Tell HN: YouTube has apparently removed the option to sort by “oldest first”

7 pointskleiba4 comments

Apparently, this "feature" has been around at least on some channels since April, but a new UI overhaul now seem to have removed the ability to sort by "oldest first" completely from youtube channels. Of course, you still manually scroll through all uploaded videos until you get to the very first one but this will be very tedious for big channels, to say the least.

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Are there significant technical challenges with that? Doesn’t seem like there would/should be..

Of course not. There's still the "newest first" sort option, so it's still possible to sort by time. It's purely an interface choice, not a backend issue.

My guess is the UI reflects cache policy, the cache policy is biased toward LRU and that LRU tends to correlate with age.

To the degree my guess correlates to reality, older videos will tend to be in cooler storage and therefore more resource intensive to retrieve and load and play.

And the UI change reflects engineering considerations as is the cultural practice at Google.

At the scale of YouTube everything is a technical challenge.

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