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
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.
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.
Right? Like that’s why I click on a video most of the time when I see “X hours old”.
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
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.
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.
