What would YouTube look like without view counts or upload dates? – Tubefilter

Instagram just said it drops the playback quality of older videos, which we’re guessing won’t exactly encourage people to seek out older content. But YouTube may be doing the exact opposite, because its appears to be running a test where it hides videos’ view counts and upload dates on the homepage.

First spotted by vidIQ, the potential test changes things so only a video’s thumbnail, title, channel name, and length appear. Users can’t tell how many views it has or when it was uploaded unless they click through to its dedicated page.

We say “potential” test because YouTube Creator Liaison Rene Ritchie retweeted a post about the homepage change, saying he and his team are “looking into it and we’ll come back with more info soon!”

🚨BREAKING🚨

YouTube is testing a homepage without view counts and dates. pic.twitter.com/UQEobxSVaR

— vidIQ (@vidIQ) October 28, 2024

YouTube typically admits when it’s testing features, or even lists those experiments on its site, promoting access to them as a perk of its $14/month Premium subscription, so it’s a little strange that Ritchie said this is a subject for investigation. Regardless of whether it’s a test or an error, though, users are responding to vidIQ’s tweet as though this change could become the default across YouTube–and they have some strong opinions.

Respondents include tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, who accused YouTube of chasing the signature, clean look of certain rival streaming services.

“Stop chasing Netflix and just be YouTube,” he said.

If YouTube rolled this out, it wouldn’t be the first time the platform has removed some video stats. It hid videos’ public dislike counts in 2021, and lets creators individually choose if they want to hide their videos’ like counts and their channels’ subscriber counts. But creators can’t hide view counts, and this change would be the first time YouTube hid public view counts on any part of the site.

Instagram has also experimented with stat-hiding, and does let creators hide their view counts, although we suspect creators who want to entice brand deals wouldn’t want to hide their key performance metric on any platform.

Stop chasing Netflix and just be YouTube

— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) October 28, 2024

As for what that revamped homepage could do for YouTube, we’re wondering if the platform wants to try serving up more older, deep-cut content, or if it wants viewers to be more willing to take chances on videos with smaller view counts. Viewers typically use view count as a metric for whether a video is worth their time or not–and that could hamstring newer videos, or videos from smaller niches. Removing view counts puts all homepage videos on equal ground, with the only upfront quality differentiators being their titles and thumbnails.

YouTube currently serves up older content on the homepage, usually from a user’s frequently watched channels and/or niches–but again, removing the exact upload date could make users more likely to click on videos based solely on their subjects.

Will this become a thing? We don’t know. We’ll be keeping an eye on Ritchie’s Twitter account to see if his team provides any updates. In the meantime, though, it’s worth considering whether taking a similar approach to content viewership, where you as a viewer purposefully glaze over a video’s view count and upload date, could expose you to new content and new creators.