Has YouTube experienced enshittification?
It seems like some websites think that the more the users know about the quality of the content, the worse it is for the website’s profit
It means they can shovel whatever bullshit they want without you realizing it is not an algorithm but a manual selection of videos.
I don’t even mind view count, but why would they even remove upload date? That’s the only way to know whether the video is new or not.
Youtube wants to own what you watch. Thats why they pivot so hard from showing you the subscriber list first and want to bank on their own algorithm to choose what you see.
Once they do, they have a captured audience of millions they get to choose what you think, buy, see ads for and become addicted too.
because if you don’t know straight away how old the video is, now you have to click on it to see. bam, ads.
Yeah, particularly great when i want to see some creators take/analysis/lecture on recent events, that are subject to daily changes.
Great way to muddy the water for people following the war in Ukraine.
Most likely answer is that they do it for the same reason as Facebook not sorting their feed by date: they want users to fully rely on their algorithm. My completely uneducated guess is that they want to feed their users older videos where they don’t pay out as much to their creators as they do for new videos.
Gotta save some “features” for the Premium version.
Right? Like that’s why I click on a video most of the time when I see “X hours old”.
Always happy to see “11 years old” video randomly pops up too, and i’ll know immediately it’s a fine wine.
I guess they’re checking if it matters. There’s nothing that inherently making a video worse if it’s old. However I must admit that even I tend to think twice if a video is mulitpile years old
There’s a lot of videos where age matters. Looking for a Blender tutorial? Have fun skimming through them to find the right version.
You want to see the highlights of yesterday’s soccer game? Here’s 5 times these teams played each other, try to find out what’s the right one.
Uploaders can add that info in Headings or,
They could also show year/version/model etc
Edit : Meant youtube could add a version feature
Of course, but that’s not a solution but a workaround
They could also show year
so could Youtube.
Taking away information so I can’t choose how best to use my time… yeah fuck that enshittification.
The lack of upload date is the thing that already bugs me the most about YouTube Shorts. Well, maybe the second most after the entire concept.
YouTube Shorts have a description, which has the upload date at the top. Though this doesn’t show up when searching for Shorts, or having them in your feed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Isn’t YT the poster child of enshittification?
Facebook set the bar high, but Google is rising to the challenge.
Well, time to install two new add-ons: Return YouTube View Counts and Return YouTube Upload Dates.
Somebody please make those.
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.
Would you chip in to cover the development expenses?
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.
Last Week Tonight does this too! I unsubbed. Not worth watching like this.
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).
No way. YouTube is such a flaghship product and a lynchpin in other businesses (like music, streaming, AI development).
I invoke Hanlon’s razor.
Chromecast was a flagship product.
Stadia was a flagship product.
YT Originals was a flagship product.
Hangouts was a flagship product.
I could go on, but I think my point has been made. Google gives zero fucks about products or consumers. They only care about money.
When they enshittify a product it’s to make more money.
I’m not entirely disagreeing with Hanlon on this, but just because they’re inept doesn’t mean they aren’t actively sabotaging themselves through corrupted negligence. Like a bank robber that didn’t get an oil change in over 40k miles and goes on a high speed chase. Sure you rob the bank, but you won’t get further than three blocks before your engine blows because of your negligence against your car while you planned the bank heist.
I’d say Chromecast is the only flagship there, it’s everywhere and reshaped the genre of those devices.
I used Stadia, it was cool, but clearly something they were dipping their toes in, it was never popular.
YT Originals was fine, but again not popular. Cobra Kai was the only show I really heard about.
I’m not sure how popular Hangouts was, I used it extensively, but only within certain groups of friends. It had no way to make money though, and they have made a bunch of messaging platforms since.
None of those were even close to flagships, they were all short term experiments.
YouTube is the basis for much of Google’s portfolio and a steady moneymaker, not an upstart liek those.
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Chromecast 2013-2024 (12-ish years)
- Google’s only known TV streaming hardware and service.
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Stadia 2019-2022 (4-ish years)
- Google’s only known Videogame streaming service.
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YT Originals 2016-2022 (7-ish years)
- Google’s first official leap into content creation for their streaming service.
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Hangouts 2013-2022 (10-ish years)
- Google’s first text, voice, video communication service.
YouTube is the basis for much of Google’s portfolio and a steady moneymaker, not an upstart liek those.
You must be joking. Why is YouTube a steady moneymaker? Is it perhaps the advertisements? So wouldn’t that make Google ads be the “basis for much of Google’s portfolio”?
What threatens the viability of an advertising company? When viewers aren’t viewing ads.
YouTube is not an investment for Google. YouTube is a liability. Huge amounts of upkeep, required staff on hand. FUCKIN LAWYERS. At best YouTube is a vehicle they control to increase ad revenue.
The real money maker? Selling your personal data to other advertising networks.
Now that Khan is in the FCC and Harris is likely to win the White House, and it might be possible we have a Blue House & Senate. With the cherry on top, the anti-trust suit.
That’s right, the fuckin Google Mafia Monopoly!
They’re hedging their bets on the next four to five years being terrible for them and are tying to get rid of as much weight as they can. Why? Because nobody uses Google to search for content on YouTube, and if they have to split YouTube off the main company, Alphabet, will lose so much fucking money the fed couldn’t print it fast enough to bail their ass out of the overextended hole they are precariously straddled over.
Google will need to buy then what they get now for free. And you know who hates Alphabet more then their competition? YouTube.
YouTube will make Alphabet pay out the nose for any ad time, so it’s easier to quietly write it off now and kill it later before it becomes a threat.
Hangouts 2013-2022 (10-ish years)
Google’s first text, voice, video communication service.
That’s not true, does anybody remember Google Talk?
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sacrificing it for a tax loss in 5 years when they shut it down.
Given that Tax = %rate * max(revenue-cost,0)
How can deliberately sabotaging a business make money?
They could be taking a tax write off of the development cost/efforts for increasing revenue from ad revenue.
I’m sure insurance claims are also included in that because of the efforts of ad blockers.
Overall, I doubt that they’re making a profit, but I bet they’re at least staying in the black.
When you take a look at the changes that they are making now, removing post dates and view counts, it could be concluded that it’s an effort to stop wrappers like new pipe from displaying recent content. This could be internally tracked as improvements made to increase ad revenue, which would be tax deductible.
It’s clear to me that they’re willing to sabotage the entire product in order to increase ad sales, fuck their consumers in the ass, and completely obliterate any trust users will have in their platform in the future.
This is the same standard private investment strategy that’s been running for the last 20 years unchecked.
Why the fuck would they even think of doing that? Genuinely what is the purpose? How does it benefit them?
You might (rightly) skip videos many years old that are no longer relevant. Without the date info available to you, you won’t know they contain out-of-date useless information, and might watch them (generating more views and ad revenue).
The goal is to make you click and anything that could stop you is considered a problem. I’d say it’s a short term strategy that will lead to long term failure but I’m not sure anymore. Tiktok and Instagram are feeding their users a bunch of trash too and it still works.
Instagrams shows you the date and views/likes. Also 20 seconds cat videos or two minute talk video are vastly different to 10mins to 4 hours youtube videos. The time “lost” by wathcing the wrong thing is just very different.
20 seconds cat videos or two minute talk video are vastly different to 10mins to 4 hours youtube videos. The time “lost” by wathcing the wrong thing is just very different. I think it isn’t uncommon for users to spend multiple hours per day watching those short clips only to realize most of it was mildly interesting at best and it’s less likely someone sits through a 4h video they dont care about than someone watching 4h worth of a variety of short clips they don’t really care for. Either way I think taking transparency/agency away from the user is terrible.
How much time are people looking through the homepage instead of watching videos?
If youtubes goal was to make people only watch the begging of an episode, which has the most ads(i think, i havent seen an ad on youtube in a long time), why are they promoting videos that make people watch for longer?
You can’t remember watching a video, so you watch it again and give them more ad revenue.
Same reason people choose not to show votes here? Bias? I never really look at beyond title and thumbnail anyway.
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.
What would removing the dates accomplish except making things more confusing and harder to find? What advantage to YouTube is there?
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
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.
They one one goal: keep you engaged in the app.
Nothing else matters.
In their eyes, further reoving the “choice” of what to watch and shifting more of it to the algorithm optimizes that. And visible view counts/dates is a factor, as you may skip a video the algorithm thinks would keep you engaged.
I just question if steering users toward old and outdated videos really keeps them engaged.
It probably does in the short term (aka next quarter or two), which is all they care about. It takes awhile to hemorrhage users when one is so entrenched.
For sure this has to be it. Less distractions, less info, less choice, more control for them
It is enshittification. IDK why other comments are mad about calling that out but look up the term if unfamiliar. Corey Doctorow laid out a thesis a few years ago and , the trend has continued. It seems unabated 😡😰
The optimist in me hopes this will be used to give smaller channels a push in views and attention, even years later, when they may have been skipped over or ignored previously.
The realist in me knows this will be used to push garbage that would otherwise be self-filtered by users due to the red flags of dates/views.
Youtube also started recommending small channels more often a while ago
It would also make more sense to prefer people watching smaller creators compared to bigger ones because, as far as i know, youtube gets more money from channels that arent monetized yet(getting 100% instead of 55% i think)
The problem for me in my recommended page, is most of the newly created channels are AI generated and it’s really hard for me to tell if it’s real content. I had to ignore small and new channels as a matter of principle.
view counts, I’m okay with. I do want to see how old a video is and how long a video is.
I watch niche stuff on Youtube. I watched a guy copy an old ISA adapter card for the very first CD-ROM drive. That’s not gonna do BeasTiePie numbers, and I don’t care. It isn’t information I use to select a video. I think it’s useful information to have generally available, but I don’t necessarily need it on the home screen. It should maybe be displayed on a channel’s Videos page, where there’s more screen real estate per video, and in the video’s description header.
Date uploaded is pertinent information. Is this a recent entry in a series I enjoy? Is this breaking or old news? Has ANOTHER 10,000 people died in a hurricane or is this just a month old? Is this from before ThE iNcIdEnT, or after?
Why do you think they are getting rid of the date of upload? UX reasons? No, they want to be able to serve you the same video, especially for news. Generates more clicks when you need to check if something is a year old or not.
Engagement, people are probably less likely to click on an old video, especially if they are looking for relevant and up to date information.
Well, or the opposite. Why click on a new video pointing out the errors / fallacies in the old one, when you only see the old one and don’t know it’s outdated
I figure less text on the screen = more room for the thumbnail. If they invented Youtube today they wouldn’t think to show you titles, channel names or other metadata, just the video thumbnail.
Yeah thats what they do with shorts mostly. Huge thumbnail, title, no of views. No date until you click. Which for shorts - not many people give 2 f’s if the cat video they are watching is from last month or 15 years ago. Not for regular videos. But then again, youtube / google are too big to fail. They could remake youtube in an absolutely abysmal direction and people would still come on the site.
You know what I wish they would do? I wish they would invent the concept of “shows.”
Like you know how on old fashioned tube television you could tune the primitive analog radio receiver to pre-selected narrow frequency bands referred to by the ancient ones as “channels” and on these “channels” one might find a collection of different, though sometimes related “shows.” Like on the Discovery “Channel” might produce wildlife documentaries and space documentaries?
There hasn’t been a robust way to do that on Youtube since at least the Johnson administration. I’ll give the example of Linus Media Group, who operate 14.04*10^666 different channels which are generally related, made mostly by the same creative staff, on broadly the same topics, but Youtube treats them as 100% unrelated. According to Youtube’s UI, TechQuickie is as related to Linus Tech Tips as RedLetterMedia is.
You can kind of get this done with playlists. But…when a stupid penis is pushed into an idiot vagina, a moron baby shall soon be born. Youtube doesn’t provide a robust playlist controls, and youtubers want people to be able to access the latest episodes, so now Youtube is full of playlists that are backwards with their oldest entries at the bottom.
One account can’t silo their own content by topic in a way that’s meaningful to the UI. Like, if you like RedLetterMedia for Best of the Worst and Re:View but don’t care for Half In the Bag…Go find the nearest anvil, hammer your dick flat and take a 2D piss up a rope for all the good it’ll do you.
With a “show” system, you could subscribe to the specific shows you like. This would count as a subscriber for the creator’s metrics because a viewer is engaging with them, and they could see which shows are most popular with their viewers to prioritize that content, which should boost engagement. Or, if you like the creator’s personality, you could generally subscribe and get notifications on everything they publish. Interested viewers would get notified of the latest shows directly without having to navigate a playlist, and newcoming viewers who discover a creator later on could watch a show from the beginning too. If engagement is what Youtube wants, surely someone stumbling upon a long running series and then lapping up the entire back catalog is a way to achieve this. If they wanted to boost engagement surely they’d want to create a way to more easily attach “second channels” to their main ones. How many people would watch the lower production effort asides/live stream dumps that they’re hosting if they lowered the UI pain in the neck?
</tantacrul>
If the video is about an ongoing event, say the Titan submarine disaster, I’d rather watch videos posted last week them videos posted a year ago, because the new info makes the old content irrelevant.
If a search for videos about how to perform carbon fiber layups shows one with 1.2m views in the last year and another with 5k views from the past 6 years, I will probably watch the better performing video first.
But if I want to see a video about some esoteric subject like how the bathyscaphe triste worked, that isn’t really changing much, I don’t care about post date or view count.
Date is relevant information. I need it as part of my decision-making. Same as choosing between videos with 12 views and those with 10k views. It’s not everything, but it’s part of the equation. Let me fucking choose.
