They are about keeping you engaged and keep suggesting to users what they think will keep you engaged with the platform. It's an entertainment platform not a library...
"Tell HN: YouTube's web UI just got even worse" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371268
They used to have a drop down box, for oldest or most recent, when you clicked on the tab Videos for a YouTube channel. Now you will notice, it has now a "Latest" and "Popular", something that of course the algorithm will decide upon...
Briefly, new tech / markets / apps ... i.e., 'innovation' ... often 'creates' tremendous 'value'*. Money (aka capital) rushes in - there's a boom, everyone's excited: consumers are getting new products, services, conveniences, improved prices; engineers, technologists, scientists, machinists, etc. are excited - building the new tech, exploring capabilities, using it to advance research, improving precision / throughout / etc. Dopamine hits all around, vibrant 'ecosystem', everything's lively, feelings of 'changing the world', etc.
But, then, the space reaches a comparative plateau. The low-hanging fruit is exhausted. The lucky/skilled'VCs' have made their 50x+ returns (that far more than cover the various failed ventures), the technologist innovators are moving into some other space, etc.
What's left are basically the 'landlords' and their crew. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Those are fine 'occupations' with essential (enough) functions etc. The problem is, there are pressures, with our current culture, towards unlimited growth. There's this need ... this addiction to / normalization of 'neverending exponential curves'. So, you get rent-seeking, forms of 'maximum tolerable extraction' - a sort of exploitative feudalism... Locking up of all the resources now developed in the hands of a comparative few.
There's something of a spectrum, when it comes to economic sectors / businesses, as to how naturally monopolization forms. In general, unchecked, just about any sector / business area can fairly easily trend towards one 'company' controlling everything ... there's more that could be written here, but I'm out of time right now ... [this part should probably be edited / made into a more suitable transition]
Ultimately, every time a given market reaches a certain degree of concentration, the businesses left, particularly these days, increasingly act like "Polyergus" ants, or possibly Cuckoos, or other parasites of various types - organisms that use some degree of parasitic strategies. They 'farm' the rest of us for ever-increasing amounts of 'value'. But, not like responsible farmers, more like the human species as described by A. Smith in The Matrix - "Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area."
That pattern is woven throughout this way overly long comment (that also desperately needs editing) ... sadly, gotta run now.
* Some of these words / phrases are so clichéd / co-opted, it's hard not to put quotes of some type around them - partly calling attention to that aspect, partly calling attention to more fundamental meaning
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."
-- Corey Doctorow, https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
If I was searching for how to replace part X in appliance Y or car Z, better search might get me the answer with less watch time. That’s good for me, but might hurt YT.
This is probably the best description of their business model.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-shorts-blo...
This is exactly it. It's the same business logic that is employed in the regular Google Search.
Google doesn't make money from giving you correct search results. It makes money by keeping you searching for the results you want.
a. Doing it won't get anybody a promo.
b. They've considered it and determined that it will lose revenue to a degree that is not justified by the usability improvement.
This is one of the pitfalls of having an ad-based product instead of a fee-based product. User experience is just no longer the top priority.