YouTube confirms that it has removed the “sort by oldest/newest” option

"we know sorting options are important & we’re still exploring how to bring these back"

While I opened this thread I felt an restless rage rising at yet another fuck the user decision from Google, but this joke made me laugh and defused the situation. Thanks. The Macbook won't be thrown across the room in a fit of nerdrage today.

salutes

The fastest growing social network on the planet is based on video shorts and they're trying to get those eyes.

I hate what the web has become.

My only guess is it has grouped me in with the crowd that watches metal machining videos.

Out of curiousity... Do you also get shorts when you open the app (new session)?

  javascript:(function(){ var els = document.querySelectorAll('[href^="/shorts/"]');  for (var i = 0; i < els.length; i++) { if (els[i]) els[i].closest('ytd-grid-video-renderer').remove(); }  })();

Every content site is hoping the US bans tiktok and they can be positioned to pick up all the traffic

"Hid for 30 days" Fucking excuse me? No, I told you I don't want this and you IGNORE ME? The insane level of arrogance and hubris to just IGNORE a direct user action like that....

Keep in mind that the best algorithm is always the human mind. People know what they like and that makes them happy. If you're following creators X, Y, and Z, you don't need a fancy algorithm to expose their videos to their followers, you just a place to show their videos in the order published.

Better YouTube algorithms might help in some cases like discovery of totally new channels and creators that people might be interested in. YouTube should go nuts and do whatever crazy experiments they want on some recommendations page. But the solution of trying to dictate precisely what users see all of the time through making the entire site a big algorithm-festival will always be suboptimial.

Are you signed in and/or using the same device?

These established sites are now designed to show you content most profitable to them, not the content you’re most likely to like.

This is why YouTube will endlessly recommend news videos to me. I’ve never watched a news video on YouTube, and any time I see it on my “Home Screen” I flag it as “Don’t show me this.” Is the algorithm comically idiotic? No, it’s trying to shove profitable (for them) content down my throat.

These platforms are fundamentally broken and we’re just waiting around for the actual implosion.

Well of course they are. YouTube isn't a public utility. And we aren't its customers, we're its product.

I think Instagram, youtube, and even a couple of porn sites have realized that they get really good engagement out of their product (users) with shorts and that's why they're doing it.

HN folks are not the target demographic, and we're a tiny minority, so they don't care what we think, even if we're justifiably annoyed.

I'd love to see a better algorithm on youtube too, but that's not their priority.

I like how the internet accepts this as a fact, despite there being zero evidence for this. It doesn't matter that corporations were historically a lot less likely to hide dislikes than independent creators. It doesn't matter that corporations that get a lot of dislikes aren't ones that that advertise much on Youtube (e.g. CNN), so they wouldn't have any leverage. It doesn't matter if they threatened to stop advertising, they'd hurt themselves as much as they'd hurt Google because the existence of the dislike button doesn't make ads any less valuable. What matters is that Google is a big corporation, and big corporations are all friends with each other.

People, think this sort of vague outrage towards "the elite" is productive, but ironically it just screws them over. Any sleazy politician or cryto influencer can peddle the same vague outrage to easily amass support.

No recommendations I don't care about, just the content I want to see.

YT is clearly pandering to advertisers. I feel a little (ok, a lot) of schadenfreude every time I hear about a move that makes advertisers uncomfortable..

The internet used to be made by users for users. Commerce has ruined software development and the general experience on the web for many.

I can’t think of a world where uBlock doesn’t work anymore. I think I’d leave the business and find a new career doing something physical where I don’t have to be subjected to this crap.

Since they removed the dislike counts, I've been getting more crap and scam videos with no value, and they're now removing date sorting, another important feature.

It's time to begon looking for alternatives. The old YT is not coming back. :(

This is amazing, I wanna use it someday. Were the issues technical? Maybe. Were the issues problematic decision makers who've been overridden? Also maybe.

We'll never know

I can't even imagine what can be a technical limitation to break sorting on something what worked for more than a decade.

OK this kind of grandiose framing makes me giggle

How messed up does your DB schema need to be that you have issues with ordering entries by date?

I dunno seems clear as day to me... Like what are the odds the company that processes the largest amount of data in the world on a daily basis can't sort some results by date.

It used to be a drop-down box, now it's pill buttons that (confusingly) are usually used for filtering rather than sorting.

So I'm assuming it was something to do with the UX rewrite getting in the way.

I'm guessing they'll end up killing it.

If there’s 100 videos I scroll through at this point 1 might be worth clicking.

Hopefully it doesn't take the dev team too long to put an 'ORDER BY DATE DESCENDING' clause into the SQL.

But yeah, pretty much this. We have access to billions of hours of video, but without advanced filter controls, most of it is inaccessible. Same problem with search engines in general.

What have we done to ourselves?

Missing context: nephew was futzing with her phone.

I'm not saying they're good at recommendations, they're not. I get tons of recommendations that I have no interest in. I still get some of those garbage ASMR recommendations but most is related content.

Edit: maybe I'm half asleep and not getting what you're saying lol

  ytsearch
  ========
  #! /bin/bash

  nresults=$1; shift
  query="$@"

  yt-dlp -j --flat-playlist ytsearch${nresults}:"${query// /+}"

  ytgetlist
  =========
  #! /bin/bash

  yt-dlp -j --flat-playlist "$@"

  ytplaylist
  ==========
  #! /bin/bash

  jq -r '"\(.upload_date // .playlist_index) \(.id) \(.duration)\t\(.title)"' "$@" \
      | sort -k1n | uniq      \
      | fzf --bind "enter:execute(ytplay {+2})"

But just for giggles, I’d have placed all video metadata into a relational database (the interviewer grimaces), and use

    SELECT * FROM metadata /* a WHERE clause here to match the user’s actual search */ ORDER BY creation_date;

That said, the behavior's really janky. When I do this on my iPad you kinda have to 'hold+smudge' your finger around before it'll reveal the list for some reason and sometimes it just wants to save to Watch Later no matter what you do.

There are popular channels with well over 10,000 videos - if I want to go back and watch their early videos what am I meant to do? Leave a brick on my mouse and wait for 3 hours for the feed to scroll to the end? No doubt it would crash before then anyway.

The videos are exactly the same length as my attention span has shrunk to. They are all vertical, so, I'm probably doing it wrong using a desktop computer like some lunk from the twentieth century, but I can't stop myself.

I've fallen into a box I cannot crawl out of and have no desire to. I'm in trouble.

The default position should be that if the video is on YouTube, they're happy to serve it. If YouTube doesn't want to serve a video it makes more sense to simply not host it. And indeed they routinely get rid of videos that they think will lose them money.

Seems unlikely to me.

Google has the competence to build a good product, they just don't have the leadership to do it while maximizing data collection and ads.

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".

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

> Youtube may as well remove subscriptions and replace the home page with a big-ass "Random" button.

don't give 'em any ideas!

> 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.

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.

Given that everyone wants the retention of TikTok now, I don't think that big random button stays a joke for very long.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

YouTube tells YOU what video to watch when.

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.

Which frankly I think is nuts.

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)

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 :/

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

Not good for the mass amounts of information available today, I'm not saying we should "go back to that" but I certainly do miss waking up with hot chocolate in the winter, dialing up 56K and when it finally connects I get a dopamine rush as the world opens up before my fingertips... a world of bad blinking alarm gifs, wild backgrounds, bright times new roman text, and very gray table borders.

I much prefer the old times of searching for some topic on google and if nothing came up, it was really because there likely wasn't significant discussion happening about said topic.

I guess my point is, searching for something you want and manually scrolling through a catalog hoping the algorithm bestows a blessing upon you are two different things. If you know what you want to watch, you can find it easily via search. If you don't know what you want to watch, then really, you probably don't want to watch anything, so do what you do want to do. Take an active role in deciding what to do with your free time. Don't rely on some algorithm to make your decisions for you.

Google PMs now investigating new ways to reduce users’ IQs.

The subscription feed isn't 100% rock solid, but I've used it pretty consistently, almost every day for at least the past decade, and find it quite reliable. It's reliable to the point that I don't think this is even a legitimate criticism: if you want videos from channels you've subscribed to, go to the page that is both easily accessible and expressly for that purpose. https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions