It's a reddit post[OP], that links to an article[1], that links to a specific comment in a reddit post[2] which is a reply to the actual comment[3] that contains the link[4] to a specific section of a YouTube video, which contains the actual confirmation.
After sifting through all that, they didn't give a reason, which is pretty lame, but alludes to the fact that it's helpful for them and not for you. Presumably this is step one in storing old videos on glacier-like storage so it costs them less (and inevitably will let them play you more ads while they retrieve it)
Some really weird product decisions this year. E.g. they are also hellbent on showing me "shorts" in my search results. I can't think of a single occasion lately when I didn't want to see the full description and comments and they make it hard to get directly to the video. Worse still they are applying this "shorts" concept retrospectively to any video that happens to be short in length, meaning I get videos that were never intended for that format by the creator.
Fortunately this bookmarklet (which i've named "eat my shorts" in my bookmarks) does the job:
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.
They also have the stupid "Posts" section where content creators are supposed to post little blurbs and tweet like things. Totally superfluous but right there on your home page. Oh that's okay, there's an X to get rid of it.
"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....
Thank you very much for this, I too despise the shorts interface with a passion, I have been manually frobanzing the url back to the desktop page for a while now, while i have been meaning to investigate what it would take to do a bookmark or user script(easier than I thought) I never got around to it.
I use this to remove shorts from my subscriptions view. You have to click it every time it loads more, but it clears up the clutter. I call it "no shorts"
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(); } })();
They don’t even need this. If they brought back whatever algorithm magic they were doing in 2015 they’d pick up a massive boost in engagement. They won’t though since they’re too busy making the world safe for democracy.
On my work computer, I am not signed into a Google account in the profile I use Youbtube in. Youtube has apparently decided that I would be most likely to engage with Shorts that feature scantily clad women and clear sexual innuendos.
My only guess is it has grouped me in with the crowd that watches metal machining videos.
this is sad because youtube is and always has been extremely resistant to public pressure. it doesn’t matter how much people complain, this is going to happen. same for removing dislikes to protect corporations from negative press, same for every piss-poor UI redesign, same for hiding viewer totals, same for desperately trying to copy tiktok
tangentially, there is one lesson content providers need to learn from tiktok. listen up, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and Youtube, and no doubt soon Twitter: Improve. Your. Algorithm. you do not need twist your content into a copycat format, like a teenage girl following fashion trends. tiktok is successful because it has an incredibly effective algorithm. that’s it. it’s no more complex than that
it’s insane to me that these platforms with masses of content freely available to them are so delighted to jump straight to abandoning all of that and cloning another app. just use the content that is already there, but show it to me better
I regularly go to my youtube recommended feed. what do I see? 5 videos I’ve already watched. 4 videos I’ve passed up on watching countless times. 3 videos I have no interest in, and maybe 1 that I might consider watching. why? because youtube’s algorithm is awful. the solution to this is not for them to pivot to stupid information bytes, but for them to make a better damn algorithm
> the solution to this is not for them to pivot to stupid information bytes, but for them to make a better damn algorithm
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.
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.
>this is sad because youtube is and always has been extremely resistant to public pressure. it doesn’t matter how much people complain, this is going to happen.
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.
>same for removing dislikes to protect corporations from negative press
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.
It's bad enough that they remove the feature, but I'm also honestly puzzled by Google's communication strategy here. According to the article, Google's responses to the issue over time have been flipping between all of the following:
- it's an intentional change, they are planning to remove the feature.
- there is no change at all, if you don't see the option, clear your cookies.
- it's a bug and they are currently investigating it.
- they have found the bug, fixed the issue and everything is back to normal now. (except users report it isn't)
- it really was an intentional change - but a temporary one, in order to isolate/fix another bug. The other bug got fixed, they reverted the change and everything is back to normal now! (except users still report it isn't)
- they didn't want to remove the option, but they had to disable it for the time being, because it's breaking another feature.
- the option is somehow gone for good, but they'd consider reimplementing it if there is enough demand.
Either Google's PR department is engaging in russian propaganda levels of gaslighting here or there is enormous chaos going on inside YouTube and no one knows what the other is doing.
It's so weird. So many videos talk about "in my last video", yet Youtube is hellbent on you not going there. The same for "this is part one of 2".
If 10 videos has been uploaded since then, Youtube _really_ don't want you to go see part 2. It is so difficult to see the chronology around the current video.
Since I am ranting, I'll also mention how weird the recommendation engine is for not suggesting music videos related to the current video. If you are watching a 30 minute documentary on how "Bohemian Rhapsody" was recorded, the video itself will contain no audio from the song because that will demonetize the video, but there are also no links pointing to the music video anywhere.
95% of the Youtube content I want to see is either educational or created by friends/family. I don't want TikTok-style algorithmic content.
At this point, I think there's a business model in making a Youtube front-end which is designed to be not horrible for niche users like myself.
I suspect I'm a small enough percentage of the market to not be worth bothering with for a $1T company, but plenty enough to sustain a mid-sized startup.
Between shorts and stupid recommendations it's really harming my yt experience. By recommendations I mean content not directly related to the search but videos yt thinks I might want to watch mixed with search results.
Another thing that bothers me a lot is yt showing results of videos in a language different from the search query. I live in Mexico and very often half of the results are in Spanish. I'm from Spain, I speak Spanish, but more often than not Spanish videos in the topics that interest me are very bad.
It seems the feature has been restored. As of the November 7th update:
> TeamYouTube has confirmed that they are working to bring the sorting options back to the platform. Furthermore, they said that the options were removed due to some issues.
It's not clear if they wanted to remove it and reverted due to backlash, or if there were genuine technical issues/limitations that needed to be addressed.
"When you use google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that's a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world because we should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant you should look for information and we should give it exactly right and we should give it to you in your language and we should never be wrong."
Google see themselves as custodians of truth. They know the truth, and it is their job to give it to you.
Now you might wonder 'how do they know what they truth is'. For google there is no ambiguity, there are not multiple narratives or explanations. The truth is what they say the truth is.
I'm not sure what's the end goal, but YouTube has become unusable at this point. Play/Pause button gone on TV app, search results prioritise absolute shite of a content. You need to watch 5 videos on any subject and that's all you'll ever see. Now this. I used to watch way more of if, but nowadays I only tune in for a couple of channels I know, so they definitely not making more money from me.
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.
It's a pity that YT is being so obnoxious with their search and directory pages. I find myself often searching for things that i shouldnt be searching. They overemphasize creators that post new content even when they (must) know that i m binging on a specific channel's older videos. Search is broken btw, things do not show up, and sometimes i had to ask google to find a video for me. Why is it so hard to give us simple controls?
From my pov they are an advertising company, they want users to spend as long as possible on the site inorder to view those ads.
I can sort of understand rewarding regular uploads from that pov, a new video by X comes out, you go to view it and then watch a few more videos.
This model doesn't explain other things though. If I find a new channel and want to binge, why stop me watching from oldest first?
Why remove downvotes? If I watch a video that has a lot of invisible downvotes, I get pissed because it's rubbish, it seems a toss up whether I watch another vid, or leave the site. That risk rises exponentially with every rubbish vid I come across.
Business idea: make an app to browse Youtube channels with efficient filtering and sorting, like "most popular video in the last 3 months", I believe it's impossible on Youtube right now.
I used to use NewPipe when I had an Android. It was great for "subscribing" to creators without needing a Google account. Youtube kept breaking it. Don't know if it still works. https://newpipe.net/
Not at all surprising as Google has been slowly removing all features that let you control your viewing experience. I’m still annoyed that they removed subscription collections over 7 years ago. They publicly promised to replace it with something better, but that never materialized[1]. I would bet money on these sorting options to never return no matter how much feedback users send in. Google has a history of lying about listening to user feedback.
Out of date time wasting clickbait. The actual news is this:
TeamYouTube:
>we added new tabs for different content types & when adding these tabs, we ran into issues keeping all the sorting options you're used to (like oldest to newest). as an FYI, if you want to find videos around a certain date, you can search "before:" ex. "dog videos before:2017"
>So to confirm there is no longer a sorting option, like oldest to newest.
>we know sorting options are important & we’re still exploring how to bring these back
it's seriously ironic - and kind of humurous - how a service starts out striving for the best and most convenient features and user experience, grows humongously big because of those and then becomes so gigantic that they think they have to cut back on the same...
eventually it will have 5 billion users and just serve a single, bland feed of random videos with no options and choices ...
... wait, no it will probably die before that happens.
It's not really, the service is designed to make money, it makes money from ads, it can only do this if the eyeballs stay on the service. If you can go from start to finish you might leave when you're done. Hard to leave when you only have a scatter gun way to view the content.
Just give me a table with sort by on column headers, a search box, and a little modal to choose columns I want to show/hide. The best UX for this was solved in like 1995.
There aren't technical decisions driving this, they are in the business of advertising.
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.
I would like that better, too, but it doesn't really work with an infinite scroll. I would be overjoyed if the web changed back to pagination, but it doesn't excite that dopamine center as well or something I guess.
[+] [-] SCdF|3 years ago|reply
It's a reddit post[OP], that links to an article[1], that links to a specific comment in a reddit post[2] which is a reply to the actual comment[3] that contains the link[4] to a specific section of a YouTube video, which contains the actual confirmation.
After sifting through all that, they didn't give a reason, which is pretty lame, but alludes to the fact that it's helpful for them and not for you. Presumably this is step one in storing old videos on glacier-like storage so it costs them less (and inevitably will let them play you more ads while they retrieve it)
[1] https://piunikaweb.com/2022/11/10/youtube-sorting-option-for...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/tx0uln/question_ha...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/tx0uln/question_ha...
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0WYt7hgXhQ&t=48s
[+] [-] jasonlotito|3 years ago|reply
"we know sorting options are important & we’re still exploring how to bring these back"
[+] [-] dang|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aquova|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JofArnold|3 years ago|reply
Fortunately this bookmarklet (which i've named "eat my shorts" in my bookmarks) does the job:
raw:[+] [-] HeckFeck|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] user3939382|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkrisc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrguyorama|3 years ago|reply
"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....
[+] [-] WASDx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] somat|3 years ago|reply
salutes
[+] [-] lovich|3 years ago|reply
Every content site is hoping the US bans tiktok and they can be positioned to pick up all the traffic
[+] [-] cuddlyogre|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lp0_on_fire|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] throwuwu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SkyPuncher|3 years ago|reply
My only guess is it has grouped me in with the crowd that watches metal machining videos.
[+] [-] saos|3 years ago|reply
Out of curiousity... Do you also get shorts when you open the app (new session)?
[+] [-] permo-w|3 years ago|reply
tangentially, there is one lesson content providers need to learn from tiktok. listen up, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and Youtube, and no doubt soon Twitter: Improve. Your. Algorithm. you do not need twist your content into a copycat format, like a teenage girl following fashion trends. tiktok is successful because it has an incredibly effective algorithm. that’s it. it’s no more complex than that
it’s insane to me that these platforms with masses of content freely available to them are so delighted to jump straight to abandoning all of that and cloning another app. just use the content that is already there, but show it to me better
I regularly go to my youtube recommended feed. what do I see? 5 videos I’ve already watched. 4 videos I’ve passed up on watching countless times. 3 videos I have no interest in, and maybe 1 that I might consider watching. why? because youtube’s algorithm is awful. the solution to this is not for them to pivot to stupid information bytes, but for them to make a better damn algorithm
[+] [-] logicalmonster|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] parkingrift|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] NaturalPhallacy|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Aunche|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] techdmn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] execveat|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Guidii|3 years ago|reply
Are you signed in and/or using the same device?
[+] [-] throwuwu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xg15|3 years ago|reply
- it's an intentional change, they are planning to remove the feature.
- there is no change at all, if you don't see the option, clear your cookies.
- it's a bug and they are currently investigating it.
- they have found the bug, fixed the issue and everything is back to normal now. (except users report it isn't)
- it really was an intentional change - but a temporary one, in order to isolate/fix another bug. The other bug got fixed, they reverted the change and everything is back to normal now! (except users still report it isn't)
- they didn't want to remove the option, but they had to disable it for the time being, because it's breaking another feature.
- the option is somehow gone for good, but they'd consider reimplementing it if there is enough demand.
Either Google's PR department is engaging in russian propaganda levels of gaslighting here or there is enormous chaos going on inside YouTube and no one knows what the other is doing.
[+] [-] wodenokoto|3 years ago|reply
If 10 videos has been uploaded since then, Youtube _really_ don't want you to go see part 2. It is so difficult to see the chronology around the current video.
Since I am ranting, I'll also mention how weird the recommendation engine is for not suggesting music videos related to the current video. If you are watching a 30 minute documentary on how "Bohemian Rhapsody" was recorded, the video itself will contain no audio from the song because that will demonetize the video, but there are also no links pointing to the music video anywhere.
[+] [-] blagie|3 years ago|reply
At this point, I think there's a business model in making a Youtube front-end which is designed to be not horrible for niche users like myself.
I suspect I'm a small enough percentage of the market to not be worth bothering with for a $1T company, but plenty enough to sustain a mid-sized startup.
[+] [-] pier25|3 years ago|reply
Between shorts and stupid recommendations it's really harming my yt experience. By recommendations I mean content not directly related to the search but videos yt thinks I might want to watch mixed with search results.
Another thing that bothers me a lot is yt showing results of videos in a language different from the search query. I live in Mexico and very often half of the results are in Spanish. I'm from Spain, I speak Spanish, but more often than not Spanish videos in the topics that interest me are very bad.
[+] [-] ryankrage77|3 years ago|reply
> TeamYouTube has confirmed that they are working to bring the sorting options back to the platform. Furthermore, they said that the options were removed due to some issues.
It's not clear if they wanted to remove it and reverted due to backlash, or if there were genuine technical issues/limitations that needed to be addressed.
[+] [-] windex|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verisimi|3 years ago|reply
Don't believe me? Hear it in Schmidt's own words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4 (30 sec clip)
"When you use google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that's a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world because we should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant you should look for information and we should give it exactly right and we should give it to you in your language and we should never be wrong."
Google see themselves as custodians of truth. They know the truth, and it is their job to give it to you.
Now you might wonder 'how do they know what they truth is'. For google there is no ambiguity, there are not multiple narratives or explanations. The truth is what they say the truth is.
[+] [-] cosmodisk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dddrh|3 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/teamyoutube/status/1590519893962653696
[+] [-] HeckFeck|3 years ago|reply
Hopefully it doesn't take the dev team too long to put an 'ORDER BY DATE DESCENDING' clause into the SQL.
[+] [-] seydor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gareth321|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benj111|3 years ago|reply
From my pov they are an advertising company, they want users to spend as long as possible on the site inorder to view those ads.
I can sort of understand rewarding regular uploads from that pov, a new video by X comes out, you go to view it and then watch a few more videos.
This model doesn't explain other things though. If I find a new channel and want to binge, why stop me watching from oldest first?
Why remove downvotes? If I watch a video that has a lot of invisible downvotes, I get pissed because it's rubbish, it seems a toss up whether I watch another vid, or leave the site. That risk rises exponentially with every rubbish vid I come across.
[+] [-] Zealotux|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afandian|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seydor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hysan|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19952930
[+] [-] carrolldunham|3 years ago|reply
TeamYouTube: >we added new tabs for different content types & when adding these tabs, we ran into issues keeping all the sorting options you're used to (like oldest to newest). as an FYI, if you want to find videos around a certain date, you can search "before:" ex. "dog videos before:2017"
>So to confirm there is no longer a sorting option, like oldest to newest.
>we know sorting options are important & we’re still exploring how to bring these back
https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1590386502865129472
[+] [-] jdthedisciple|3 years ago|reply
eventually it will have 5 billion users and just serve a single, bland feed of random videos with no options and choices ...
... wait, no it will probably die before that happens.
[+] [-] cube00|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NayamAmarshe|3 years ago|reply
It's sad what YouTube has become. World's greatest educational resource turning into dust.
[+] [-] chrismarlow9|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leeches|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] godshatter|3 years ago|reply
What have we done to ourselves?