Has YouTube experienced enshittification?
Well… One more reason to ditch YouTube. As always: Reminder PeerTube exists.
I know the network effect is powerful, but YouTube won’t lose until people are fed up enough to not use it.
I bet that when they do this that older videos with newer thumbnails will get more clickthroughs and watch time same that of the newest uploads, but it won’t be as effective with documentary / science videos (vsause, veritasium ect) because their videos are highly memorable. This will have a bad effect on the end user filtering out low effort video farms that show up in the search results, because those videos tend to have 100 views - 10k views.
About 15 years ago Microsoft had this great idea.
What if we forced everyone to use our software on the web so they can’t buy it.
Macros will no longer work, but not many people use macros so fuck those guys, they are nerds anyway.
This became the heyday of the Libre Software movement. And the reason I still occasionally use it.
Companies run on the simple automation the nerds create with Macros and companies aren’t going to hire a bunch more clerks so they can pay more for shittier software.
TL;DR, Microsoft backed down when people voted with their feet and not before.
I guess they really want to get rid of users huh.
I watch tech videos. If I can’t see when a video is from, I’m not going to waste my time on watching it.
Conspiracy time: Google is purposely making their video platform worse because they’re sacrificing it for a tax loss in 5 years when they shut it down. In those five years they’re going to “ramp up” development and write off all that “work” to pay for other projects.
Their UX and design choices are amateur at best and clearly they have no interest in maintaining the product(much like all of their retired line).
Wow, your algorithm shows the exact same videos that mine does. I’ve never seen that before. Every time I check out someone else’s YouTube, their homepage is completely different from mine.
Now kith?
What would removing the dates accomplish except making things more confusing and harder to find? What advantage to YouTube is there?
YouTube’s goal, as was Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and TikTok and everyone else, is to get you to consume what they want you to consume, rather than what you choose to consume.
My guess is that it makes it easier to suggest you older content that wouldn’t be interesting when you can see at a glance how outdated it is.
Have to wonder if advertisers want to advertise on older videos though.
Would it really matter if they pay per view?
I don’t understand why the hell I would want to watch an old ass YouTube video unless I sought it out.
That’s pretty much my point. You won’t know unless you click
Well, time to install two new add-ons: Return YouTube View Counts and Return YouTube Upload Dates.
Somebody please make those.
Would you chip in to cover the development expenses?
Yes, please! Also, would the add on make the date searchable again?
Because anything that has had an update is now a clusterfuck… say I want to see how to change a calendar setting in godforsaken Outlook, searching by date is necessary b/c who knows what the version number is.
Or games like Path of Exile, where three months can render some information obsolete because it’s a league system.
I can’t stand YouTube’s feed. It’s so bad. This does not help. I know many others already said it, but this is not an improvement.
The date can matter a lot. Especially, when it comes to tech learning. That world moves too fast. If you’re learning programming on YouTube, you need to be sure you have current info.
I desperately with YouTube had real competition.
So I just installed Linux on a new computer and during the short install I went to YouTube for something but it didn’t even give me a list of videos to watch instead it told me I had to search so it can build a list of videos to recommend.
I’m not sure if this is a new change or what but along with this and taking away information I’m ready to just drop YouTube altogether probably better for my health… There is one service that was created by the people who do jetlag I might give them a try at this point.
I’ve had watch history off since like 2015 and sometime in 2021(?) they blanked the home page on me and said I had to turn history back on. It got fixed for a bit in 2022 (based on my discord chat logs) but then got cleared again later. Now it’s just a blank page; they don’t even tell me to turn history back on, but that could be my revert layout extension cause the giant thumbnails suck ass. Still salty they removed day markers on the subscription page since that’s how I kept track of what I still hadn’t watched.
Anyway, when they cleared it again for me in 2022/2023 is probably when they stopped giving signed-out new sessions a feed.
There is one service that was created by the people who do jetlag I might give them a try at this point.
Nebula is pretty good, and has a lot of creators on it, but I personally have had issues with videos buffering or not being playable until 5-10 seconds after clicking on them. It might just be my browser (I use Firefox with a ton of various extensions and settings changes that affect rendering and content loading), but it’s something to note depending on how much you care about the user experience.
I think they let you view a video or two for free though, so you can test that out beforehand if you wanted to.
The date can matter a lot.
The original algorithm rewarded engagement absent dates, but this resulted in old classic hits mopping up revenue while newer stuff struggled to grab anyone’s attention. You’ll never make a music video more popular than Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up, so why bother trying?
Then the algorithm shifted to fresh-first bias, which incentivized streamers to constantly churn out new content. But it still contended with users who stubbornly wanted to see the old content. So you got a bunch of content that tried to imitate historical hits or play on trends. This ended up producing 10,000 videos named some variation of “Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up, Explained” with a digitally edited picture of the singer with big eyes and a soy face.
Now we’ve got this deluge of AI generated crap that nobody wants to look at or search for, piling up in YouTube’s back catalog. The only way to justify hosting it is to jam it into someone’s feed. So every user is being A/B Tested once again, with a new procedurally generated wall of garbage that will eventually narrow down what any given individual is most likely to click on and watch. Then we can solve both of the problems above. Always have new content, but its technically “fresh” rather than a rehash of some prior release.
We are doing Monkeys On Typewriters because someone at YouTube HQ decided it was better than letting anyone watch the Rick Astley video one more time.
I desperately with YouTube had real competition.
There are other places to host video, but they tend to be very boutique or with an abundance of very low quality content. That, plus YouTube leveraging economies of scale and the networking effect means there’s nowhere else you’d ever want to try and host a video, unless you were looking to reach a very boutique audience or you were putting out material you didn’t really expect anyone to watch.
Has YouTube experienced enshittification?
Ummm, only for the past decade?
Hopefully they’ll remove the length, the channel name, the thumbnail, the title and the entire video, too.
It’s because users are less likely to watch old videos. They do this on TikTok. You’ll see videos that are years old on your feed because they have a lack of new content. You watch the new videos and then move on with your day. Now you’re getting shown more videos and more likely to stay.
They do this on YouTube shorts too. Just check the comments…
Sometimes I watch videos of The Daily Show and it drives me bonkers that they upload old episodes from a decade ago and it’s impossible to tell if it’s current Daily Show, or the classic one. If the whole service was like that… I’m completely gone.
Yeah, same with outdated tutorials, old news etc.
This is so stupid… I can give a personal exemple that happened to me today!
I just got into Lorcana and I want to learn a bit more about the meta and where the strategies are at. The damn thing got like FOUR expansions in a year!! So a video that came out during release is already WAY out of date!
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Return YouTube dislikes will change to
Return YouTube dislikes + view count + upload date
Until they shut down / lock down the APIs that allow querying this information.
