YouTube reportedly testing new homepage that removes dates and view counts

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.

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.
- 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.
- 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.

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.

- No way. YouTube is such a flaghship product and a lynchpin in other businesses (like music, streaming, AI development).
  I invoke Hanlon's razor.
- 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?

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.
  
  How much time are people looking through the homepage instead of watching videos?
- 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.
  
  I don't understand why the hell I would want to watch an old ass YouTube video unless I sought it out.
  
  Have to wonder if advertisers want to advertise on older videos though.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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.

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.

Youtube is getting shittier by the minute. Come to think of it, many things are.

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.

Date is how I go by whether or not someone I'm interested in has put up a new video or if YouTube is just showing me an old one I forgot about.
So I'm finally going to have to start fucking subscribing?
Ugh.
- I got on a YouTube kick a while back and subscribed to anybody whose videos entertained me. They haven't all been winners, and I've unsubscribed from some of them, but for the most part it gives me a good way to see the sort of content I want. It's actually halfway decent.
  Until you start using the apps, that is. They are the most cancerous, dark pattern bullshit hellscapes and I can't believe how far they've come. Every movement and click on those things is intended to get you to engage and watch just one more video, it's terrible.
  
  I don't know if I can explain it well, but I'm just opposed to the concept of having to subscribe when there is a front page that shows me all the new videos of people I watch regularly. It's an unnecessary step. I realize it helps creators (I was one once), but I still don't like having to constantly subscribe and unsubscribe based on who I've gained and lost interest in when it just tells me that person has a new video and if I stop watching them for a while, it stops telling me about them. I can also instantly tell it to not recommend the channel anymore.
  It's just so much easier.

The removal of view counts could empower fringe content. Even the most gullible are far less likely to take a video of an extremist nut job seriously when they have 100 views. Part of how radicalisation works is by convincing people that the radical ideology is far more mainstream than it actually is. It's already easy to inflate view counts but removing them entirely makes it much much simpler for crazies to sell the idea that their ideas are popular.

For fucks sake. This will do wonders for video tutorials and won't backfire in any way due to the content being outdated /s

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?

As someone that prefers to watch series in order… wtf?
- This is the homepage, i.e. youtube.com. If you were watching a series, I would imagine you'd go through the channel page, which should still have the upload date visible.
  
  Except YouTube can't count and will show you episode 3 on the home page then recommend episodes 4 7 5 6 8 in that order even if there is a playlist.

I've been using https://freetubeapp.io/ client for a few months and am extremely happy with it. It allows me to subscribe to channels without requiring an account, it has a nice UI that doesn't shove videos I don't care about in my face, no ads, can download videos, and it's in general a way better experience. Haven't used web YT in ages.
- The website doesn't allow interaction at all with my current ublock origin configuration. Not sure that's a good sign?
- Holy crap, thanks for this.

Side note:
I like to do a semi-anual audit of the information sources I use, and last year I removed the infographics channel from my feed. It turns out it's a content farm that puts quantity over quality. Some of their videos may actually be good, but they don't have the fact checking safeguards that more reliable channels like kurzgesagt does.
You'll notice Kurzgesagt has several videos that delve into how they do their research, and how the funds they receive from individuals, governments, and corporations affect their videos. Check to see if any of your channels have a "how we make our content" page. If they don't, it's for a reason.
Also, be wary of channels that use the kurzgesagt visual style, or an aesthetic that is similar to a notably trusted source. I've noticed a lot of false info that has an easier time being passed off as good due to using animation that we might associate with quality educational content.

Joke's on them, I got used to my homepage being "fuck you for disabling search history" for years

- They do this on YouTube shorts too. Just check the comments..

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 watched a creator having a meltdown today, because his views stats weren't seeming correct, nor his monetary compensation.

I noticed that with music videos. They remove the release date, remove it from the video section of the channel and shove it in something called releases on there. Weird change.
- A lot of changes look wierd on the surface from the companies, these are experiments for figuring out how to extract more money.
  In this case my guess is people constantly look to seek out new content and avoid older content. If people don't know, that could lead more general engagement then baseline and therefore an increase in revenue.
- Music videos are a special case, because I think the majority of them were uploaded to Youtube in 2009 when they launched the Vevo service. Everything from Video Killed The Radio Star to I Got A Feeling were uploaded to Youtube "14 years ago."

Has YouTube experienced enshittification?
Ummm???

The English language long has started failing me to accurately describe just how trash the entire YouTube situation as a whole to this date really is
This is just one monopoly, all but a glimpse into the dystopia company's want to become

The cat story is really upsetting.
- what happened?

Enshittification has 3 steps:
Make a good platform for users
Make the platform worse for users, but better for business customers
Make the platform worse for users and business customers to maximize profits
Youtube is past the first step
In the comments for this post i have seen 3 explanations:
Boosting smaller youtubers, which would not make the platform worse for the users, meaning that it couldnt be part of the process
Boosting radical youtubers, which would make the platform worse for business customers, but not increase profits, meaning that it couldnt be part of the process
Making people click on videos more often, which goes against attempts to make people watch single videos for longer
This is just a terrible change, there is no overused word to describe 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.

removes dates
and that's all the news channels gone.

You know why they might be hiding upload dates? My theory is, Youtube doesn’t really want you looking at new stuff. (Very apparent by the algorithm) they want you looking at specific news stories, and specific content but not constantly seeking new uploads from independents.
But that is just a theory a plain theory. Thanks for watching.
- Youtube doesn’t really want you looking at new stuff
  I think they do want you looking at new stuff. Its just going to be AI generated stuff, and you'll get spooked if you realize it was produced hours or even minutes ago with virtually no other engagement to speak of.
- YouTube's search filter sort by "Upload Date" has been broken for awhile now so this is very plausible. It will serve it's favourite creators' irrelevant content in with relevant videos and not display at all some actual relevant videos.
  If you filter sort by upload date and filter by Uploaded Today you'll see different results quite often which really makes no sense

This is the dumbest shit I've ever seen

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!

Oh fuck off, the rounded edges on videos was bad enough

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.

Has YouTube experienced enshittification?
Crapperidge's law says yes

how's that even a question?

I suppose this targets viewers like me who refuse to watch large content creators
- Or more likely viewers who just go with large content creators.

Is that a rhetorical question?

I've been trying to find browsers extensions that do this so that I would spend less time on youtube. Pretty sweet that youtube is doing it on their own!