We’ve encountered many apps testing out their updates before and now YouTube is hopping into that trend. On October 28, VidIQ reported in a post on Twitter, now X that YouTube is testing its new homepage layout removing the dates and counts from YouTube channels. The change involves YouTube hiding its video views and not showing the date on which the creators uploaded the video.
This update is aimed at new creators to have more clicks to get more views on the content that has not gone viral yet. Other speculations are that YouTube may be directed to a cleaner user interface. There is not much good feedback received from this update as many creators have already made videos on the platform talking about how shitty of an update this is calling it “A Downgrade of the Century”.
Other creators have commented on platforms like X that it feels empty looking at new videos popping up with no view count and dates. This is a temporary update as of now as YouTube said they were testing and that they value the opinions of the public who use the platform. Many users claimed that they didn’t mind upload dates going away but the view counts being hidden was a bummer.
Many creators also came forward talking about the update and saying how it is useful for all creators nonetheless as YouTube and Google kept pushing the old popular videos in public’s for you page when there are new blooming creators coming up every day.
Just like YouTube updated the platform by removing the dislike count back in 2021 became revolutionary, will this be such an update? We feel like the dislike count being hidden had a greater cause in reducing the targeted attacks on videos which prompted backlash from users worldwide. However, an extension was introduced soon after to bring this back which leads to another question YouTube is playing games with its users, and is this update a gimmick so that they could bring this back again later?
Several other speculations arose if this feature was hidden just to introduce them into the premium plan for YouTube and if so, it is not exactly fair as many normal users also use the video view counts to speculate whether to watch the video or not. Thinking from YouTube’s perspective though, this was the sole aim of the update and to test whether there is a difference between then and now.
Will this update be permanent? Only time can tell. Ritchie, a Twitter user, had initially hinted on YouTube testing out its update so we’ll keep an eye on his profile and will let you know if there is any update on this situation.
In the meantime, I’d suggest users have a judgment-free approach to all users and try to find the positives in the update that give the new creators a chance to explore their luck in this update as well. Viewers also could figure out if they look for the view count and update dates unintentionally.
