YouTube: Sort by oldest is back baby
I was navigating around YouTube and found a channel I wanted to watch its most popular videos and have noticed they added back the oldest option!
I thought shorts is just a way for YouTube to make sure everyone knows tiktok exists. They all end with an ad for tiktok
I would cynically assume it's a solely dark pattern, but I have never built at such a scale as youtube.
Being able to do exploration is an important part of recommendation systems. Allowing a user to do just exploitation is going to lead to a worse experience in them long term.
Growing format
The only reason I could think it's like this for a technical reason is if they put the opt-out "ticket" into some high availability cache system that was hard coded to eject old entries after 30 days, but that would make no sense given YouTube has infra for persistent user configuration already.
And while we're talking about extensions to customize your YT experience, here's three more that I really enjoy:
- Clickbait Remover [2], to remove the usually clickbait-ish video thumbnails
- Unhook [3], to remove the recommended videos entirely. This extension helped me reduce the time spent on YT. I now browse recommendations on my phone much more quickly, add what I want to check out to Watch Later queue, so on desktop I only search, check subscriptions, or consume my WL queue
- Video Speed Controller [4]. This one is super popular, so probably you already have it installed.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-shorts-blo...
[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickbait-remover-...
[3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...
[4] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...
Allows hiding(*) and converting to normal video.
(*) "Firefox 103+ and layout.css.has-selector.enabled set to True - Experimental CSS feature not fully working on Firefox, some rendering issues may occur"
youtube.com##:xpath(//ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[@overlay-style='SHORTS']//ancestor::ytd-grid-video-renderer)
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blockerher...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/enhancer-for-youtu...
- you can tweak several things by one extension
These extensions usually have full access to the DOM, so they can do everything they want to.
So their question is very much warrented: installing as new extension should always be well considered.
You cannot universally answer the question "how much of a threat are chrome extensions".
firefox addon store is very much better in that regard. Anyway, this makes me feel like you don't know about gorhill and UBO? that is actually recommended for sane internet browsing on any browsers.
As i often say, surfing the internet in a browser without UBO feels like having unprotected sex. Fun but dangerous.
Its an ad blocker for the in-video sponsorship segments
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
It's also available for other browsers.
I personally do not use it though as I do not have a problem with advertising in general. As long as there is no data collection and targeted ads, I am good to sponsor with my time.
There are a couple of blocker addons for firefox (eg youtube-shorts-block) which I'm going to try out.
youtube.com##:xpath(//ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[@overlay-style='SHORTS']//ancestor::ytd-grid-video-renderer)
The option was removed as part of a general UX refresh that moved from a sort drop-down to pill buttons -- this general drop-down -> pill thing seeming to be a general trend on apps and websites now.
But it's hard to imagine why it was removed in the first place. Saving a minuscule amount money by reducing views of less-cached long-tail content doesn't seem important enough. Nor does there seem to be any compelling engagement reason to prioritize newer videos. And I'm not aware of an ad revenue reason, such as older videos being less monetizable.
Maybe it was just a misguided attempt at UX simplification that backfired?
this is absolutely the truth!
I would say that perhaps what is lacking is a clear vision of the product. Steve jobs didn't use metrics for the initial design of the iphone.
I suspect that as a company grows bigger and bigger, the product loses the initial visionary that created the success in the first place. May be the "founder" (of the product, not necessarily of the actual company) left, or moved on, and what remains is just diluted responsibility between a few different people. Therefore, they resort to metrics, as they have no idea what works, nor have a vision.
Time spent scrolling is not time spent watching ads. So that is definitely not a metric YouTube is optimizing for.
Except that sometimes people do care. It's pretty hard to know in advance whether https://xkcd.com/1172/ will apply or not. You can't run any kind of UX study because odds are that the only way you get people to interact with the feature is by making up an artificial scenario that basically forces them to use it. You can't even run an A/B test because every fewer people will actually reduce their YouTube usage over this. They might be unhappy, but their level of happiness doesn't show up in metrics.
I don't know the figure, but if I had to guess, I would wager that 95% of their views at any given time go to videos produced in the most recent month. Video is incredibly expensive to store, and almost all of what they're storing is basically sitting in a graveyard.
My immediate assumption is these videos are not edge cached, so naturally they want their platform to avoid delivering these types of videos. They would rather stick to the well-cached, proven popular videos that are currently circulating.
If any YouTube developer is reading this, please fix this dangerous behavior by malicious actors that take advantage of the platform's relatively recent changes.
Google doesn't want to solve the fact that users spend more time watching clickbait and low quality videos as a result of removing features that they themselves implemented back when they thought they could be anything more than an advertising company. This strategy also explains what happened to Google Search.
Removing public dislike counts takes a good amount of wind out of such campaigns
I'm not on Nike, Coke or mega-corp advertising level, but I do spend a lot with google's advertising apparatus, including on youtube-based adverts - not one time have I cared about how controversial or whatever a video might be. I simply want engagement from in-market potential customers... regardless of what content they're watching.
Who are these people that think a Nike commercial being randomly played before a video has anything to do with some sort of endorsement of the video's content?
It's not an entirely unfair thing either. That is something that is happening, just in miniscule amounts. So YouTube introduced brand safety options which predict how safe a video is and avoids such potential headlines.
However since it's just an algorithm, it doesn't understand nuance. So now creators who are making educational content about tough subjects earn less money because they are bucketed as unsafe. Since unsafe content has less advertising biders, it earns less money.
Even when it was available I've only ever seen a few cases of it working well. One prominent one was an educational YouTuber (Veritasium) asking users to post video replies with solutions to a physics puzzle/experiment that he was doing. Besides that, the feature was not used by creators and so spam videos and response girls were rampant in the video replies to most popular YouTubers.
If memory serves, that was ultimately what got the feature on its way out.
OFC, I'm assuming a utopic world here. There's no incentive for neither Youtube nor the creator to do this, as opposed to simply linking more of their own stuff or whatever is ad friendly.
Maybe an author's hilight section and then an "other replies" that's more open.
PM lists an OKR for increasing engagement.
PM launches a new version without the feature.
New version shows engagement(or whatever corpspeak metric) increased by N%.
PM gets a promotion.
Dev sees a missing feature, launches the feature.
Dev shows M people are using this new feature.
Dev gets a promotion for 'impact'.
And the cycle repeats, with minor variations for mature products. This is why startups even get a chance to compete with the giants.
(I'm being a complete armchair expert here, since I have no idea of the actual state of the YouTube backend. It might look simple to me but I'm sure it's not in reality . I'm curious to see what would be the best way to optimize a feature like this one!)
It of course may not be as simple as your random hobby projects, but Google has the manpower that is proportional to the complexity of YouTube.
I mean, you say that, but... what is the alternative? YouTube is the host of some of the most valuable content on the internet, in my opinion, and some (some!) of the most valuable content produced by humanity. And it allows anyone to access it for free, with incredible technical specs. This is a non-trivial problem, and incredibly expensive.
Sure, I dislike that they play around with features that I think are valuable. But given everything else I get from YouTube, I'm not exactly complaining, and for sure I wouldn't wish them gone without having some idea of what could replace them (and I don't think that exists).
One specific idea that could see reality some day is a site that hosts proprietary videos on their own servers (for professional and paid creators) but also lists non-commercial creators that store their data in their own cloud platform of choice or indeed in the P2P network. The main point would be to not rely on dark patterns and ads in supporting this business but offload as much storage/bandwidth as possible to other servers.
I said they have to go cause I am slowly having enough of their policies. Sorting by old is a minor inconvenience but having 15-45 (!) minute long ads is just ludicrous (I listen to podcasts to sleep). I've also heard some voices about an anti-adblock campaign being rolled out, I wonder how that goes...
What is old is new again.
So if you sort by price you get the strangest crap at the cheapest end.
I have disabled both of them and got my results properly sorted by "Price: Low to High" while with both extensions on, it defaults to Featured!
Here's a tiny portion of a massive error message:
Error logged with the Track&Report JS errors API(http://tiny/1covqr6l8/wamazindeClieUserJava): {"m":"undefined Unknown error","name":"Error","csm":"v5 ueLogError stack","logLevel":"ERROR","attribution":"APE-safeframe","pageURL":"https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mastering+perl&s=price-asc-rank&ds=v1%3ANxZp5S66jp%2F1FIQyOG0JNqN4D96zzLqBks5YP1xArBo","f":"https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mastering+perl","l":2039,"s":["logError<@https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mastering+perl:2039:60","importScript</script.onerror@https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mastering+perl:2039:267","EventHandlerNonNull*importScript<@https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mastering+perl:2039:230","@https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61ZS63EQSsL.js?AUIClients/AmazonUIjQuery line 44 > eval:1:372"Comparing to FF with both those extensions, the items and their order look identical (minus some ads)
You might have customized uBO beyond default settings/lists, and this is causing your issue. If you think this is a filter issue in uBO, please submit a report using the _chat_ icon in the popup panel[1], this will provide us with all the information we need to start investigating the issue.
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Quick-guide:-popup-us...
Having a traversable landscape of content is incredibly valuable. I think "search results as search criteria"/"traversal by adjacency" is the only real feasible way to organize the web, and the fact that we've moved away from that is the reason google search is often now useless. ChatGPT is valuable as a search replacement/amplifier because it reproduces that adjacency in a roundabout way.
If you want to know what kind of quality a given printer produces, good luck finding a picture on google. All you'll see is ad-infested, auto-generated top-n lists.
Applying the old youtube related model, you'd just have to find one picture to be a few degrees of separation from a picture of a print job from any printer ever manufactured.
The idea of objective universal ranking is a wash, and ranking based on N paramaters isn't much better.
1. Whose role is it to make judgements about whether people should be able to find certain kinds of content?
2. Do you think modern recommendation systems are better at keeping people away from that kind of content?
The thing is, as of now, if a recommendation algorithm identifies you as someone that responds to that kind of content, whether negatively or positively, it'll show you so much of it that you think it's the entire world. Even if you want to see something else, you have to have the discipline to "train the algorithm" over days, weeks or months to break free.
I feel that any suggestion things are better now is just impossible to believe.
The second goal is to make you slightly more angry, so that it is more probable that you will engage with the video.
The third is that you will watch more advertisements the more you watch. It is not in the best interest of the algorithm to give you answer right away.
It also does not have to be a bad will of YouTube/Google. After all you train neural networks to have desired outcome. The goal is to capture users attention.
Well for starters, there's the user. Once youtube decides you like a certain type of content that it wants to amplify, there is no "ok enough of this" button. You can't dismiss the categories it makes up for you.
And for enders, well your real question comes down to the question of if sufficiently effective psychological engineering contradicts, at least for some large fraction of people, personal agency. Suppose there was an adversarial patch we discovered that you could hide in a banner ad to make 15% of people read a completely different article than the one that is actually in front of them. That's may not be a highly efficient hack, but its more than the margins on nearly any election. How do we police these newly discovered neural-network hacks?
There's no question in my hypothetical on the matter of the victims personal agency in forming opinions and seeking information. I took care of that in the premise. They have no control, its a design flaw in the brain that is being exploited. But, where along the continuum of plausible technology does one draw the line between brains being hacked and people having agency in what they choose to see and believe?
I don't know either.
General public pressure that ultimately comes down to money (a.k.a: advertisers) which is controlled by general social pressure. With the previous rabbit hole effect, it's trivial for a reporter or an activist or anyone to record a 5 minute video where you start with a debate on a news channel or some very tame video about [Insert undesirable topic] then through 1 click on the top/next recommended video find yourself in an endless rabbit hole of full [Insert undesirable topic] videos. Then publicly call/shame those advertisers. Advertisers don't want associate their brand with that. If YouTube wants to be a bastion of free speech absolutism, that's their prerogative. Maybe it's good for their brand. We just want to sell Coca-cola or shoes or cars or whatever. To score brownie points with the public, we will pull our ads until YouTube gives us assurances that they are not promoting that [Insert undesirable topic].
Without the big advertisers, YouTube goes bankrupt in few months. Just like any traditional media company YouTube answers to their advertisers.
> 2. Do you think modern recommendation systems are better at keeping people away from that kind of content? > The thing is, as of now, if a recommendation algorithm identifies you as someone that responds to that kind of content, whether negatively or positively, it'll show you so much of it that you think it's the entire world.
That's a false dichotomy. Recommendation systems are whatever we make them to be. For example, maybe a recommendation system that recommends you content based solely on *your* own preference + the current content you're consuming, is more likely to exhibit rabbit hole effect characteristics. One that takes the subject matter into account and evaluates it equally against some other criteria might have a different characteristics.
Ultimately it's a difficult problem to answer because it's a social problem, not a technical one. Just because you're a video or a social media or generative AI platform built on tech, doesn't absolve you from social responsibility if you're large enough to have wide spread social impact. That was the case with traditional media company. The fact that you're designing and creating algorithms and statistical models to recommend, promote, or generate content means you're on the hook for what those models produce.
Now is behind the three dots drop-down menu, not as handy as before.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions (you must be logged in)
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/oZFG5eN
Hope it appears for you too, is a bit hard to find.
Their ability to guess my bandwidth is Bad. It always sticks me on 360p and yet 4K works fine everywhere in my house without question all the time. All other apps chromecast in HD just fine.
But no. Gotta take that feature away. Some obsessive UI/UX people who need to keep looking busy and necessary.
Can I have something better then 'longer then 20min'? Like there are tons of things that go up to 3h or more. And often I might want 1h content but the 'longer then 20min' shows tons of stuff that is some 22min video.
When I play a long video, for example synthwave music to get myself nostalgic with the '80s, I can see the suggested videos on my right are either of the same range or even longer than expected!
You cannot imagine how many diamonds I have discovered like that, which makes me very happy! ^_^
https://www.androidpolice.com/youtube-oldest-sorting-coming-...
I really hate these services (especially the mega ones like YouTube, Twitter) ALWAYS have random feature disparity across client/region for no apparent reason.
I understand they can't be exactly simultaneous for technical reasons, but often times features would be delayed in some regions for days if not months.
My use-case is wanting to check out the top videos from a specific time frame. I'll periodically check in on some channels or niche interest, and I just wanna get a sense of their top videos.
For example, I don't watch League of Legends regularly, but I like to check out the occasional VOD, and if I'm gonna watch a random game I'll probably get a good game by picking one with a lot of views within the last 2 or 3 months.
Other times I might go a year or two without listening to an artist and I wanna check out their most popular videos in that time frame.
It uses either youtube-dl or yt-dlp behind the scenes for playing the videos while downloading them on the fly, so it works flawlessly in cases like yours.
It's the best hidden feature of YouTube. You switch using the normal account switcher.
Of course, there's History and "Restore Previous Session" which saves you from countless nightmares when the next time you boot your computer you want to restore what you last viewed or had opened.
It helps immensely!
Mixes and user playlist are different from suggestion playlists.
How about hover on each suggestion and add it to "Watch Later" or even Queue? That also works, at least for me.
It's a good day.
the free YT api is limited to 100 hits a day so it might not work sometimes
source (really bad): https://github.com/arye321/yt_sort
i have sent numerous feedback asking for a sort by length in playlists. that feature doesn't seem to align with their vision of good playlist management somehow.
This extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sort-by-oldest/mig... added (logically yesterday, if we see its date in description) an End of Life announcement due to the return of this option.