you know how when you navigate google drive on the web you have to double-click. like, what, a website, where you double click links to navigate? the internal study that justified that was 12 people; 6 of whom either immediately tried to double click (2 IIRC) or eventually tried to double click (4 IIRC). so, 50% didn't shit a brick when they were presented with a broken website interaction, so it was greenlit.
source: I was at google when this happened and I argued with the pm's when this happened.
Single click to navigate in a file manager is what got us those laughably inefficient interfaces where you have check boxes beside every item and no reasonable way to multi-select.
Maybe those 6 people immediately double clicked because it's the only non-stupid way of doing it?
are you familiar with google drive?
confusingly enough, in the google docs "browser", which is some limited interface to some subset of google drive, a single click is all that's needed to open a doc. but in google drive, opening the same doc takes two clicks.
> and no reasonable way to multi-select.
fwiw, I have absolutely no problem multi-selecting in google photos; another google-joint with single-click to open/interact/etc.
> Maybe those 6 people immediately double clicked
as I said, only two people immediately double clicked.
A radical approach in the similar vein would be to just turn off half your infra and add a ton of latency to YouTube. That would similarly solve the "dislike attacking behavior" altogether at the cost of having your existing users hate your product, with the added bonus of server cost savings.
- Site is usable.
- Site updates to significantly less usable version but keeps the old version around.
- They keep breaking things about the old version.
- "Oh no one uses the old version anymore, let's EOL it to save resources."
> the feature feeling useless, as even if you dislike, you might thing that you click will worth nothing as no one will see it
That was exactly the point. They didn't want the attack mobs seeing the fruits of their labor, making it feel useless, making fewer people mob.
Maybe Youtube can somehow incorporate the dislikes into "Likely to enjoy" score similar to how its set up on Google maps. It's pretty accurate from my experience.
The opening paragraph seems to equate these "dislike attacks" with "creator harassment" but I'm not seeing any data on dislike constituting a form of harassment.
Don't get me wrong, creators suffer a LOT of online harassment. I'm just very unconvinced dislike buttons are a primary tool of harassers.
"We removed the dislike button. This resulted in a reduction in dislikes, people are happier."
They made a specific action less rewarding, so that (obviously) resulted in the action being done less often.
It would happen exactly the same if they did this for the "like" button.
Clearly a flawed conclusion. For the result of their experiment they deduced what they wanted it to say. Because we can easily say that the effect is not "dislike attacking" but other effects:
- shy people more afraid to give their opinion not knowing that others have done the same.
- the feature feeling useless, as even if you dislike, you might thing that you click will worth nothing as no one will see it.
Imagine if you were voting for something but no one will give you the result of the votation.
Also, strangely they did not do the same experiment with the "like" button to see if there was not a "like attack".
So when I see something like that, I'm thinking that they are now in the dominant position where they don't have to care about their users anymore...