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Comment by SCdF | Hacker News Reader

The OP link is...not great.

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

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They also said: https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1590393940402147328

"we know sorting options are important & we’re still exploring how to bring these back"

Furiously Googling to find `git checkout HEAD~1`

But since it's the team that does YouTube search that explains the delay...

Too bad Googling doesn't work anymore either.

"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.

"It's just a simple change."

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.

It's shocking how incompetent youtube is.

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.

Ok, we've changed to that article from https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/ymoyx3/youtube_con.... Thanks!

FWIW - I was still served the old.reddit.com link from the HN frontpage. Maybe that's already known behavior, or not. Just thought I'd share!

Not sure! possibly a stale cache. If so, it should be correct by now.

Not only that the original article was written back in May, this story is 6 months old.

The original article is old, but contains time stamped updates until present.

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