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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

> The only two possible filters on the list of videos of a channel now are most recent and most popular.

Isn't that all there's ever been? Just chronological and popularity? This post isn't very helpful unless you say what you think has been removed. (I, for one, have always wished for most popular over the last 30 days, but oh well.)

> Also, there's less videos on a single row now.

You're going to have to tell us how many there were before and how many there are now. I'm not seeing any difference. It also depends -- are you talking about the home page? Channel home page? Channel videos tab? Because they all act differently.

Are you sure you just haven't changed your zoom settings or something? Or your window width?

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>Isn't that all there's ever been? Just chronological and popularity?

Youtube old UI "SORT BY" option had "Date added (oldest)" : https://imgur.com/a/9czAAiv

Youtube new UI removed "oldest" option and only has "Recently uploaded" : https://imgur.com/a/aSAhxLC

(Apparently, the new javascript for Youtube hasn't propagated to all worldwide servers yet which is why I was able to get screenshots of both the old & new UI by using different computers.)

Google does a lot of A/B testing, called Experiments. YouTube has some cool tools for QA testing those experiments...

This redesign is being A/B tested (with high percentages of users it's rolled out to). It comes in different parts, so if you clear your cookies and reload you can be reassigned a bucket and therefore see slightly different interfaces.

Bonus: I think the redesign is called called Amsterdam, don't quote me on that though...

There was an "oldest" filter too. Especially necessary for today's YouTube for us to revisit channels that once used to be good but then gradually fell into dark patterns like everyone else in the industry.

you can add it back in since it just takes a url param. (until they break this too of course)

https://github.com/sw-yx/youtube-browser-extension

Fyi... the url params in that source code[1] no longer work:

  const urls = {
    popular: `?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid`,
    oldest: `?view=0&sort=da&flow=grid`,
    newest: `?view=0&sort=dd&flow=grid`,
  }

Which means the following url modification with "&sort=da" will not work in an attempt to list the oldest videos first: https://www.youtube.com/c/veritasium/videos?view=0&sort=da&f...

[1] from https://github.com/sw-yx/youtube-browser-extension/blob/e76f...

I slapped together a really quick script to get oldest videos via Youtube API. It goes through all the videos from a playlist ID and then writes them to a html file with oldest first. Looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/ZxCgnBY.png Not perfect but works ok

https://github.com/n0x5/scripts/blob/master/youtube_api_uplo...

Need an API key and also the Uploads playlist ID from the channel which can use this script to get: https://github.com/n0x5/scripts/blob/master/youtube_get_uplo...

It's a little convoluted I might implement get uploads id right into the script but the issue is it doesn't always return the correct channel when searching by name, in which case one has to manually go through the results and find the right channel id which would take longer to code to actually work all the time.

suggest sticking that into a replit so that people can easily run/fork on the web :)

just fyi i got very upset and retried again and... it works on https://www.youtube.com/c/JessicaSanchezOfficial/videos. they made youtube slower to load (which broke my extension.. i fixed it) but those queryparams still work.

the thing on the veritasium looks to be a new layout. trying to see if i can modify for it.

update: looks like a very opaque api request so i cant figure it out in the time i have for this. extremely sad.

Good product design is not based on personal preferences, it's data/usage-driven. Having an unused feature is bloat that takes away important dev/QA resources.

I disagree. Good product design is faithful and doesn't change every time someone does an A/B test

Depends what you mean by "the product". If the product is a content platform where the main purpose is serving ads, then I agree. If you're trying to build a "bicycle for the mind" that actually empowers the user then removing seldom used, but useful features will kill the thing. I can imagine what A/B tested Vim would look like.

>I can imagine what A/B tested Vim would look like.

Much more intuitive to learn?

A vim A/B test blindly adhered to would make it so any key pressed quit vim.

I want Clippy for Emacs. "It looks like you are trying do define a new mode. May I help with that?"

And then all it knows how to do is help you install Gentoo

in 3 commands

You used to be able to filter by oldest to newest which doesn't look possible anymore

Err, that’s sorting - not filtering. And I’m staring at a YouTube channel right now and the sort options are:

Most Popular Date added (oldest) Date added (newest)

>Most Popular Date added (oldest) Date added (newest)

That's what I see too, but worth remembering that other people might see totally different UI options, given the number of A/B tests that Google run

Was it there recently for you? I hadn't seen that option on a channel's list of videos for what must be years now.

I appreciated this comment, especially since this article is currently near to the top of HN at the same time: https://www.karlsutt.com/articles/communicating-effectively-...

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