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Comment by frfl | Hacker News Reader

Life hack, maybe it will help someone out: Add a "before:YYYY" to the search to go back to a simpler time.

Eg, "before:2012 python talk"

As an experiment open two tabs and compare the results of "python talk" and "before:2012 python talk". The difference is staggering.

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My only complaint about this is that so much of the old stuff has been removed, privated, marked as age restricted, blurred due to refusal to be marked as "for kids"[1] and removing the comment section, or otherwise made inaccessible by their authors. The reason usually being that it's embarassing or otherwise doesn't reflect the uploader's modern persona. A lot of awesome content is missing from the results due to that, and that thought alone makes me sad when I use this feature...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viTkj0eu-fk

People should be allowed to remove their persona from the internet.

Yes, but that doesn't make it less of a shame when people remove content thousands of people enjoy.

Information that goes on the internet never truly goes away, be it through personal archive sites or more general ones like archive.org (which archives youtube.com directly), it just becomes harder to find unless specifically sought for.

The knowledge that I'm most certainly missing something when doing dated searches, and I'm viewing results filtered by people's current-day hindsight, instead of the unfiltered essence of the youtube of yesteryear makes me sad. We lost a lot of authenticity in the pursuit of flawless public images.

The way YouTube doesn't show you the metadata for removed videos anymore is infuriating. You end up with playlists where you can tell something was removed but not what.

We'll probably all need to start adding "before:2023" to all our search queries when the deluge of AI-generated content crowds everything else out.

there was tons of BS content, often digitally created, before 2023. the difference is 40% (then) vs 95% (potentially, soon)

This is amazing!

I bet there are already tickets in google-JIRA to break this functionality :(

That is a good tip. Many people doing this will run into another silent youtube change, which is higher resolution options for older videos are completely removed. Some videos I have in my saved playlists marked 'HD 1080p' now only have a maximum resolution of 240p. Very sad.

That seems unusual, post some examples?

Welp, it's way past time I backed up my favourite videos. Thanks for the warning.

Also, 'sort by upload date' kills all the non directly keyword related results.

You can also do before:2030 (or some other date in the future). It shouldn't change the results except removing the "recommended" garbage. It's crazy how much more usable it becomes. You could probably write a Userscript or something to automatically add it to every query.

Thanks a lot!

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