There are federated video file sharing services. Maybe Google saw how spez fucking up is causing people to search for alternatives - especially federated ones - for all services and went, "Maaaybe we should add some easy to add features that people are wanting, like returning the ability to sort by oldest"?
Seriously, and you know it's purely the work of the executives and business managers, cause no developer would ever think it makes sense to remove functionality just because.
This is what happens in capitalist markets, and especially publicly traded companies, when your market share has reached saturation and there is no natural profit growth, you have to start paywalling currently free features/content to continue the quarterly profits.
They probably saw that it barely got used compared to the other two options (which makes sense) and then probably decided to remove it to free up UI space or some BS.
Like just because something doesn't get used a lot, doesn't mean it's not valuable/useful in the cases when it is being used...
Our A/B testing shows that fire extinguishers are used less often and generate less revenue than gumball machines. Therefore, we have removed all fire extinguishers to make room for more gumball machines.
I'm surprised to see it was removed in the first place, as it makes watching series in chronological order a pain (unless the uploader explicitly made a playlist in chronological order, which means extra configuration time and is prone to mistakes from the uploaders)
Exactly, Youtube never should have removed that sorting option. Such a weird thing to do that only impairs users, without benefit for Youtube or content creators (assuming you can monetize old videos).
There may be an argument that not allowing to sort by oldest makes people watch fewer old videos which means they can reduce caching server costs by moving older videos off most of the servers. Not sure how big that impact would be financially, though.
Nice! I was so disappointed when they removed it as I only found out about it about a week before it was gone. I liked to see how people started out and evolved over time. 😀
I have the feeling that the only reason they're bringing back the feature is because of their push to integrate podcasts within YouTube. It makes sense to be able to sort by oldest to newest in the context of podcast episodes.
Never understood why they would remove functionality... I watch way way too much YouTube and typically gravitate to channels that have timeline stories.