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Comment by gniv | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

>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).

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.

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.

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