I assume it's more that kids are far more tolerant of ads and they'll relentlessly watch youtube all day regardless of the ads.

I do wonder about this quite often nowadays - is it because they're kids or because particular apps provide continuous stream of content that doesn't distinguish between ads and the content. Or is it both of these things?

Youngest generation will be the perfect customers in the nearest future, it seems. That kind about which corporations dream about now; they won't complain about privacy or ads because they're being programmed right now to consume whatever they see. And that scares me tbh.

That's incredibly illogical. If you intentionally make something unbearable, you end up with X/Twitter. Google might be stupid, but they aren't Musk.

There are different kinds of unbearable.

If Musk had simply cranked up the ads to increase revenue, it would have worked / probably wouldn't have hurt the platform like all his other changes. The problem at Twitter (from a short term profit perspective) is that his changes - or rather, what he wanted to do - were not all so simple.

Where else are you going to find videos to watch? Vimeo? Bing? YouTube has a dominant market position And wants you to pay for it. Their reasoning could be that if they give you enough ads that make it unbearable, you will pay just to get rid of the ads and wants you to pay for it. Their reasoning could be that if they give you enough ads that make it unbearable, you will pay just to get rid of the ads.

From a business perspective, it's completely logical.

Have you ever tried to use the video controls on YouTube in Safari for iOS / iPadOS? Or manage a GSuite (or whatever it's called this week) account? I'd say Google are both malicious in intent, and incredibly bad at design.

No, it’s really not. Maybe you’re thinking of Spotify whose goal is to get everyone to subscribe to premium, but YouTube’s cares much more about completely cornering their market and has no problem sustaining itself with ads. Why would they purposefully design their app to annoy the vast majority of users?