Why was it removed in the first place?
To bury old content on old channels.
Go to Vsauce, sort from oldest and be surprised.
My money is on one of either
- sorting made it too easy to skip shit content and YouTube decided they lost engagement
- it’s too confusing for normies
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Damn I’ve gotten so cynical about social media.
If you’re confused by sorting there’s a really nice sandpit further down the road. It even has a little toy excavator!
You don’t have to stop at social media… my cynicism encompasses the entirety existence
So they could reintroduce it 6 months later and get cheered for doing the bare ass minimum.
It’s bizarre it was even removed in the first place. I hate the enshittification of the internet.
Seriously, and you know it’s purely the work of the executives and business managers, cause no developer would ever think it makes sense to remove functionality just because.
This is what happens in capitalist markets, and especially publicly traded companies, when your market share has reached saturation and there is no natural profit growth, you have to start paywalling currently free features/content to continue the quarterly profits.
I mean devil’s advocate here, what do they do with social media in a socialist market?
Lemmy and kbin were created in a capitalist market. So was linux and the rest of the foss concept.
I thought people loved watching part1, part2 and part4, as suggested by youtube. I’m shocked! :D
They probably saw that it barely got used compared to the other two options (which makes sense) and then probably decided to remove it to free up UI space or some BS.
Like just because something doesn’t get used a lot, doesn’t mean it’s not valuable/useful in the cases when it is being used…
Our A/B testing shows that fire extinguishers are used less often and generate less revenue than gumball machines. Therefore, we have removed all fire extinguishers to make room for more gumball machines.
They try really hard to test our patience. It never should have been removed 🙄🙄🙄
Only thing I can imagine is to put older video on slower/cheaper storage and prevent accessing it.
Additionally, it is usually less “engaging” content so it is not making much money.
Something like that might have been hypothesis. They are experimenting.
I was missing sort by oldest.
I never really understood why they seem to keep obfuscating video content on their video streaming platform.
They don’t want you finding content, they want you watching the content they feed you. That’s why you used to be able to just subscribe and see videos, and then you had to ring the bell to see stuff you subscribed to (BECAUSE WHY WOULD YOU SUBSCRIBE TO SOMETHING YOU DIDN’T WANT TO SEE?) and then you only actually GET to see that content if you’re also allowing notifications to spam you about it. The process literally changed to “if you want to always see what you want, instead of what we tell you you want, you have to let us blow up your phone 24/7.” Fuck the modern internet, this is the reason I tend to just hide in my old video games most of the time now.
Yeah I would think they’d want people to find content as quickly as possible
Exactly, Youtube never should have removed that sorting option. Such a weird thing to do that only impairs users, without benefit for Youtube or content creators (assuming you can monetize old videos).
There may be an argument that not allowing to sort by oldest makes people watch fewer old videos which means they can reduce caching server costs by moving older videos off most of the servers. Not sure how big that impact would be financially, though.
Google making a good change on YouTube wasn’t on my bingo card this week. I’m positively surprised.
There are federated video file sharing services. Maybe Google saw how spez fucking up is causing people to search for alternatives - especially federated ones - for all services and went, “Maaaybe we should add some easy to add features that people are wanting, like returning the ability to sort by oldest”?
Nah, must be a coincidence. They always A/B roll user hostile changes and then implement them fully. They know they can get away with it
Good I really missed this.
Okay, now let me reverse the “Play All” playlist and we’re back in business!
Now if they would just let me show all the comments on a video, or at least give me an option to search the comments on a video!
Removed by mod
Nice! I was so disappointed when they removed it as I only found out about it about a week before it was gone. I liked to see how people started out and evolved over time. 😀
How revolutionary
Now they should add sort by oldest comments on videos.
I have the feeling that the only reason they’re bringing back the feature is because of their push to integrate podcasts within YouTube. It makes sense to be able to sort by oldest to newest in the context of podcast episodes.
Is it super early April’s Fool? Youtube making positive change for once? I’m having trouble believing.
YouTube making a positive change? Mental.
Ok now they just need to fix the search so it doesn’t show random bullshit after the first 3 results.