• YouTube is experimenting with hiding view count and upload data on the home page.

• Speculations behind the reason include a cleaner user interface that encourages interest in non-viral content.

• Users are divided on the potential changes, expressing a range of mostly positive reactions.

Everyone loves a good UI tweak, right?

YouTube’s latest test involves hiding both views and load data when the home page is first loaded (via Dexerto). The test isn’t widespread at the moment, though early user reactions range from “I don’t think this will help” to “The degradation of the century.” Of course, there’s no word on the reasoning behind the potential change, but speculation includes that much looking for a cleaner user interfaceand an attempt to get viewers to click on content that is not yet viral.

YouTube is on a wave of interface changes

Experiments are where they start, for better or for worse

The newly discovered trial balloon comes after a busy month at Google’s streaming machine. Some, like updated app miniplayergathered (rightly) praise, while button Skip ads hidden we’ve seen a friendly back-and-forth between Android Police and Google, with the latter assuring us that the button isn’t hidden, it’s just behind something else so that it doesn’t distract you from ads. And that’s to say nothing of the potentially manipulative YouTube shorts (or it’s YouTube Pants?) Change the location of the dislike/save button or adding busy hyperlinks to comments.

Playful quips aside, it’s not hard to imagine that removing the view count helps expand people’s options, as it’s all too easy to go to the most popular videos the moment the homepage loads. Hiding upload data makes a little less sense, as YouTube’s most dedicated and prolific viewers typically live for the latest videos.

On the other hand, everyone misses things sometimes. We might be convinced that reducing page load data will help users engage with content that might not otherwise most recent but still relevant on a given day. This of course depends on YouTube not tweaking the algorithm to push videos way past their peak.

As you can imagine, there is no word on the reason behind the test or how close it is to the reality of the general public. If user backlash is anything to go by, YouTube would do well to avoid implementing it permanently. While some social media users understood the number of views to get the axe, and others didn’t mind upload data disappearing, extremely few fully supported YouTube’s latest and mysterious test.

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