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Comment by dddrh | Hacker News Reader

Looks like the YouTube team suggested sending feedback as way to gauge user demand for sort by oldest…

https://twitter.com/teamyoutube/status/1590519893962653696

I recently tweeted them regarding this. They replied, to their credit, and said the feature was removed due to problems implementing it on mobile. But they were "looking into" ways of restoring it.

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

About 6 years ago Twitch removed the random directory, which was just a list of random streams. That was my preferred way of finding new content to watch. I sent monthly emails for 2 years asking for it to come back, the response always was "looking into it" and it never came back.

This reminds me of a Bernard quote from Yes Minister:

"Well, 'under consideration' means we've lost the file; 'under active consideration' means we're trying to find it."

They have a kind of discovery / recommendation thing now which is pretty basic, but I guess a little bit better than nothing.

Obviously there's something else going on here. As someone else suggested, possibly old videos getting purged/archived so they'd have to change the UI to reflect that. You're not the customer here so why would they make it convenient for you?!

With 60% of YouTube’s watch time now on mobile, why go through the work of creating annotations that won’t even reach the majority of your audience?

Good god these lines of excuses really disappoints me from YouTube. These are the issues I'm really bothered by from the past few years, as an avid, paying, YouTube audience:

- Removal of annotations

- Removal of fan-submitted subtitles

-- (Not specifically few years) Limited choice of subtitle format. There is no way for dynamically placed/formatted subtitles, worse than FTA TV has available

- Removal of dislike counts

- Wildly varying recommendation quality, worsening a lot in the past year/6 month

-- Shorts. It's a pretty good product and there's a lot of good content, but the recommendation engine kneecapped it.

- No watch queues in the mobile app, even after 1 year of release on desktop

-- Inconsistent experience of queues in YT desktop, please just automatically queue any video i play so it continuously play, instead of having to queue -> play it

- Inconsistent sort by capabilities, especially no way to sort my own downloads (come on shouldn't list/playlist component be same/similar??)

- UI/UX obsession with line-count capping text. Component can be varying height and it's fine! I can't sort through all the great and free conference talks because the complete title is never readable on any view except when I open up the video.

- Bitrates. <<% wants 4k, most of the audience wants higher bitrate.

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

put BACK

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