YouTube is undoubtedly one ofthe most feature-packed video streaming servicesout there, with things liketime-specific sharable links and keyboard shortcuts. But its biggest sore point remains the number of useful features that Google keeps dropping. Last year, YouTube got rid ofplayback speed controls from Android TValong with the handy option to sort a channel’s videos by oldest. But now it looks like the latter is at least making a comeback after all.
Both the YouTube website and the apphave for years supported sorting videosinside a channel. It is set to the latest videos by default, but you can sort them by their view count as well to glance at the most popular content from a channel. YouTube also used to have a third option that lets you see the oldest videos from a channel without having to scroll endlessly to reach the bottom of the list.
YouTubecalled the removal of the option a bugfor the longest time, but it finallyconfirmed in a creator event in Octoberthat it had deprecated the sorting method. The only option users were left with was to do those tiresome manual scrolls, which aren’t even possible on YouTube’s phone app as it stops loading new content after a few scrolls.
But surprisingly,a few Reddit usershave started seeing the option to sort a channel’s videos by oldest on their YouTube app. As shown in the screenshots above, there is a new “Oldest” chip along with the other two sorting options, and it works as expected.
It even showed up for us on the YouTube app version 18.23.35, but installing this app version wouldn’t guarantee that you will start seeing the button. In fact, some users have noticed that the oldest sorting buttonis currently limited to certain channelsand isn’t available on the web, too.
YouTube hasn’t yet confirmed if this is merely a limited test or a slow server-side rollout. While we hope it’s the latter since it’s such a handy tool, we wouldn’t hold our breath until the feature is rolled out more widely.
