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Comment by frou_dh | Hacker News Reader

Something else strange is that they removed the dropdown option to sort videos in a channel in chronological order ("oldest first").

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It's been a while since they removed it. It's probably because playing rarely-played videos costs more in bandwidth. You can still find them, of course, but it's more work.

True. The most recent videos of popular channels would be cached in multiple locations to improve latency, but rarely accessed videos would exist at only one (or two for redundancy) data center.

It's one reason why I love channels that take the time to make meaningful playlists: they're in whatever order the channel decides, which is often oldest-first in the context of a regular series.

In my experience that kind of playlists are always newest first.

I watch a channel that has hundreds of videos playing a city builder, with playlists for each city they've streamed. I just looked and they're all oldest to newest, but yeah, I guess its up to the creator.

The frustrating bit if they get it wrong is YouTube autoplays the next video, which would be going backwards for you.

>It's probably because playing rarely-played videos costs more in bandwidth.

Huh? Why would that be the case?

They exist on fewer servers, so they have to be pulled from deeper levels of cache, or maybe even no cache. Popular videos will be cached on edge servers all over the place, and will be quick and easy to deliver.

That's a good point that I didn't consider. Still, I don't think this was the right direction to go. If the videos were already rarely watched, going out of your way to make them less watched isn't going to save much bandwidth.

How do you know?

Azure, AWS, Google cloud all pay less for data that gets accessed regularly.

Google Cloud charges $0.02 / month for each gigabyte of storage, but if you store it in an infrequently accessed volume you can qualify for special pricing of $0.0012 / GB / month. That's a 177% difference in storage costs for cold storage vs hot storage.

So yeah, it's MUCH cheaper to store it in infrequently accessed volumes. And stopping people from finding the oldest videos allows them to do that.

According to Google Cloud, archival storage is only meant to be accessed once a year at most. Even infrequently watched videos should be considered hot (i.e. likely to be accessed more than once a month).

I think they also realized they didn’t want to be a video archive service but a “come back for the new thing” service. Otherwise they’re just holding everyone’s home movies

I feel that this change served creators (too): Long-running channels transform over time, in production value, niche, style, messaging, etc. Creators want you to look at this new image instead of their old one.

(Imagine looking through your old vs new social media posts... which would the current-you agree with more?)

Indeed, that was actually my inkling rather than the infrastructure cost angle. Though it doesn't make sense that it would be blanket applied, rather than being part of channel configuration for those creators who care about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS1qfuKfVN8

They appear to be bringing it back based on a recent video from their Creator Insider channel

It's not too strange if you think that YouTube is trying to abandon its past to become another also-ran on-demand broadcast service.

Probably assuming oldest one like archived data and storing them accordingly.

Are you sure this isn't just an option for some channels to decide if they want it? Some channels definitely still have this sort option available.

No, they removed it. While I believe they haven't shared the reason they do it, I think it's probably due to backend changes to reduce costs of hosting older less popular videos (maybe moving them to nearline storage?). Some previous discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33559888

Yes/no, "Some channels definitely still have this sort option available". Many smaller (?) channels still have this button. Also sorting by date still works for all channels after editing URL.

I don't know exactly, what is the criteria for hiding that button, but consider size/geography/political views/ability to inject ads/etc. YouTube shadowbanned comments, likes, videos for a long time; consider this as another technique of shadowbanning without explaining anything.

Any examples? I just checked about 20 channels I'm subscribed to that have between 1k-15k subs and there's no Sort By Oldest button.

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