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)
"Exploring how to bring these back" What, did they change something in the back end that made sorting videos by channel chronologically impossible? Were there fundamental issues with it? That kind of wording really gets me riled up, feels like such nonsense.
Genuinely though I'd like to know what the reason was for this, I'm sure it isn't anything technical but I'm not even sure what removing this feature accomplishes for them. Another comment suggested it might be to move old videos to less expensive, slow storage. Could it be simple as that?
Some sort of technical reasons seems most likely to me for now. They probably have some crazy denormalized/multi-level-cached storage where videos can be stored on different media or different locations. It's possible that "changing the query" requires some involved architecture changes in that system.
Why they weren't aware of this before adding the new feature is a different question.
Listen, I've arm chaired with the best of them, but I've learned it's not wise. You can pretend you have a better understanding of their architecture and numbers, but the reality is, getting riled up over this is the real nonsense.
eg a (presumably reasonable?) use case: watching a video, posted more than a year ago, and you want to see the either (1) immediately previously posted; or (2) immediately next posted video. Because they are part of a series, or mention each other. It's extremely difficult to do.
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.
These AB tests where they force you to engage in some new medium of content that they want you to become accustomed to is reminiscent of that scene in A Clockwork Orange where they force Alex to watch film of violent images.
Could be worse - recently Android YouTube (or some A/B test of it) opens links with the tiny thumbnail at the bottom - like it reduces to when you go back to search results or something usually, but it's not maximisable, not dismissible, it just sits there tinily playing its ad.
I have to back out of the app and open link in new tab (so it plays in the browser instead) if I want to see it, but usually I just bounce, and am slowly learning not to bother clicking in the first place.
I'll load the URL directly either in mpv (desktop or Mobile via Termux), or VLC.
Fuck YouTube entirely.
The pain of using the Web interface is precisely the point, as someone's KPIs are steering users to apps. That's succeeding, though it's not YT's apps which are substituting....
I still miss the mps-yt app, though I'd found an alternative recently, yewtube (still need to try it out).
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