YouTube not removing dates, view counts from homepage

YouTube has no current plans to remove view counts or publication dates under videos displayed on the app's home page. The company's official X (Formerly Twitter) account confirmed this after reports that such a change was being considered.

It first appeared that some users might be seeing this change according to a screenshot posted to Twitter, but YouTube stepped in to set the record straight.

YouTube responded that certain browser extensions may have this effect for some users, and that disabling them might work to fix the problem. But it is not an update the app is testing, nor does it appear to have plans to do so in the future.

View counts and publish dates on the home page have become an essential part of driving traffic to content creators' videos -- especially ever since algorithms have largely determined what appears on any user's home YouTube screen. Not only is it based on what you've watched before or recently, but what's getting a lot of engagement at the moment.

And you likely already know, as an internet user, that you are much more likely to click on something if it was uploaded both recently and has a lot of traffic. Seeing those numbers matters, and YouTube likely knows this. Removing that information from the home page would likely hurt watch time across the platform, and not just creators, but YouTube as a whole, would suffer because of it.

So you probably don't need to worry about your homepage changing, at least not like this. YouTube will always introduce new updates here and there, but they will also likely announce those updates before they go into effect for users across the board. Their official accounts and pages will always be the best source of information about what's coming up next in the updates queue, but we'll do our best to report on them as they happen as well.