Make YouTube's Recently Uploaded Usable Again

YouTube’s Category chips suck

In the before times YouTube used to have Netflix style categories for videos, when they switched to Polymer they made a design choice to change these neatly divided categories into tabs (or chips as they call them) where above the videos you have all the categories listed out from “All” to “Recently Uploaded”, “Watched” and “New to you”. In between those categories are all the things the all mighty algorithm has decided you like.

One of my favorite categories is “Recently Uploaded” because it is a mix of videos from channels I subscribe to as well as videos similar to those I subscribe to and they are not usually more than a couple days old. I watch a lot of gaming videos which are time sensitive due to patches that change the “meta” (play style and mechanics) so watching a video from 6 years ago isn’t what I usually want. It’s not just games though, I have a lot of channels on bleeding edge tech and also programming channels which I want to stay up to date on.

For this reason it was very annoying to me that YouTube tucked this chip all the way at the back of the line, to the point I needed to scroll the chips to find it. They also have a styling bug that sometimes the scrolling doesn’t show last chip all the way. It got so annoying I found workaround like disabling the polymer view to get the old style. But, the thing is, other than the chips I really liked the new “infinite” vertical scroll and larger, more condensed, thumbnails.

I finally had enough and wrote a user script to solve my problem. A user script is kind of like a browser extension except it is somewhat more limited in scope and functionality and it doesn’t require publishing it to the Chrome/Firefox store, it can be shared, copied and edited easily. I did publish it to Greasy Fork and can be found here: Reposition YouTube Recently Uploaded Chip. I’ve also published it as a gist on Github.