That's most limiting factor for such an hobby weekend side project of one lonely developer which we all know YouTube is.
I understand what you're saying but based on what we've heard from ex-Googlers about user interface/experience design within the company, that people who've not got the first idea about good design are thrust into the role of designing user interfaces and user-facing features, I think it's a minor miracle we have what we have already — and what we have isn't great.
Plus, look at the variety of users and devices on YouTube. From those who watch 5K video on 27" high-resolution monitors backed by grunty graphics and powerful processors, to cheap $29 Android phones that barely keep the battery from draining to zero within a couple of minutes just showing a 360p video, and all the devices in between.
Between Google's issues with user interface/experience design on a company level and the fact that YouTube needs to cater to so many different kinds of people and devices, there's clearly more than meets the eye when it comes to the hidden scale of YouTube.
Since Google basically prints money, I don't think money could be the issue. Since Google is overflowing with engineers, I don't think throwing more engineers at the problem would help. Rather, I think that removing annotations is a good sign that Google is trying to do something smarter: manage the scale of YouTube.
The removal of just one feature, like annotations, lifts a heavy burden from the main site team, the mobile site team, the mobile apps teams, and everything else. It brings platform consistency, meaning some actually new and innovative features can finally get some of that precious engineering time, rather than the inelegance of supporting what was always a janky feature that could only become jankier as devices became more diversified.
That's why Google Reader is gone, I suppose. Google just couldn't save it, no matter how much money and engineers' time was spend on it. And we all know how much exactly it were.
> Rather, I think that removing annotations is a good sign that Google is trying to do something smarter: manage the scale of YouTube.
Consistently removing the features which is not popular among majority of users is not smart at all. That's the dumbest way to manage the scale actually.
This means streamlining platforms and trimming excess/old code.
I've seen 'code debt' and 'technical debt' mentioned more than a few times in this thread and I think these are why Google is so aggressive about dropping support for things. They don't have time, and the engineers don't want to be forced into someone else's pet project (face it, that's where a lot of these platforms and features come from).
So they cut their losses and rise.
From the other thread, pretty usual recently
> I considered working at Google last year after a recruiter reached out to me, but their decision to backtrack on their promise in China changed my mind
Maybe it's not about rising anymore.
To borrow a famous quote, Google is like an ship with a hole in the bottom, leaking water, and they seem to be trying to get the ship pointed in the right direction.
Still, whilst the ship's not yet overrun, I can't blame the individual teams for trying to throw as much water back overboard as they can muster.
YouTube is already pretty fragmented as it is, with each device having a different experience. Since viewing is increasingly a mobile thing, and the mobile site sucks, I would be more than pleased to see some consistency coming across their platform.