Seriously, what the fuck? I thought it was some kind of user interface glitch so I looked it up. Nope, they're A/B testing this shit.
Found this brilliant statement by Youtube on the matter:
Now note that we are deprecating one sorting option and that is by oldest video at the channel level. But don’t panic, you can still view the oldest video of a channel, by scrolling through it’s content’
Oh, yeah, just scroll to the bottom. Silly me, I guess I'm just a stupid idiot for not realizing the option was redundant since I can simply take the time to scroll through potentially thousands of videos.
Why are silicon valley tech people such freaks?
Also, Youtube's use of A/B testing is actually genius. See, normally A/B testing is just a method of determining how people react to a change by applying it to a test group and comparing their response to the control group.
But I've never seen an A/B test on Youtube that didn't end up getting rolled out to all users. No, the real reason Youtube uses A/B tests is to make extremely unpopular changes go down easier by limiting the amount of people they piss off at once.
TV was capitalism's perfectly optimized mass medium, and they're trying to get back to it. i bet they keep the search bar for 6 more years at most.
search is already incredibly atrocious, for every 3 search results you get some other shit you don't care about interspersed into the results
The only real solution for the audience was to abandon TV altogether. No force remains that can tame them. I stopped watching TV back in the 80's except for Star Trek and Simpsons.
so SO much. watching tv is to passively consume fabricated images instead of real ones, and the conglomerated ownership of tv production means that this consciousness-shaping power is in the hands of a very small few.
Streaming chases TV which chases film which tries to emulate ( and surpasses) the grandeur of the theater.
You love scrolling, don't you? We gave you some more scrolling to do.
See, now you're scrolling even more. We knew you loved scrolling.
I suppose them making the search function completely unusable wasn't enough. So now we get this as well.
Seriously though, are they just fucking morons? Literally no one thinks this is better.
And no, you dumb fucks, this isn't going to make me pay for yt premium. If anything, shit like this just makes me even less inclined to do so.
Lookup how Google does performance reviews and you'll find out why they are so dysfunctional as a company. They took Intel's Objectives and key results performance review system and turned it into a cross between Logan's Run and the Salem Witch Trials.
https://blog.grovehr.com/google-performance-review
https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/okrs-good-bad-and-ugly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR
OKR's became Google's go to excuse to fire older workers, and they have been sued so much for age discrimination - calls to the carnival - that it raised the average age someone was fired above 35 to 40 or so today.
Google hires fresh graduates out of places like Stanford's and SJSU's CS departments like off an assembly line to replace older workers, who burn out, are fired for performance, or leave for a better gig by the time they are 40 at a very
suspiciousamazing rate.The average age of Google's talent pool has been balanced mysteriously on or around 30 for years and years .
20-30 year olds typically are hired unto projects that only go places if the top dogs are fired for performance. So the young eat the old, and the old zealously try to make everyone happy - which makes no one happy- and this is the story that plays out over and over at Google. Google typically has gone from a run of about 10 years for a new service/product being cancelled or added to another existing product like a frankensteinian monster.
Intel uses OKR in highly motivated engineering teams working on hardware goals running up against the physical limits of modern technology and science.
Google uses OKR in lowly motivated creative/marketing/UI/etc teams working on nebulous software goals that are measured by browser cookies.
all large commercial software eventually ends up removing as much control as they can from the end user. ideally youtube would want people to pay a subscription to be on their app watching ads 24/7 with no user input whatsoever. they will do anything to bring themselves as close to that ideal as they can get away with
YT videos have changed over time as people play into the algorithm with flashier thumbnails and more shocking click bait titles. YT celebrities have popped up since I started watching videos back in the aughts. The eternal September of the internet is introducing new viewers to a world of ad watching and the marketers that make these decisions told the devs to remove the oldest to newest sort algorithm so new watchers will slough off to Bethlehem to be born as ad watching junkies.
I'll still never forgive Amazon for when they did something similar to their wishlist system a few years back.
I had a bunch of big in-depth lists that helped me keep track of all sorts of different stuff, all of which were basically rendered useless after they severely limited the sorting options (Most notably removing the abilities to sort alphabetically and by date added for example) for literally no reason.
In a nutshell: :lord-bezos-amused: :stalin-gun-1:
This is why I just stick to bookmarks or written lists. I stopped caring about favoriting videos in YouTube about a decade ago because the list ended up being half [removed video] due to DMCA claims.
If nothing else I wish they would keep the title of the video up or something so you'd at least know what it was later, instead of possibly forgetting it forever.
also when sorting A-Z, you have no idea if the the first letter is going to be the product name or the brand's name, and it'll always be inconsistent.
you can still view the oldest video of a channel, by scrolling through it’s content
:internet-delenda-est:
At that point just tell your users to create a csv of all the channel's videos and sort it themselves.
I don't understand why they did this.
I assume many (most?) people will say to themselves "Fuck it - I'll watch new videos instead." By directing people to newer videos - does Google make more money somehow?
It's Google. That's why. They don't want you opening a folder, and then grabbing a subfolder and paging through entries.
They want you to search.
They want you to always search.
If YouTube hadn't been bought out by Google you'd have pages of videos. This is Google's own project to make sure YOU ALWAYS SEARCH.
I don’t understand why they did this.
My guess is that it was requested by creators who feel like their old stuff isn't up to standards.
Also a bit off topic but in my opinion the browser extention PocketTube is a must have for anyone who uses a lot of youtube. It adds a ton of useful features that it’s honestly embarrassing that google can't deliver something similar.
Maybe it was the advertisers and marketers that decided that the older stuff isn't up to standards. I really doubt YT cares what creators think any more than any other businesses or politicians; just enough to keep the status quo.
not sure if this is the #1 reason, but they're trying to put older, nearly never watched videos onto a cheaper servers optimized for archiving.
Any time you're scrolling, you're seeing more content and viewing ads for longer. The goal is to make YouTube as inefficient to use as possible.
I actually didn't think about this because I've never seen an ad on YouTube and never will. The day ad blocking dies is the day I walk away from the internet.
Why are silicon valley tech people such freaks?
I want to make sure people know this refers to product managers and not software engineers
In YouTube's case it's because there are a lot of ideological fascists in management from what I've heard
I imagine one of them read a ux research article that was like "simpler apps tend to get more usage" and just started slashing and burning features to "simplify" youtube.
I think google does this shit the worst of anyone. Their maps have taken many such steps backwards
Agreed they're awful, but I just want to give attention to facebook changing the feed from "Most Recent" to "Top Stories" every few months and changing where the setting is to revert it.
My theory is it makes it harder to find gamer n-words dropped by the bigger channels from when they barely had any views
oh yea i thought my adblock filter was messed up. its still there on my phone doe.
