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Comment by adamsvystun | Hacker News Reader

Relevant tweet by YouTube CEO: https://twitter.com/nealmohan/status/1655999215515074561

It's astounding that such a simple feature was dropped, firstly, and then got a re-launch mentioned by the CEO himself "after hearing some great feedback"... it's just a sorting order, honestly this should have never been removed. Those big platforms really got to go.

I don't want to speculate baselessly but if you've worked in big companies you'll know seemingly simple features become complicated with scale. This is especially when you are YouTube. It could be that the old feature was causing production problems and had to be removed, while a more efficient re-implementation is underway. I mean just look at what Google's Cloud Spanner says about using timestamps as keys: https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/schema-design Having both sort by latest and sort by oldest in an efficient way could very well be a nontrivial problem.

Isn't that the type of sorting you basically only need to do once? Or I guess in the rare cases when a video gets taken down, privated or relisted? I know it's not super rare but it would still be a much rarer event than users sorting by old. So they can just keep the list or set of video IDs, no need for expensive db operations right?

(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!)

I agree with you in general, but in this particular case? No, I really don't believe it's a technical issue.

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.

> Those big platforms really got to go.

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).

I don't have a satisfying answer. My bet would be something like a decentralized P2P solution that uses the LBRY protocol.

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...

"This feature is set to launch in the coming months." It sounds like he wants a round of applause for this big deal release. They can't even admit that it was a mistake to remove it... or maybe he is like a lot of writers/directors for new games and movies in old franchises that were never fans/users of the original materials.

What is old is new again.

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