List of features removed from YouTube

“Removing features is our passion!”

This is an incomplete list of features that YouTube has removed from their website and mobile application.

Anyone is invited to contribute and add anything missing. Feel free to write on the discussion page for suggestions.

Desktop website features

Table

List of removed YouTube website features

Feature category	Feature	Introduction date	Removal date	Description and notes
Annotations	Video annotation editor	2008	2017-05-02	Ability to add/edit annotations for interactive videos (annotation editor).
	Ability to view annotations	2008	2019-01-15	Final removal of annotations
	Pause annotation	2008 or 2009	2013	Ability to add automatic pauses inside videos. Removed because it was misused by users.
	Collaborative annotations	2009-02	2012 or earlier	Ability for multiple people to collaboratively work
Comments and ratings	AJAX-free comments that pre-loaded within the page	2005 or 2006	2013
	/all_comments?v=	circa 2007	2016-01
	Comment search			Part of TestTube, circa 2011
	Real-time comment stream and counter of new comments	circa 2010	circa 2013	Similar to Twitter's “View X new results”
	Channel discussion pages (earlier known as “Channel comments”)	Circa 2006	Gradually since 2018	Replaced with Community Posts feature instead of co-existing. First applied to channels with ≥10000 subscribers, later 500 and ≥1000. Permanently deletes discussions upon replacement.
	Video reactions in comment area			Reaction options: “LOL”, “OMG”, “EPIC”, “CUTE”, “WTF” or “FAIL”.
	1-5 star ratings	2005	2010	Star ratings of 1 and 2 were replaced with dislikes and star ratings of 3, 4 and 5 with likes upon conversion to the new rating system. As of 2020, the Google Play store still utilizes the star rating system.
Sharing	AutoShare		2019-01-31	Ability to automatically share liked videos, uploaded videos, added subscriptions (removed earlier) and videos added to playlists to Google Plus (deceased later) and Twitter.
	/shared?ci=			Details unknown
Channel pages	Unified channel page	2006 or earlier	2013	Allowed seeing more infirmation at once and thus enabled richer web archival. Removed with 2013 “One channel layout” redesign. Notice the ironic name.
	Custom channel theme	2006	2013	Fine-grain custom colour control for many page elements; ability to use custom backgrounds. Removed with 2013 “One channel layout” redesign. Opting out was possible for a limited time.
	/feed channel page		June 2020	Asummarized list of recent channel activities including publicly liked videos (removed December 2019), public subscriptions, uploaded videos, playlist additions and channel messages.
	flow=list URL parameter		June 2020	Listed videos and subscriptions of a channel with the beginning of its description.
Awards (also known as Honors)			Badges on the channel page for various statistics-related achievements.
Site layout, appearance and watch page	YouTube Feather			Lightweight YouTube site. Part of TestTube in the early 2010s decade.
	Count of public videos of uploader on watch page	2011	2014
	Compatibility website view mode		circa 2013	If an older browser was detected, the user was prompted to view a compatible version of the site in a green notice on the right side of the video player.
	“Hovercards” mouseover tooltips	2013	2014 or 2015	Similar to Twitter's profile hover cards when hovering the mouse pointer above the display name of a profile.
	Top-bar mini player	March 2018	March 2018	As known from Dailymotion and Vimeo.
	Cosmic Panda site layout	July 2011	Probably early 2012	Experimental site layout
Statistics	Full subscriber counts			Many places such as subscriber counts and like/dislike counts started only showing up as abbreviated number, e.g. “1K” “1M” or “1B” during the years. Since September 2019, only the three leading digits of the subscriber count are visible on YouTube's website and accessible via the API, allegedly for consistency. The change was heavily disliked by VidIQ community.
	Public video statistics	2008	2019
	Ability to share list of liked videos	Before 2010	2019-12	A playlist with up to 5000 last liked videos could be shared publicly with the community. The closest workaround after this feature removal is manually creating and maintaining a public playlist of liked videos.
	Public views by country		~2013
	Channel page view counts			Still accessible via APi?
Video player	Like/Dislike/description and information viewer inside the video player.		~2016	Ability to rate (like/dislike) a video inside the embedded player
	Video polls	2015 or 2016	June 2020
	Search feature inside ActionScript2 flash video player.	2008	~2013
	Warp player	circa 2009	circa 2010	Experimental video browser interface
	Embedded player with integrated browsing and searching functionality			Only in the ActionScript 2 flash video player
Video management	Built-in video editor and slide show creator		2017-09
	Video effects		2019
	Video responses		2013
Subscriptions	Subscription groups
	Friend list	~2006	2011-12
	Ability to hide individual videos on one's own subscription page	?	September 2020
Searching	Ability to find videos by uploader-specified tags.
	Video search results counter		June 2018
Playlists	Playlist notes	Circa 2013	2020	Notes that could be added to videos by playlist creators. Not available in “polymer” design since introduction, still was accessible in legacy layout as long as it existed, accessible through disable_polymer URL parameter by setting it to “1” or “true”.
	Individual video view counts on playlist page	2012 or earlier	2014 or 2015
	Ability to see total length of videos in a playlist	2012 or earlier	Circa 2013
	Ability to rate playlists	2012 or earlier	Circa 2013 or 2014
Subtitles	Community-contributed subtitles	early 2010s	September 2020	Creators were able to allow users to directly contribute subtitles, also known as community captions.
Descriptions	Video credits	2014 or earlier	2019	Dedicated section for video credits.

Some table cells might be empty due to lack of currently available information.

Details

Parts of the text in this section is based on work originally published in April and May 2019 on ArchiveTeam Wiki, and imported and adapted to EverybodyWiki in November 2020 by the original author.

Annotations

On November 27th, 2018, YouTube updated its help page to include that all annotations (which had been disabled for new videos and replaced with "cards" early May 2017, but old annotations remained visible) will be removed from videos hosted on the platform on 15 January 2019.

Discussions (Channel Comments)

In addition, YouTube decided that their new “Community Post” feature can not co-exist with the “Discussion” feature, earlier known as “Channel Comments”. Therefore, all channels that reach a certain subscriber threshold (formerly 10000, last known threshold: 1500), all channel comments will be permanently erased instead of being merged or co-existing.

The owner from the YouTube channel is still able to access comments from the discussion tab for 30 days after their channel has received the community tab feature. For channel visitors, the “Discussion” tab immediately becomes inaccessible after it becomes replaced with the “Community” tab. Attempting to access the discussion tab via URL get redirected to the main page of the channel.

Removal of AutoShare

AutoShare was a YouTube feature, introduced in 2009, that allowed users to automatically share the following actions on YouTube to Twitter, Google Plus and formerly Facebook automatically:

• Liking a video.
• Publishing a video.
• Adding video to playlist (AutoShare did not share name and URL of the target playlist.)
• Favourising a video (removed YouTube feature, existing favourite videos automatically got moved to “Favourites” playlist.)

The tweet or Google+ post posted by AutoShare included the title and the URL to the target video.
An AutoShared tweet's metadata source tag indicates “Google”.

Example tweet:

I liked a @YouTube video https://youtu.be/By_Cn5ixYLg?a YouTube Rewind 2018 but it's actually good

At some point, YouTube AutoShare tweets also included the Twitter handle of the YouTube channel the video was shared from, if the owner of the YouTube channel had also linked his Twitter account to his YouTube channel and publicly listed it on the channel.

Twitter's tweet search feature allowed finding out the URL or the title of a deleted video from each other, or the original video URL and full title from knowing the approximate title.
It could also help to trace back changes of a video's title.

This information was useful to find out more about lost videos, e.g. what caused them to be removed, captures by Wayback/Archive.Today, online discussions and potential re-uploads.

On 20190110, YouTube announced that they would get rid of that feature on 20190131.

After the removal of AutoShare, people still tweeted “I liked a @YouTube video […]” manually.

Video Statistics

Without any clear warning in advance, YouTube has also entirely removed the public “video statistics” feature. The only warning sign was that their new “Polymer” website layout lacked the statistics feature, which could originally be found in the “More” menu below a video.

Only their “One” website layout that they introduced in 2013 and revised in late 2014, then barely changed for years, co-existing with “Polymer” since late 2017, included the statistics feature.
When YouTube released their “One” website layout, the number of parameters displayed by the video statistics was also reduced.

The video statistics were also inaccessible from the “One” website since late 2018, and the API endpoints were removed as well..

Parameters (legacy)

• Total view count + graph.
• Total comments count + graph.
• Total favourited count + graph (removed YouTube feature).
• Total rating counts (no graph)
• Like and dislike count (no graph)
• Referral sources with date of initial referral (exact dates available as of 20071130).
  • View counts from each referral source.
    • First featured video view
    • First referral from related videos (separately mentioned)
    • First view from embededd video
    • First view from embededd video (specified website)
    • First referral from YouTube search (for separate search terms)
• Most popular audiences (age and gender)
• World map that highlights countries in which the video is more popular.
  • Countries with higher popularity are highlighted in darker green.
• Honour badges
  • Total honour counts
  • List of honours
    • Rank: Most viewed of all time
    • This list is incomplete yet.

Parameters (recent)

• Views
• Total Watch time
  • Average watch time per user.
• Subscribers gained from said video
• Share counter: How often the video was shared.

Each of these parameters could be viewed as total cumulative count or counts per day, of which the latter was the default setting.

Unified channel page

In March 2013, YouTube enforced all channels to change to the previously optional new channel layout called “One” channel layout.

“One” channel layout crippled the Wayback Machine's ability to crawl channel pages.
The Wayback Machine often just captures the home page of a YouTube channel and misses the channel subpage tabs.

Since “One” channel layout was introduced in March 2013, the information of YouTube channels is no longer unified onto a single page, but has been split up onto different, separate subpages:

• /home
• /feed
  • (Includes “shared thoughts”).
  • Thoughts shared via the “Share your thoughts” feature (not to be confused with discussions or community) can only be written with the legacy channel layout (accessible via ?disable_polymer=1 URL parameter) but read via the new polymer channel layout too.
  • This feature is potentially endangered due to the lack of support from polymer layout, and depreciation of purpose. Existing thoughts shared via this feature could be deleted.
• /videos
• /playlists
• /discussion
• /community
• /stories
• /about
  • Does include channel views, total view count, subscriber count and channel creation date.
  • Includes user-added information such as E-Mail address (ReCaptcha needed to access due to spam prevention), channel description, user-specified country, link farm.
• /search

Some channels have the custom layout feature turned off. In that case, the channel description shows on the channel's home page, but the discussion page (usually not enabled by default in the customized channel layout mode) is enabled and accessible via the URL.

Because all this information is no longer on a single page, if the Wayback Machine captures a channel page, it often only captures the main (home) page of the channel, dismissing the information from the other channel tabs because they are on different pages instead of all information on one page.

Custom channel layouts

Due to the lack of customizability of the “One Channel Layout”, as of March 2013, all custom creative channel designs have been deleted. Also other information such as channel view counts are no longer shown, but channel view counts can still be accessed via the YouTube API.

Video counter

Prior to that layout change, when YouTube video title stood above instead of below the video, there was a menu where one could quickly see other videos uploaded by the channel. If this feature existed today, it could have helped chromebot save information about the 20 most recent uploads of a channel the video was archived from.

From March 2013 to August 2014, the video counter was still visible next the channel name, although clicking on it just refers to the /videos page of the uploaders channel instead of directly listing the recent uploads.

YouTube's August 2014 redesign, which has slightly changed throughout the years, still co-exists with the polymer design and is still accessible as of May 2019 by appending the &disable_polymer=1 or &disable_polymer=true parameter to the URL.
Since that August 2014 redesign, the number of publicly available videos is also no longer visible directly from the watch page. And also not from the channel's “about” page, but only from the search results.

However, SocialBlade tracks the statistics of as many YouTube channels as possible, storing historical data. Some is only accessible through paid subscription.

Comment loading

Since YouTube's “One Channel Layout” redesign, comments “extraload” using AJAX, which means that they do not get loaded within the page itself, but only start loading after scrolling down towards the comments. This made the comment section inaccessible to the Wayback Machine. However, there was a page called youtube.com/all_comments?v=<video ID>, which actually loaded the first few comments without AJAX (included in HTML source code), but loading more comments required AJAX. But that one was discontinued and started redirecting to the main /watch?v= page since January of 2016. However, archive.today still was able to archive YouTube comments until late 2017. As of April 2019, archiving YouTube comments using http://archive.today/ is still possible by linking directly to a comment using YouTube's lc URL parameter.

• Example comment URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3GrSMYbkBE&lc=UgxC238Gea0KGOditl54AaABAg
• Archived: http://archive.li/OXq7u

As of June 2019 YouTube's google_comment_id URL parameter does the same thing as lc (maybe it was created as a replacement for lc which might not do anything in the future, speculation of course):

• Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaPfzgUFJyI&google_comment_id=UgyJ0eDN227JG2mDFg54AaABAg
• Archived: http://archive.vn/MRmNW

Chromebot, operated via #ArchiveBot ^connect IRC, can still be used to archive YouTube comments thanks to it's bottomless page scrolling capabilities.

Comments on YouTube can be sorted by Top Comments or by Newest Comments. The uploader of a video can specify which way of sorting is used for the video by default, but it can be adjusted manually by the user. The default preset is Top Comments. However, no known URL parameter is able to select the sorting methods for the comments so far. Therefore, crawlers that can access the comments can only crawl them in the preselected way of sorting.

Trivia:

• The Top Comments are not necessarily the comments with the highest number of upvotes, probably because YouTube does not want always the same comments to stay on top for too long. Older comments get pushed down despite having a high rating, allowing comments to cycle.
• At some point, YouTube started hiding negative comment ratings and only shows how often a comment has been rated positively. Rating a comment negatively is still possible however. It's effect is pushing comments further down from the Top Comments.

Video Responses

“Video responses” was a feature where users could respond to videos with new or existing videos that were listed above the comment sections.

After YouTube removed that feature, the existing videos that were posted as response were not removed. But the links between the original video and the video used as response were removed.

Video reactions

YouTube's 2011 “Video Reactions” feature is similar to Facebook's extended liking feature since 2016.

The possible reactions were: “LOL, OMG, EPIC, CUTE, WTF or FAIL”.

To view reaction counts, one needed to be logged in.

But the feature got removed within just months after it's initial release, erasing all existing reactions.

Reasons for video deletions

When a video gets removed for any reason (e.g. manually removed by uploader; uploader closed channel; guideline issues; channel terminated) or not available in a specific region, YouTube usually displays the reason for why the video can not be played.

However, at some point (estimatedly 2013 or 2014), YouTube started purging unavailability reasons for manually deleted videos and videos and channel pages of closed channels, meaning that YouTube shows “This video does not exist.” or “This video is unavailable.”, as if the video never existed in first place.

Since then, reasons for videos that have been permanently erased will only be displayed for a very limited time, after which the video reads as unavailable instead of removed by user or closed channel.

Example:

• The video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtdDvkI8NUA once existed, but was deleted.
• The video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABCDEF12345 never existed in first place.

YouTube does not differentiate between these videos after the deletion reason gets purged.

Since 2017, a private video will also indicate as “not available” (same as a video that never existed in first place) immediately after privated, while playlists that contain the unavailable videos still indicate the distinction between private and deleted videos. Since late 2019 or early 2020, private videos are indicated as such again.

YouTu.be image hoster

YouTu.be used to be an image hoster back in 2006. In late 2015, they created a robots.txt file that disallows all crawlers (or “User-agent: * Disallow:/”).

Bulletins

YouTube used to have a feature called “Bulletins” in it's earlier years, likely introduced in 2006.

After co-existing with “Channel Comments” that would later become “Discussions”, that feature got removed at some point, erasing all existing Bulletin posts.

It allows users, momentarily exclusively with channels that have over 10000 subscribers, to publish vertical videos, usually filmed from their mobile devices, and optionally edited with e.g. text, using their basic editing features.

Volatility

“Story” videos automatically get deleted in 7 days (= 1 week) after being posted.

Accessibility

“Stories” can be accessed from the “Stories” tab on YouTube channels when viewed in the mobile application.

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Trivia

• All ytimg servers (where YouTube saved images, stylesheets and the .swf file of the flash-based YouTube video player) used to be intoxicated by robots.txt (“user-agent:* disallow:/ noindex:/”). When browsing YouTube layouts starting circa 2008 using the Wayback Machine, the website could only be viewed as black text on white background, just with different sizes (e.g. <h1> video title), due to the missing images and stylesheet information. Only information visible in the HTML source code of the page itself could be rendered. On February 29th of 2012, the robots.txt file vanished off the ytimg servers, lifting the restrictions and making YouTube more properly browse-able through the Wayback Machine.
• Yahoo and Bing Video search results might contain titles, upload dates and thumbnails of unavailable YouTube videos (i.e. after privated, deleted or channel terminated).
  • Yahoo URL format: https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?hspart=ddc&p=search query
  • Bing URL format: http://www.bing.com/videos/search?FORM=HDRSC3&q=search query

Additional feature removals

Additional, lesser noteable removed features and changes:

• Since August 2018, one can only load 10 comment replies at a time, using “Show more comments”, rather than loading all comment replies at once.
• Snake game easter egg (only existed in flash-based video player with dotted loading animation icon)
• Debug information shows exact volume level several digits behind decimal (circa 2010). (Trivial)
• Bulletin feature (appears to have been removed around 2007, but re-appeared in 2010)
• According to a lost YouTube comment, there was once the ability to see the playback position where users rated a video in YouTube analytics.
• Time markers and magnified seek bar upon hovering for videos longer than 90 minutes
  • Replaced with seek bar that can be dragged up to scrub (finer seeking).

Mobile application features

• Infinite search history (now: only 50 items)
• (Minor) Case-sensitive search history.
• Ability to enter a search without requiring internet connection (behavioural change)
  • Ability to open a video prior to established internet connection, so that playback can start sooner as soon as the connection has been established. (behavioural change)
• Tapping on search bar (which opens search history) did not unload the loaded search results or channel/playlist page.
• Full numbers (now, many places such as subscriber counts and like/dislike counts only show up as abbreviated number, e.g. “1K” “1M” or “1B”)

Predicted feature removals

This section documents possible future removals of existing features.

• Automated transcribing and advanced caption tools
  • Possibly to be removed or turned into a feature for premium users only.
• Comment counter — Shows number of comments posted on a video.

Returned features

Features that were once removed, but have returned.

• Ability to see whether a video is private or erased entirely (removed circa 2017 or 2018, returned August 2019)
  • A video in a playlist has always shown the distinction.
• QuickList (Removed in early 2010s, returned in late 2019) - Temporary, JavaScript-powered watch queue.
• YouTube XL - YouTube website optimized for television, formerly located at XL.YouTube.com.

Also see

• List of features removed from Android

Related navigation boxes: Electronics • Mobile phones • Data storage • User experience and user interfaces

External links

• General forum for discussing removed features.
• https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/196342/youtube-update-enforcement-bypass-reasons-why-the-old-youtube-app-is-superior
• https://twitter.com/hashtag/FeaturesYouTubeRemoved

• https://twitter.com/ActiVideo2019/status/1084811606054395904 (thread)

References

This article "List of features removed from YouTube" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:List of features removed from YouTube. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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