefanos82 3y ago

I was navigating around YouTube and found a channel I wanted to watch its most popular videos and have noticed they added back the oldest option!

tomcam 3y ago
Holy shit I’m a new man. Thank you. I had stopped bothering to look.
sieabahlpark 3y ago
[dead]
rasz 3y ago
Its just you, one of Google targetted experiments
- stefanos82 3y ago
  Can you clear your cookies for YouTube only and try again? It could help.
  - incomplete 3y ago
    just cleared my cookies, re-logged in, and no ability to sort by oldest. :(
    - stefanos82 3y ago
      Have patience, it will get visible to all users eventually. This extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sort-by-oldest/miglaibdlgminlepgeifekifakochlka https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sort-by-oldest/mig... added (logically yesterday, if we see its date in description) an End of Life announcement due to the return of this option.
belfalas 3y ago
I see the option in their mobile app as well.
paulpauper 3y ago
Maybe it is to maximize revenue. older videos are less profitable for google compared to newer ones .
- jamcrimer 3y ago
  so you're saying they're disabling the feature of "not being able to watch old videos" to maximize revenue?
  - wruza 3y ago
    Idk, but I’ve noticed that many old non-popular videos take time to load or seek. It seems they’re optimizing availability architecture wrt that.
johnchristopher 3y ago
OT: I wish there was a way to create a playlist from music youtube suggestions. I am losing some good things when accidentally closing a tab.
- stefanos82 3y ago
  I use Firefox and more than often I restore last closed tabs (by mistake like you!) with Ctrl+Shift+T. Of course, there's History and "Restore Previous Session" which saves you from countless nightmares when the next time you boot your computer you want to restore what you last viewed or had opened. It helps immensely!
  - johnchristopher 3y ago
    Youtube music will replace the playlist with new suggestions (it makes a new playlist with the first song being the one that was playing or on pause when the tab was closed), so even though the tab gets restored its content doesn't. Mixes and user playlist are different from suggestion playlists.
- stefanos82 3y ago
  > OT: I wish there was a way to create a playlist from music youtube suggestions. I am losing some good things when accidentally closing a tab. How about hover on each suggestion and add it to "Watch Later" or even Queue? That also works, at least for me.
  - johnchristopher 3y ago
    So, I found out today (it's a new feature, I still have tabs that are missing it because I haven't refreshed them yet) that they added a white button "+ save" which adds the whole playlist/suggestions to a new playlist AND now click on individual songs "add to playlist" adds to the latest created playlist. It's a good day.
  - johnchristopher 3y ago
    Well, this becomes old fast :). I usually have to click 40 songs and add them to a new playlist. There are some firefox extension that can extract URL and rebuild playlist but they are a bit buggy.
rtsil 3y ago
I see it as well, on chrome and firefox, across different YT accounts.
LeoNatan25 3y ago
I have it, and it certainly wasn't there yesterday. Thanks for the tip!
blondin 3y ago
i see it too. i have sent numerous feedback asking for a sort by length in playlists. that feature doesn't seem to align with their vision of good playlist management somehow.
legrande 3y ago
Still no way to see how many videos are in a channel though? Unless I need to pay more attention.
- iamevn 3y ago
  On the android app at least, the video count is next to subscriber count below the name and above the description on the channel's page.
- stefanos82 3y ago
  It can be found on top of the channel of your choice, right below channel name, right next to channel @ChannelName.
BasedAnon 3y ago
Now for them to bring back the 5 star rating system and video replies!
- stefanos82 3y ago
  ...and the dislike counting! I don't want to depend on an extension to know whether a video worth to watch or not.
  - miohtama 3y ago
    The problem with dislike counting is that the customers of Youtube (advertisers) do not want it, because they are spooked to have their ads associated with perceived negativity.
    - stefanos82 3y ago
      They really need to fix this, because I have lost counting how many times I've got click-baited with a video that contained either violence in it or its content was completely unrelated to its thumbnail...therefore a visible dislike counter would have saved me from giving them views when they should have removed them from the platform as a whole. If any YouTube developer is reading this, please fix this dangerous behavior by malicious actors that take advantage of the platform's relatively recent changes.
      - usui 3y ago
        I'm not sure how to say this without being at least a little offensive: If the above request is in earnest, it is incredibly naïve. You don't think they know this is a problem for users, or that legions of other users share this thought, or more charitably, do you think that sharing this thought will make a difference? Google doesn't want to solve the fact that users spend more time watching clickbait and low quality videos as a result of removing features that they themselves implemented back when they thought they could be anything more than an advertising company. This strategy also explains what happened to Google Search.
SllX 3y ago
Doesn’t seem to have hit the iPad app yet and I don’t have any updates pending at the moment, but this is still excellent news. Thanks for the heads up!
TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
I wish you could sort by views within certain time frames. I've written a JS snippet to help do this in the past, but it's crazy to me that this isn't implemented natively. My use-case is wanting to check out the top videos from a specific time frame. I'll periodically check in on some channels or niche interest, and I just wanna get a sense of their top videos. For example, I don't watch League of Legends regularly, but I like to check out the occasional VOD, and if I'm gonna watch a random game I'll probably get a good game by picking one with a lot of views within the last 2 or 3 months. Other times I might go a year or two without listening to an artist and I wanna check out their most popular videos in that time frame.
- rzzzt 3y ago
  "before:<date>" works in search, at least it did a short while ago.
panick21_ 3y ago
I so wish youtube would have a more powerful search. Can I have something better then 'longer then 20min'? Like there are tons of things that go up to 3h or more. And often I might want 1h content but the 'longer then 20min' shows tons of stuff that is some 22min video.
- stefanos82 3y ago
  I have noticed a pattern by YouTube's algorithm with long videos. When I play a long video, for example synthwave music to get myself nostalgic with the '80s, I can see the suggested videos on my right are either of the same range or even longer than expected! You cannot imagine how many diamonds I have discovered like that, which makes me very happy! ^_^
  - metiscus 3y ago
    You know, I've noticed the same thing but I never really "noticed" it, if you follow. It's almost like they bin the videos by length in the suggestion algorithm.
- rdlw 3y ago
  Also when I search, it shows me about 5 search results, 5 videos related to my search that I may like, and then... recommendations?
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    Yes. This pisses me off too.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
93po 3y ago
Great. Can we get Amazon to have price sorting work too please? And have it actually accurately show cost per unit across similar products? I have to believe it's deliberately broken in both cases which is fucking annoying.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  As far as I'm aware, that feature never worked. Who knows why they even keep it. Surely they don't actually think we're that stupid that we won't notice that the price sorting doesn't work.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    The problem is search is incredibly fuzzy and only saved by relevance filtering. So if you sort by price you get the strangest crap at the cheapest end.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- stefanos82 3y ago
  TIL...that Privacy Badger extension and uBlock Origin affect the "Sort by" options in Amazon! I have disabled both of them and got my results properly sorted by "Price: Low to High" while with both extensions on, it defaults to Featured!
  - rand0mx1 3y ago
    This is false information, ublock origin doesn't affect 'Sort by' feature.
    - stefanos82 3y ago
      It does affect it, at least under Firefox; check your web developer tools. Here's a tiny portion of a massive error message: Error logged with the Track&Report JS errors API(http://tiny/1covqr6l8/wamazindeClieUserJava): {"m":"undefined Unknown error","name":"Error","csm":"v5 ueLogError stack","logLevel":"ERROR","attribution":"APE-safeframe","pageURL":"https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mastering+perl&s=price-asc-rank&ds=v1%3ANxZp5S66jp%2F1FIQyOG0JNqN4D96zzLqBks5YP1xArBo","f":"https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mastering+perl","l":2039,"s":["logError<@https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mastering+perl:2039:60","importScript</script.onerror@https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mastering+perl:2039:267","EventHandlerNonNull*importScript<@https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mastering+perl:2039:230","@https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61ZS63EQSsL.js?AUIClients/AmazonUIjQuery line 44 > eval:1:372"
subarctic 3y ago
Oh, you mean for a specific channel - I thought you meant you could sort search results by oldest. Well, that's still better than not having it.
atsuyatakagi 3y ago
This is exactly why I created a site to search/sort specific YouTube creators' videos [0], but I guess it's good that they listened to end-users :) [0]: https://holosearch.xyz https://holosearch.xyz
crazygringo 3y ago
Confirmed. Now I'm just curious what the justification was for removing it, because it baffles me. The option was removed as part of a general UX refresh that moved from a sort drop-down to pill buttons -- this general drop-down -> pill thing seeming to be a general trend on apps and websites now. But it's hard to imagine why it was removed in the first place. Saving a minuscule amount money by reducing views of less-cached long-tail content doesn't seem important enough. Nor does there seem to be any compelling engagement reason to prioritize newer videos. And I'm not aware of an ad revenue reason, such as older videos being less monetizable. Maybe it was just a misguided attempt at UX simplification that backfired?
- IIAOPSW 3y ago
  If you're not the customer...
- autoexec 3y ago
  I'm guessing someone (or something) made the argument that forcing people to scroll through every video uploaded to a channel just to get to the oldest ones "increased engagement"
  - KeepFlying 3y ago
    If it's anything like redesign work I'm used to, someone redesigned and just happened to remove it with little reason for it. Then the numbers went up as people had to scroll so they assumed everyone loved the redesign and didn't question why.
    - ninkendo 3y ago
      I think this hints at a concept I find very hard to articulate about letting metrics guide your design. You set out with metrics that seem plausible, you work to improve them, and if they do improve, you call the design a success. But then it actually turns out the metrics were no good in the first place because they “improve” for scenarios where you’ve most certainly made the user experience worse. Metrics proponents would argue that you should have had better metrics, but then I start to feel that the problem of selecting the right metrics becomes an art form just as subjective and complicated as designing a good UI in the first place, at which point they’re no help.
goda90 3y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if it disappeared again. Playback speed briefly appeared on the Android TV app, then disappeared for good with no explanation.
spirit557 3y ago
Not for me yet, tried with a clean profile too. I have been missing this simple option a lot
Waterluvian 3y ago
Now if only they could add back the ability to pick my own resolution with chromecast YouTube. Their ability to guess my bandwidth is Bad. It always sticks me on 360p and yet 4K works fine everywhere in my house without question all the time. All other apps chromecast in HD just fine. But no. Gotta take that feature away. Some obsessive UI/UX people who need to keep looking busy and necessary.
- tmpz22 3y ago
  It’s ok it’s probably a line item in their next promotion packet
stefanos82 3y ago
Update: There's an article about the restored feature. https://www.androidpolice.com/youtube-oldest-sorting-coming-back/ https://www.androidpolice.com/youtube-oldest-sorting-coming-...
abnry 3y ago
Does anyone have any self hosted YouTube __playlist__ recommendations? Downloading tends to be the focus and that isn't important to me. I like to save videos for later with my watch later playlist, but it is unmanageable. Not easy to delete or sort or search. YouTube could be so much better in terms of playlist management.
- stefanos82 3y ago
  The best suggestion for you would be to use SMplayer and create a new playlist in it with the video links you want to watch later and never fear of messing things up. It uses either youtube-dl or yt-dlp behind the scenes for playing the videos while downloading them on the fly, so it works flawlessly in cases like yours.
IIAOPSW 3y ago
youtube is quickly approaching feature parity with mid 2000s youtube. Same for Google maps and even Gmail.
- jaimex2 3y ago
  i loled. Its so true.
- NotYourLawyer 3y ago
  Not google search though. Blech.
- FullstakBlogger 3y ago
  I can't wait for them to bring back the old related videos list. When is the last time you've heard someone use the term "youtube rabbit hole"? The effect is so lost, people who never experienced it don't even use the term wrongly to describe how things are now.
  - eddythompson80 3y ago
    They removed it for a reason. Hard to imagine having the rabbit hole effect while avoiding all the negatives of it too.
    - FullstakBlogger 3y ago
      The negatives being what? Technical? Social? Having a traversable landscape of content is incredibly valuable. I think "search results as search criteria"/"traversal by adjacency" is the only real feasible way to organize the web, and the fact that we've moved away from that is the reason google search is often now useless. ChatGPT is valuable as a search replacement/amplifier because it reproduces that adjacency in a roundabout way. If you want to know what kind of quality a given printer produces, good luck finding a picture on google. All you'll see is ad-infested, auto-generated top-n lists. Applying the old youtube related model, you'd just have to find one picture to be a few degrees of separation from a picture of a print job from any printer ever manufactured. The idea of objective universal ranking is a wash, and ranking based on N paramaters isn't much better.
adamsvystun 3y ago
Relevant tweet by YouTube CEO: https://twitter.com/nealmohan/status/1655999215515074561 https://twitter.com/nealmohan/status/1655999215515074561
- badtension 3y ago
  It's astounding that such a simple feature was dropped, firstly, and then got a re-launch mentioned by the CEO himself "after hearing some great feedback"... it's just a sorting order, honestly this should have never been removed. Those big platforms really got to go.
  - kccqzy 3y ago
    I don't want to speculate baselessly but if you've worked in big companies you'll know seemingly simple features become complicated with scale. This is especially when you are YouTube. It could be that the old feature was causing production problems and had to be removed, while a more efficient re-implementation is underway. I mean just look at what Google's Cloud Spanner says about using timestamps as keys: https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/schema-design https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/schema-design Having both sort by latest and sort by oldest in an efficient way could very well be a nontrivial problem.
    - mardifoufs 3y ago
      Isn't that the type of sorting you basically only need to do once? Or I guess in the rare cases when a video gets taken down, privated or relisted? I know it's not super rare but it would still be a much rarer event than users sorting by old. So they can just keep the list or set of video IDs, no need for expensive db operations right? (I'm being a complete armchair expert here, since I have no idea of the actual state of the YouTube backend. It might look simple to me but I'm sure it's not in reality . I'm curious to see what would be the best way to optimize a feature like this one!)
    - thrdbndndn 3y ago
      I agree with you in general, but in this particular case? No, I really don't believe it's a technical issue. It of course may not be as simple as your random hobby projects, but Google has the manpower that is proportional to the complexity of YouTube.
Nellyz 3y ago
[flagged]
JEDI-HACKER 3y ago
[dead]
fooker 3y ago
The pinnacle of perf-driven-development! PM lists an OKR for increasing engagement. PM launches a new version without the feature. New version shows engagement(or whatever corpspeak metric) increased by N%. PM gets a promotion. Dev sees a missing feature, launches the feature. Dev shows M people are using this new feature. Dev gets a promotion for 'impact'. And the cycle repeats, with minor variations for mature products. This is why startups even get a chance to compete with the giants.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  OKR surfing
DoesntMatter22 3y ago
That's fantastic to hear.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
EFreethought 3y ago
I wish they would get rid of infinite scroll. If a channel has a lot of videos, "Oldest" is no better than "Latest".
pentagrama 3y ago
And (for me at least) the Save to Watch Later button is no more when hovering the video thumbnail on the Subscriptions feed [1] :/ Now is behind the three dots drop-down menu, not as handy as before. [1] https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions (you must be logged in)
- ddq 3y ago
  Making a quick queue from a selection of suggestions should really be YT’s bread and buttery, especially if they’re pivoting to a shorts focus, yet they removed that button (for me at least). I used that button all the time, it made it quick and easy to basically program my own block of television. Hope it comes back or I’ll have to look for an extension.
  - pentagrama 3y ago
    But at least for me is still appearing, when hovering on each video row > three dots button appear > click on three dots button > Save to Watch Later is on the options list. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/oZFG5eN https://imgur.com/a/oZFG5eN Hope it appears for you too, is a bit hard to find.
pentagrama 3y ago
Are you talking about the mobile native app? Because at least for me, on desktop web is still only Latest and Popular https://imgur.com/a/XBFvmen https://imgur.com/a/XBFvmen [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/@theneedledrop/videos https://www.youtube.com/@theneedledrop/videos
- oatmeal1 3y ago
  "Oldest" shows on Windows using Chrome for me.
  - pentagrama 3y ago
    Oh, I'm on Windows too but using Firefox.
  - thrdbndndn 3y ago
    It doesn't show up here with either browsers, probably region factor (I'm not in the US). I really hate these services (especially the mega ones like YouTube, Twitter) ALWAYS have random feature disparity across client/region for no apparent reason. I understand they can't be exactly simultaneous for technical reasons, but often times features would be delayed in some regions for days if not months.
excalibur 3y ago
I want an option to sort by duration. Or rather search by duration.
pengaru 3y ago
Not on any of the channels videos pages I have bookmarked... (without logging in)
- pengaru 3y ago
  Seems to be there as of today though, nice.
vondur 3y ago
I’d live to be able to favorite or organize my subscriptions.
ezconnect 3y ago
The thing I hate about youtube is it's trying to be like TikTok, please stop trying to be TikTok.
normaldist 3y ago
Does anyone else find YouTube's search near-unusable for some topic domains?
- antegamisou 3y ago
  I can search for a specific term and a few scrolls later I'll get videos I previously watched or liked as search results, which never have any relevance to the term I entered.
- RGamma 3y ago
  Yes, it's been like this for a long time now...
- thinkingemote 3y ago
  I think search includes words mentioned within the video and comments. Often prioritising this over a title and description. This leads to bad results finding things.
- Minor49er 3y ago
  This is deliberate. It's probably for the same reasons why comments are arbitrarily sorted and why live chat always sorts by "Top" rather than "Newest" (whatever "Top" even means to YouTube, idk)
cesarvarela 3y ago
I would love to be able to hide Shorts for good instead of having to do it every 30 days. I wonder what technical issue is preventing them to accomplish such task.
- dec0dedab0de 3y ago
  There is no technical issue, they realized that shorts make them more money, so they are pushing that.
  - Fatnino 3y ago
    How do shorts make money? I thought shorts is just a way for YouTube to make sure everyone knows tiktok exists. They all end with an ad for tiktok
- ehnto 3y ago
  I wrote a personal browser extension that hides them. They are obnoxious.
- jamespullar 3y ago
  I doubt it's a technical issue. The current YouTube CEO, Neal Mohan, has made a big push for Shorts. This is almost certainly a business decision.
  - jeron 3y ago
    it's a business decision that makes sense. Short form entertainment is a huge market that TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat have been cashing in on. It may be annoying to users but to those that adopt, YouTube stands to gain a lot from it
- chii 3y ago
  there's a ublock list that specifically hides shorts : https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts
- bongobingo1 3y ago
lazylion2 3y ago
I made a page that lets you see top videos of a channel with a date range https://ytsort.netlify.app/ https://ytsort.netlify.app/ the free YT api is limited to 100 hits a day so it might not work sometimes source (really bad): https://github.com/arye321/yt_sort https://github.com/arye321/yt_sort
ugur2nd 3y ago
Finally! In this way, I can follow the development processes of the channels and create insight.
cobbaut 3y ago
When will Youtube allow me to set tags (or my mood). I like watching science and math video's in the morning, and music video's in the evening. Both are very distinct, yet Youtube will keep putting music video suggestions in the morning, and math in the evening. Please allow a "mood" (or category) setting, so I can click "math and science" and only get those kind of suggestions.
- lyvxh 3y ago
  I just use brand accounts for this. You can create them here: https://www.youtube.com/channel_switcher https://www.youtube.com/channel_switcher It's the best hidden feature of YouTube. You switch using the normal account switcher.
  - cobbaut 3y ago
    Interesting, thanks.
TootsMagoon 3y ago
No snark. Honest question. What is the best reason to remove sort by oldest in the first place?
iammjm 3y ago
It's great to look back to the beginnings of people and to see the progress they have made. I remember checking out some of the first Nerdwriter videos. He's come a long way! Maybe there's hope for me too ;)
fairygod 3y ago
Does anybody know how to play all videos from channel in chronological order (from oldest-to-newest)? There is a trick to play them newest-to-oldest with some viewing page's source magic ('&list=UU...') and it works pretty reliably, but what about oldest-to-newest?

441 points by stefanos82 3y ago

I was navigating around YouTube and found a channel I wanted to watch its most popular videos and have noticed they added back the oldest option!

tomcam 3y ago

Holy shit I’m a new man. Thank you. I had stopped bothering to look.

sieabahlpark 3y ago

[dead]

rasz 3y ago

Its just you, one of Google targetted experiments

stefanos82 3y ago
Can you clear your cookies for YouTube only and try again? It could help.
- incomplete 3y ago
  just cleared my cookies, re-logged in, and no ability to sort by oldest. :(
  - stefanos82 3y ago
    Have patience, it will get visible to all users eventually. This extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sort-by-oldest/miglaibdlgminlepgeifekifakochlka https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sort-by-oldest/mig... added (logically yesterday, if we see its date in description) an End of Life announcement due to the return of this option.

belfalas 3y ago

I see the option in their mobile app as well.

paulpauper 3y ago

Maybe it is to maximize revenue. older videos are less profitable for google compared to newer ones .

jamcrimer 3y ago
so you're saying they're disabling the feature of "not being able to watch old videos" to maximize revenue?
- wruza 3y ago
  Idk, but I’ve noticed that many old non-popular videos take time to load or seek. It seems they’re optimizing availability architecture wrt that.

johnchristopher 3y ago

OT: I wish there was a way to create a playlist from music youtube suggestions. I am losing some good things when accidentally closing a tab.

stefanos82 3y ago
I use Firefox and more than often I restore last closed tabs (by mistake like you!) with Ctrl+Shift+T. Of course, there's History and "Restore Previous Session" which saves you from countless nightmares when the next time you boot your computer you want to restore what you last viewed or had opened. It helps immensely!
- johnchristopher 3y ago
  Youtube music will replace the playlist with new suggestions (it makes a new playlist with the first song being the one that was playing or on pause when the tab was closed), so even though the tab gets restored its content doesn't. Mixes and user playlist are different from suggestion playlists.
stefanos82 3y ago
> OT: I wish there was a way to create a playlist from music youtube suggestions. I am losing some good things when accidentally closing a tab. How about hover on each suggestion and add it to "Watch Later" or even Queue? That also works, at least for me.
- johnchristopher 3y ago
  So, I found out today (it's a new feature, I still have tabs that are missing it because I haven't refreshed them yet) that they added a white button "+ save" which adds the whole playlist/suggestions to a new playlist AND now click on individual songs "add to playlist" adds to the latest created playlist. It's a good day.
- johnchristopher 3y ago
  Well, this becomes old fast :). I usually have to click 40 songs and add them to a new playlist. There are some firefox extension that can extract URL and rebuild playlist but they are a bit buggy.

rtsil 3y ago

I see it as well, on chrome and firefox, across different YT accounts.

LeoNatan25 3y ago

I have it, and it certainly wasn't there yesterday. Thanks for the tip!

blondin 3y ago

i see it too. i have sent numerous feedback asking for a sort by length in playlists. that feature doesn't seem to align with their vision of good playlist management somehow.

legrande 3y ago

Still no way to see how many videos are in a channel though? Unless I need to pay more attention.

iamevn 3y ago
On the android app at least, the video count is next to subscriber count below the name and above the description on the channel's page.
stefanos82 3y ago
It can be found on top of the channel of your choice, right below channel name, right next to channel @ChannelName.

BasedAnon 3y ago

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

stefanos82 3y ago
...and the dislike counting! I don't want to depend on an extension to know whether a video worth to watch or not.
- miohtama 3y ago
  The problem with dislike counting is that the customers of Youtube (advertisers) do not want it, because they are spooked to have their ads associated with perceived negativity.
  - stefanos82 3y ago
    They really need to fix this, because I have lost counting how many times I've got click-baited with a video that contained either violence in it or its content was completely unrelated to its thumbnail...therefore a visible dislike counter would have saved me from giving them views when they should have removed them from the platform as a whole. If any YouTube developer is reading this, please fix this dangerous behavior by malicious actors that take advantage of the platform's relatively recent changes.
    - usui 3y ago
      I'm not sure how to say this without being at least a little offensive: If the above request is in earnest, it is incredibly naïve. You don't think they know this is a problem for users, or that legions of other users share this thought, or more charitably, do you think that sharing this thought will make a difference? Google doesn't want to solve the fact that users spend more time watching clickbait and low quality videos as a result of removing features that they themselves implemented back when they thought they could be anything more than an advertising company. This strategy also explains what happened to Google Search.

SllX 3y ago

Doesn’t seem to have hit the iPad app yet and I don’t have any updates pending at the moment, but this is still excellent news. Thanks for the heads up!

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago

I wish you could sort by views within certain time frames. I've written a JS snippet to help do this in the past, but it's crazy to me that this isn't implemented natively. My use-case is wanting to check out the top videos from a specific time frame. I'll periodically check in on some channels or niche interest, and I just wanna get a sense of their top videos. For example, I don't watch League of Legends regularly, but I like to check out the occasional VOD, and if I'm gonna watch a random game I'll probably get a good game by picking one with a lot of views within the last 2 or 3 months. Other times I might go a year or two without listening to an artist and I wanna check out their most popular videos in that time frame.

rzzzt 3y ago
"before:<date>" works in search, at least it did a short while ago.

panick21_ 3y ago

I so wish youtube would have a more powerful search. Can I have something better then 'longer then 20min'? Like there are tons of things that go up to 3h or more. And often I might want 1h content but the 'longer then 20min' shows tons of stuff that is some 22min video.

stefanos82 3y ago
I have noticed a pattern by YouTube's algorithm with long videos. When I play a long video, for example synthwave music to get myself nostalgic with the '80s, I can see the suggested videos on my right are either of the same range or even longer than expected! You cannot imagine how many diamonds I have discovered like that, which makes me very happy! ^_^
- metiscus 3y ago
  You know, I've noticed the same thing but I never really "noticed" it, if you follow. It's almost like they bin the videos by length in the suggestion algorithm.
rdlw 3y ago
Also when I search, it shows me about 5 search results, 5 videos related to my search that I may like, and then... recommendations?
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Yes. This pisses me off too.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

93po 3y ago

Great. Can we get Amazon to have price sorting work too please? And have it actually accurately show cost per unit across similar products? I have to believe it's deliberately broken in both cases which is fucking annoying.

ravenstine 3y ago
As far as I'm aware, that feature never worked. Who knows why they even keep it. Surely they don't actually think we're that stupid that we won't notice that the price sorting doesn't work.
- bombcar 3y ago
  The problem is search is incredibly fuzzy and only saved by relevance filtering. So if you sort by price you get the strangest crap at the cheapest end.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
stefanos82 3y ago
TIL...that Privacy Badger extension and uBlock Origin affect the "Sort by" options in Amazon! I have disabled both of them and got my results properly sorted by "Price: Low to High" while with both extensions on, it defaults to Featured!
- rand0mx1 3y ago
  This is false information, ublock origin doesn't affect 'Sort by' feature.
  - stefanos82 3y ago
    It does affect it, at least under Firefox; check your web developer tools. Here's a tiny portion of a massive error message: Error logged with the Track&Report JS errors API(http://tiny/1covqr6l8/wamazindeClieUserJava): {"m":"undefined Unknown error","name":"Error","csm":"v5 ueLogError stack","logLevel":"ERROR","attribution":"APE-safeframe","pageURL":"https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mastering+perl&s=price-asc-rank&ds=v1%3ANxZp5S66jp%2F1FIQyOG0JNqN4D96zzLqBks5YP1xArBo","f":"https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mastering+perl","l":2039,"s":["logError<@https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mastering+perl:2039:60","importScript</script.onerror@https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mastering+perl:2039:267","EventHandlerNonNull*importScript<@https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mastering+perl:2039:230","@https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61ZS63EQSsL.js?AUIClients/AmazonUIjQuery line 44 > eval:1:372"

subarctic 3y ago

Oh, you mean for a specific channel - I thought you meant you could sort search results by oldest. Well, that's still better than not having it.

atsuyatakagi 3y ago

This is exactly why I created a site to search/sort specific YouTube creators' videos [0], but I guess it's good that they listened to end-users :) [0]: https://holosearch.xyz https://holosearch.xyz

crazygringo 3y ago

Confirmed. Now I'm just curious what the justification was for removing it, because it baffles me. The option was removed as part of a general UX refresh that moved from a sort drop-down to pill buttons -- this general drop-down -> pill thing seeming to be a general trend on apps and websites now. But it's hard to imagine why it was removed in the first place. Saving a minuscule amount money by reducing views of less-cached long-tail content doesn't seem important enough. Nor does there seem to be any compelling engagement reason to prioritize newer videos. And I'm not aware of an ad revenue reason, such as older videos being less monetizable. Maybe it was just a misguided attempt at UX simplification that backfired?

IIAOPSW 3y ago
If you're not the customer...
autoexec 3y ago
I'm guessing someone (or something) made the argument that forcing people to scroll through every video uploaded to a channel just to get to the oldest ones "increased engagement"
- KeepFlying 3y ago
  If it's anything like redesign work I'm used to, someone redesigned and just happened to remove it with little reason for it. Then the numbers went up as people had to scroll so they assumed everyone loved the redesign and didn't question why.
  - ninkendo 3y ago
    I think this hints at a concept I find very hard to articulate about letting metrics guide your design. You set out with metrics that seem plausible, you work to improve them, and if they do improve, you call the design a success. But then it actually turns out the metrics were no good in the first place because they “improve” for scenarios where you’ve most certainly made the user experience worse. Metrics proponents would argue that you should have had better metrics, but then I start to feel that the problem of selecting the right metrics becomes an art form just as subjective and complicated as designing a good UI in the first place, at which point they’re no help.

goda90 3y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if it disappeared again. Playback speed briefly appeared on the Android TV app, then disappeared for good with no explanation.

spirit557 3y ago

Not for me yet, tried with a clean profile too. I have been missing this simple option a lot

Waterluvian 3y ago

Now if only they could add back the ability to pick my own resolution with chromecast YouTube. Their ability to guess my bandwidth is Bad. It always sticks me on 360p and yet 4K works fine everywhere in my house without question all the time. All other apps chromecast in HD just fine. But no. Gotta take that feature away. Some obsessive UI/UX people who need to keep looking busy and necessary.

tmpz22 3y ago
It’s ok it’s probably a line item in their next promotion packet

stefanos82 3y ago

Update: There's an article about the restored feature. https://www.androidpolice.com/youtube-oldest-sorting-coming-back/ https://www.androidpolice.com/youtube-oldest-sorting-coming-...

abnry 3y ago

Does anyone have any self hosted YouTube __playlist__ recommendations? Downloading tends to be the focus and that isn't important to me. I like to save videos for later with my watch later playlist, but it is unmanageable. Not easy to delete or sort or search. YouTube could be so much better in terms of playlist management.

stefanos82 3y ago
The best suggestion for you would be to use SMplayer and create a new playlist in it with the video links you want to watch later and never fear of messing things up. It uses either youtube-dl or yt-dlp behind the scenes for playing the videos while downloading them on the fly, so it works flawlessly in cases like yours.

IIAOPSW 3y ago

youtube is quickly approaching feature parity with mid 2000s youtube. Same for Google maps and even Gmail.

jaimex2 3y ago
i loled. Its so true.
NotYourLawyer 3y ago
Not google search though. Blech.
FullstakBlogger 3y ago
I can't wait for them to bring back the old related videos list. When is the last time you've heard someone use the term "youtube rabbit hole"? The effect is so lost, people who never experienced it don't even use the term wrongly to describe how things are now.
- eddythompson80 3y ago
  They removed it for a reason. Hard to imagine having the rabbit hole effect while avoiding all the negatives of it too.
  - FullstakBlogger 3y ago
    The negatives being what? Technical? Social? Having a traversable landscape of content is incredibly valuable. I think "search results as search criteria"/"traversal by adjacency" is the only real feasible way to organize the web, and the fact that we've moved away from that is the reason google search is often now useless. ChatGPT is valuable as a search replacement/amplifier because it reproduces that adjacency in a roundabout way. If you want to know what kind of quality a given printer produces, good luck finding a picture on google. All you'll see is ad-infested, auto-generated top-n lists. Applying the old youtube related model, you'd just have to find one picture to be a few degrees of separation from a picture of a print job from any printer ever manufactured. The idea of objective universal ranking is a wash, and ranking based on N paramaters isn't much better.

adamsvystun 3y ago

Relevant tweet by YouTube CEO: https://twitter.com/nealmohan/status/1655999215515074561 https://twitter.com/nealmohan/status/1655999215515074561

badtension 3y ago
It's astounding that such a simple feature was dropped, firstly, and then got a re-launch mentioned by the CEO himself "after hearing some great feedback"... it's just a sorting order, honestly this should have never been removed. Those big platforms really got to go.
- kccqzy 3y ago
  I don't want to speculate baselessly but if you've worked in big companies you'll know seemingly simple features become complicated with scale. This is especially when you are YouTube. It could be that the old feature was causing production problems and had to be removed, while a more efficient re-implementation is underway. I mean just look at what Google's Cloud Spanner says about using timestamps as keys: https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/schema-design https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/schema-design Having both sort by latest and sort by oldest in an efficient way could very well be a nontrivial problem.
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    Isn't that the type of sorting you basically only need to do once? Or I guess in the rare cases when a video gets taken down, privated or relisted? I know it's not super rare but it would still be a much rarer event than users sorting by old. So they can just keep the list or set of video IDs, no need for expensive db operations right? (I'm being a complete armchair expert here, since I have no idea of the actual state of the YouTube backend. It might look simple to me but I'm sure it's not in reality . I'm curious to see what would be the best way to optimize a feature like this one!)
  - thrdbndndn 3y ago
    I agree with you in general, but in this particular case? No, I really don't believe it's a technical issue. It of course may not be as simple as your random hobby projects, but Google has the manpower that is proportional to the complexity of YouTube.

Nellyz 3y ago

[flagged]

JEDI-HACKER 3y ago

[dead]

fooker 3y ago

The pinnacle of perf-driven-development! PM lists an OKR for increasing engagement. PM launches a new version without the feature. New version shows engagement(or whatever corpspeak metric) increased by N%. PM gets a promotion. Dev sees a missing feature, launches the feature. Dev shows M people are using this new feature. Dev gets a promotion for 'impact'. And the cycle repeats, with minor variations for mature products. This is why startups even get a chance to compete with the giants.

quickthrower2 3y ago
OKR surfing

DoesntMatter22 3y ago

That's fantastic to hear.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

EFreethought 3y ago

I wish they would get rid of infinite scroll. If a channel has a lot of videos, "Oldest" is no better than "Latest".

pentagrama 3y ago

And (for me at least) the Save to Watch Later button is no more when hovering the video thumbnail on the Subscriptions feed [1] :/ Now is behind the three dots drop-down menu, not as handy as before. [1] https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions (you must be logged in)

ddq 3y ago
Making a quick queue from a selection of suggestions should really be YT’s bread and buttery, especially if they’re pivoting to a shorts focus, yet they removed that button (for me at least). I used that button all the time, it made it quick and easy to basically program my own block of television. Hope it comes back or I’ll have to look for an extension.
- pentagrama 3y ago
  But at least for me is still appearing, when hovering on each video row > three dots button appear > click on three dots button > Save to Watch Later is on the options list. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/oZFG5eN https://imgur.com/a/oZFG5eN Hope it appears for you too, is a bit hard to find.

pentagrama 3y ago

Are you talking about the mobile native app? Because at least for me, on desktop web is still only Latest and Popular https://imgur.com/a/XBFvmen https://imgur.com/a/XBFvmen [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/@theneedledrop/videos https://www.youtube.com/@theneedledrop/videos

oatmeal1 3y ago
"Oldest" shows on Windows using Chrome for me.
- pentagrama 3y ago
  Oh, I'm on Windows too but using Firefox.
- thrdbndndn 3y ago
  It doesn't show up here with either browsers, probably region factor (I'm not in the US). I really hate these services (especially the mega ones like YouTube, Twitter) ALWAYS have random feature disparity across client/region for no apparent reason. I understand they can't be exactly simultaneous for technical reasons, but often times features would be delayed in some regions for days if not months.

excalibur 3y ago

I want an option to sort by duration. Or rather search by duration.

pengaru 3y ago

Not on any of the channels videos pages I have bookmarked... (without logging in)

pengaru 3y ago
Seems to be there as of today though, nice.

vondur 3y ago

I’d live to be able to favorite or organize my subscriptions.

ezconnect 3y ago

The thing I hate about youtube is it's trying to be like TikTok, please stop trying to be TikTok.

normaldist 3y ago

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

antegamisou 3y ago
I can search for a specific term and a few scrolls later I'll get videos I previously watched or liked as search results, which never have any relevance to the term I entered.
RGamma 3y ago
Yes, it's been like this for a long time now...
thinkingemote 3y ago
I think search includes words mentioned within the video and comments. Often prioritising this over a title and description. This leads to bad results finding things.
Minor49er 3y ago
This is deliberate. It's probably for the same reasons why comments are arbitrarily sorted and why live chat always sorts by "Top" rather than "Newest" (whatever "Top" even means to YouTube, idk)

cesarvarela 3y ago

I would love to be able to hide Shorts for good instead of having to do it every 30 days. I wonder what technical issue is preventing them to accomplish such task.

dec0dedab0de 3y ago
There is no technical issue, they realized that shorts make them more money, so they are pushing that.
- Fatnino 3y ago
  How do shorts make money? I thought shorts is just a way for YouTube to make sure everyone knows tiktok exists. They all end with an ad for tiktok
ehnto 3y ago
I wrote a personal browser extension that hides them. They are obnoxious.
jamespullar 3y ago
I doubt it's a technical issue. The current YouTube CEO, Neal Mohan, has made a big push for Shorts. This is almost certainly a business decision.
- jeron 3y ago
  it's a business decision that makes sense. Short form entertainment is a huge market that TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat have been cashing in on. It may be annoying to users but to those that adopt, YouTube stands to gain a lot from it
chii 3y ago
there's a ublock list that specifically hides shorts : https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts
bongobingo1 3y ago

lazylion2 3y ago

I made a page that lets you see top videos of a channel with a date range https://ytsort.netlify.app/ https://ytsort.netlify.app/ the free YT api is limited to 100 hits a day so it might not work sometimes source (really bad): https://github.com/arye321/yt_sort https://github.com/arye321/yt_sort

ugur2nd 3y ago

Finally! In this way, I can follow the development processes of the channels and create insight.

cobbaut 3y ago

When will Youtube allow me to set tags (or my mood). I like watching science and math video's in the morning, and music video's in the evening. Both are very distinct, yet Youtube will keep putting music video suggestions in the morning, and math in the evening. Please allow a "mood" (or category) setting, so I can click "math and science" and only get those kind of suggestions.

lyvxh 3y ago
I just use brand accounts for this. You can create them here: https://www.youtube.com/channel_switcher https://www.youtube.com/channel_switcher It's the best hidden feature of YouTube. You switch using the normal account switcher.
- cobbaut 3y ago
  Interesting, thanks.

TootsMagoon 3y ago

No snark. Honest question. What is the best reason to remove sort by oldest in the first place?

iammjm 3y ago

It's great to look back to the beginnings of people and to see the progress they have made. I remember checking out some of the first Nerdwriter videos. He's come a long way! Maybe there's hope for me too ;)

fairygod 3y ago

Does anybody know how to play all videos from channel in chronological order (from oldest-to-newest)? There is a trick to play them newest-to-oldest with some viewing page's source magic ('&list=UU...') and it works pretty reliably, but what about oldest-to-newest?