> YouTube makes it pretty clear you are publishing your video to the public when you upload the file

After working in tech for long enough, you realize that no one reads anything, even if its absolutely clear in the UI. And they will blame you for it.

Yes, indeed! : Myth #1: People read on the web https://uxmyths.com/post/647473628/myth-people-read-on-the-w...

I always have a hard time explaining to people carefully writing pagewalls that throwing out 90% of it would actually be more effective...

As well they should, because (the hypothetical) you built and deployed something that relied for safety on users doing something you knew they wouldn't do.

Non-rhetorical question: how would you build this feature? What if the user lies about their age to avoid COPPA? What if the user uploaded 100 videos in the past, but didn't want to make this video public? Should we bug them every single time to verify if they wanted to make the video public? How many times should we bug them about it?

So in your world, we should just never give users nice things because we know they're stupid?

No, you make the default safe and make the "dangerous" option hidden behind an advanced menu, so at the very least you can be certain the user can read and follow directions. Like a two-stage weapon switch.

What if not reading those things is smart as almost all of it is crap? Then you are banking on them being reasonable but stats still in your odds.

The tools you give them should come preconfigured to stop them hurting themselves, because you already know they will if you don't. It's not hard to go from that knowledge to questioning what it means if the defaults are harmful.

This. Public videos should t be default. By I assume, this change would bring YouTube a lot less eye balls and hence revenue.

At the end it boils down to the truth that a Corporation is a hive mind, an intelligent machine ruthlessly optimizing for stock price and profits at the expense of sometimes human values.

The whole point of YouTube for m it's inception was to share videos with the internet. This isn't some shady hivemind hatching an evil scheme.

Things are not clear just because they have been spelled out in text. I don’t think this has anything to do with tech, except that tech tends to be full of abstract concepts that are difficult to understand.

It's strange to assume that people think youtube is not a video sharing service.

What people see and viscerally understand is that they 1) upload a video and 2) get a link that they can share with others. Up to this point, it's the same as e.g. Dropbox.

What's not immediately clear is that the video (and channel) now shows up in search results. You won't be aware of that unless you either have a clear mental model of the platform, or try to search for the video title yourself (which implies a certain sort of mental model to be present already).

Upon opening YouTube the visitor is faced with videos published by others. Upon uploading there's one input dropdown right in front and center of the user, by default saying Public.

Sure, people only skim and headline-read articles, but because most articles are shit. That doesn't mean people don't ponder at least a bit when faced with a YT upload page. (And the upload through mobile app is probably more common for non-pro [first time, casual, accidental(!?)] youtubers, there the privacy: public field is pretty visible, legible and explicit.

They can mean anything in people's mind, public is that yeah anyone I send the link can see it, but that's not exactly YT's fault, that people don't make the connection, and somehow live in a fantasy world.

> no one reads anything [...] they will blame you for it.

And I cannot blame them too much. People are constantly bombarded with misleading messages (e.g. ads), clickbait stuff, terrible UIs, indecipherable contracts, countless pop-up notification and warnings, opt-out and other "dark patterns".

(disclaimer: personally, I read contracts and agreements and it's often pointless and frustrating)

Part of the problem is the publishers. They know what they are uploading and want it to be public. You are taking the analogy too far.

I don't think you can safely assert that people know that they "want it to be public". The last decade or so has demonstrated pretty adequately that people's brains have a lot of trouble with what "public-to-the-internet" means.

Sharing information with broad public is the whole point of social networks. People might not want all consequences, but they want some consequences.

No, the point of most social networks to most people is sharing information with people close to you. To witness, Facebook being more popular than Twitter.

I know. I just think it’s somrthing YouTube should implement, because people uploading videos of their family probably don’t intend on complete strangers searching for them and thus probably don’t worry about making them public.

> you are publishing your video to the public when you upload the file

Due to various cognitive biases most people fail to realize just how big and far reaching that public is.

To share an example from my own experience a few years ago. I wrote a blogpost. I love writing blogs and sharing them with The Public. That's why I write it.

In one of them I used an Xkcd comic. My entire audience, anyone I could ever imagine reading it, knows XKCD and loved it.

But then that blog got 100,000 views. Then 200,000. Then it spiraled. Suddenly I was flamed from all sides, called a disgusting human being and all sorts of things. Why? Because I didn't correctly attribute that XKCD comic.

"Yay my friends and their friends and liek 1000 people saw my thing" is a completely different "public" than when THE public sees your thing. Most people imagine the former when they think "Oh I'm uploading this and it's going to be public"

but in this example would you blame wordpress or whatever is hosting your blog?