Comment by mrkramer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrkramer | Hacker News Reader

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People at Google don't use Google products, YouTube in particular. It is quite astonishing that so many features are nonsense or not yet implemented. Why I can't search comments in comments section of a video; if a video has 100+ or 1 000+ comments I can't easily find comments that are relevant to me. Why I can't search my playlist videos and my liked videos; I have 1 000+ liked videos and 1 000+ videos in my Watch Later playlist. Maybe I'm disorganized with Watch Later playlist but I'm also a power user which is not satisfied with only casual features. Any yea you can't sort channel videos like you use to(Newest, Oldest, Most Popular). Like you said it's now only Most recent and Most popular. And one thing that I almost forgot, in Web version of YouTube you can search channel for videos and in native mobile app you can't search channel for videos. When I say search channel for videos I mean query with keywords(there is no Search Bar within Channel page or within Videos tab).

YouTube is slowly transitioning from a UGC video marketplace into a modern version of cable tv. These technical oversights aren't bugs. They're a deliberate effort to shape user behavior and maximize advertising revenue. Old content is a liability and is slowly being deprecated from the system.

My pet theory is that they only implement features which are lightweight enough to not cause significant load on their backend and if it does then the feature dies right there, no matter how useful. Extreme cost-focused tunnel vision.

But it doesn't make sense when you know that they have billions in cash sitting in bank waiting to be spend. They have the money and the knowledge to implement whatever feature they need to. Backend load and infrastructure scale is not a problem at this point. My somewhat simple explanation is; Google wants to cater to the casual crowd so hard to the point of sacrificing user experience for advanced users or power users who use YouTube every day. They rather prefer status quo than try to bother with more advanced features. But I have to admit, they already have some pretty advanced features but they need to keep pushing.

They took away 'sort by new' for mobile users (most users), which means most users won't see (possibly valid) critical comments anymore. Remember 'YouTube comments' meme existing because the comments were just that bad.

It's a pattern of 'don't restrict, just make it less convenient to use'.

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