Because allowing users to control how they use the platform is not viable in today's world.

From an engagement standpoint, the ideal Youtube is one where you can't actually view a list of videos from a specific channel at all. Or search for videos. Or anything really that isn't just watching whatever set of videos the algorithm thinks will maximize your engagement at that time.

The web in general is moving in this direction at a fast pace and the cause for all of this is one thing: phones. That's it. There's an increasingly massive number of people that spend hours a day staring at their phones mindlessly scrolling through tiktok, twitter, etc. to waste their time away when they have nothing better to do, simply consuming whatever content is fed to them, giving absolutely no thought to what they're seeing beyond how much it entertains them in that moment. They don't want to look for specific videos, they don't want to watch a specific channel, they just want to be kept busy by an algorithm. These people are insanely easy to please and will consume for hours at a time, watching plenty of ads. The more people start behaving like this, the more money these platforms make.

Sounds like you are describing the typical HN reader

> The web in general is moving in this direction at a fast pace

True with an exception of Mastodon, PeerTube, Matrix and other distributed networks based on free software.

I read here in HN (whatever that means to you) that Product Owners in the Youtube team have an incentive to improve certain metrics if they ever want to be promoted.

I can imagine a "Watch Later" product owner thinking that if he removes a certain control, he can game the stats and say the feature is seeing more use - securing his promotion.

We see this in public administration all the time, no reason to think private enterprise would be any different.

Tend to agree. Given the actor, I'd bet they want you to search multiple times instead of search once and play with filters. They want you to feel lost so you are forced to search.

Having written that, I realize my YT usage is fairly low on search and I feel myself being forced towards it more and more in recent months/years.

okay, but who owns filters and search and whatnot? nobody? oh, okay.

I wonder how do product owners get assigned to features, in this case. Is it 'musical chairs'? Or at random?

I think it in large part comes down to how the performance assessment process manages PMs at an org like Google. When you're measured at work on your success in 'launching' things, and the evaluation metric comes down to your personal idea authorship and impact generated, there's a profound need to extinguish other paths. An incremental improvement is insufficient, you need to have launched / authored / designed, and provided personal outsized impact. Or as an engineer, played some leading role in making this vision reality. The organization as a whole is constantly on the hunt for these units of work, because the internal metrics encourages this. X launched and replaces Y is a good story to tell the promo committee. Iterating on someone else's design is career suicide.

What do you do if you are in such org and your idea-less manager not only steals all your ideas but also sabotages you to the point where you never get to implement anything yourself?

Are there books on how to play the game?

I dunno, I was there for 10 years and never learned to play. So I quit.

But I never had a hostile manager really. Some coworkers though. Most people were more than decent.

It's just... a hard environment to get used to if you're not inclined to think in a big-organizational way.

> why is there such a mania for reducing sort/finest options

Apple started the minimalist, option hiding, functionality axing, 1984-ish control freak movement. They even got away with selling phones without chargers, making $40 billion on lightning cables sales.

Just blame Apple.

>making $40 billion on lightning cables sales

Someone commented this yesterday but the calculation was crap. What source do you have?

Not everything is a conspiracy to make more money.

I don’t know a single person in my bubble who needs more lightning cables. I have a dozen unused lightning cables already laying around.

I threw away all headphones that came with my iPhones I have ever bought. Most of mini/macro usb cables that come with small electronics go into trash - I do not need more cables!

Was just thinking about how they stopped including headphones. Yeah, I already have enough chargers, headphones and whatever else…

Cynically it’s probably a way to adjust for inflation or whatever by keeping the same price but reducing the amount of stuff you get.

Agreed. At this point extra cables and chargers seems wasteful.

If you need one there are plenty of options, including affordable 3rd party options.

>Not everything is a conspiracy to make more money.

???? That's literally exactly what the point of every business decision is.

There are literally people in the world that can be motivated by something other than money. Some of those people are involved in making business decisions. Imagine that!

Well, no, that's why things like government regulations exist. Some business decisions are to keep within, say, a government target for waste produced.

And government control over these matters is why lobbyists exist

I’ve made business decisions.

It’s not always a conspiracy to make more money.

You are right sometimes it is all out in the open

Agreed. I've never even owned a device that uses Lightning, and I still have a small handful of Lightning cables in various cable drawers.

They still come with a Lightning to USB-C cable. I plug it into my laptop when I need a quick charge and use my existing lower power Lightning charger when I don't.

If it’s no longer an option, the platform can now control that lever with no indication of why. See how Facebook sorts the news feed for you? Oh, it doesn’t? That used to be a user option right up top.

/?sk=h_chr still works maybe

Designers gonna design. Even if it's a stupid mess. I wonder why nobody from Google ever shows up when there is negative feedback.

On that hand: Google never cares about feedback, you can't submit it, if you can it gets ignored.

Not sure if you work with designers. They are not some isolated partially insane org in most tech companies. Decisions like that likely start with a PM, got reviewed, then eng reviewed, then they run an experiment and confirm a hypothesis. None of that involves going to HN to seek feedback. Should they ignore an engagement increases of 3% because someone has stern feedback? That’s just not the reality of tech.

Personally, I hardly use YouTube unless I follow a direct link. I have also disabled all feeds, comments, and suggestions using uBlock Origin.

Not just HN. It's the same with Mozilla. They change stuff just because they feel like it. Then their metrics confirm that the users like it (because they have no choice, or the alternative is cumbersome). Then they pat themselves on the back.

If you expect that people are stupid you will get stupid interfaces.

Personally I don’t think they consider their users stupid. The problem is in the fact that they (teams, PMs, designers, engineers) exist. They have to do something. And these companies keep hiring more and more, staff more and more teams… So you end up with massive orgs that own relatively small surfaces. They all have perf reviews every few months, all have OKRs, all have the natural desire to make changes, build and refactor stuff.

There is just no way to endlessly improve a UI. At some point if you have 3K people work on it it will become a hot mess.

> Should they ignore engagement increases of 3% because someone has stern feedback?

Yes. A sane person or organization must be able to make judgements that include values other than narrow metrics.

If your engagement numbers told you to jump off a bridge, would you?

User feedback is very unreliable. At a certain scale we tend to trust usage data more. (Eg why should they care more about your individual feedback than what seems like an increased user satisfaction with the platform?)

So far I have not encountered a single big tech company that is able to factor in values into decision making at this level. I don’t know whether we even have the tools for that. The incentives (promos, bonuses), company size (internal competition, changing ownership, focus on growth), being public (relentless growth), etc, etc - all of that contributes to this outcome.

Personally I prefer a more thoughtful and caring approach to introducing changes, but knowing how the industry works I don’t see a lot of space for that.

Usually bottom line efficiency (less surface area to maintain, fewer staff needed etc) drives action more than a long tail of user value. Don’t ask about use case value ask about business value. Don’t like it, well I agree but don’t be surprised that companies aren’t a project to deliver value to humanity.

More data = bigger indexes = much much more complexity and cost involved in simple filtering.

They probably ran an A/B test and whomever is in charge at YouTube was thrilled that the B test resulted in people clicking around more. Engagement!

People who's search term history looks like this:

<funny videos> <cats> <harry styles new gf> <steroid cycle> <apple or pc>

My best, charitable guess is that their goal is to make YouTube as easy to use and low-friction as possible for anyone. For all of us here, using technology is second nature, but for a lot of people, especially in 3rd world countries where I imagine YouTube is expanding, adding another button means adding a nontrivial mental overhead for those people

To many, a simpler product is more appealing to a greater number of users. I feel like the idea of "convention over configuration" went to an unnatural extreme in the world of product design - every choice you give a user is an admission that you as the creator of the app don't know what the user wants in this particular case, and you have to let them tell you. For this reason, you may want to stick to what you know.

At the same time, there is some pipe dream that the app can just give the user a 100% ideal experience with virtually no input on the user's part. What this really means is less optionality for users who want it.

Lastly, in any company there are going to be people fighting against complexity to keep things maintainable, scalable etc. The product gets sacrificed for the organization.