Why are sites forcing us to deal with features we explicitly don’t want? Take YouTube Shorts for instance. I’ve made it clear I hate these things, but they keep popping up on my homepage every other week. Every time, I have to click the “Temporarily Hide” button like a damn whiner.
I can just picture the internal YouTube meetings:
Manager: “We’re not getting enough engagement on Shorts.”
Developer: “Maybe our audience doesn’t like them?”
Manager: “I’ve got an idea! Let’s force Shorts onto everyone’s homepage for a week or two each time!”
Then, later, they celebrate like they’ve invented the internet.
Is this really how it’s supposed to work? Why else are companies shoving features down our throats we clearly don’t want? Is there no better way than to just keep throwing stuff at us and hoping we’ll stick around long enough to click “Hide This Annoying Feature” again?
🤔 What’s the deal with this endless pushing of features we hate? Are they just ignoring user feedback entirely, or is there some secret strategy I’m not seeing?
You’re assuming that these approaches don’t work. As someone who has worked on shitty growth engineering projects for many years, I can tell you they do work very, very well.
I hear people say the same about ads: “why show ads when everyone hates them!”. They fucking work. Big biz doesn’t care about love or hate, it cares about profits. These methods turn profits.
It’s the power of defaults.
1 person will hate the change but 100 others will be affected by the default and not care. The net result is more as revenue even if the first user cancels their account.
Bingo. Everyone thinks it’s about retention but it’s not. Lifetime value of a user is a much more complicated than it was ten years ago when Silicon Valley was joking about DAU and such.
If you ever want to fuck your LTV for a company, just phone their customer services a few time and make sure you waste as much time as possible. Your value as a user will drop significantly as you plummet into negative value due to the high cost of human-led support
Yep. “We want more people to watch Shorts” -> A/B test cramming more into the home screen -> “More people watched Shorts with X change, roll it out to everyone” -> “What’s the next idea to get more people to watch Shorts?”
Someone gets the idea that more views on Shorts is what they need and start optimizing for it. On and on until another metric becomes more important and they optimize for that.Well I remember seeing a study that ads actually have a pretty bad return on money on average, so the problem is that selling ads is quite profitable. Platforms drown us in ads because it makes them money, and it doesn’t matter if the ads themselves are effective or not.
I’d have to see the study, but most of what I’ve seen from articles in the same vein is that they have a very low conversion rate… But they’re still worth it.
A single conversion’s LTV can offset the cost of an ad by many thousands or tens of thousands of unconverted impressions. Then you factor in referral campaigns, social share incentives, etc. you get converted users that convert other users, which also factors into the overall balance of your campaign and … In short you can see why targeted ads are so popular.
Do you remember the push to get everyone to sign up to YouTube with their real names and abandon pseudonyms when Google Plus was a thing?
They pulled the same trick there too. They’d pop up a box that said something like “Do you want to migrate your account to your real name now?” and if you said no, they said “OK, we’ll ask again later.”, which was inevitably in a couple of days.
No option to say “never ask me again” because that would be against what they wanted. I changed my then-main account to a name-like pseudonym just to get them to stop asking. Thankfully their algorithms that checked whether a name might be legit or not didn’t catch on that it wasn’t real.
As for why they do this, innovation for innovation’s sake is to prove they’re doing something and so the stakeholders think that value is being created and don’t pull their investments. Also, the more you watch, the better the profile about you is that they can then sell to advertisers, especially if your account’s under a real name.
If it was legal to install tracking devices in people’s behinds, Google would be a top manufacturer of them.
In a nutshell…
They’re not here for your benefit, they’re here for their own profit.
If they could make money with flashing lights they would, even if they had to deal with lawsuits from people who had seizures from it.
They don’t cate what you like. They don’t care what you want. You are nothing more than a commodity they can sell.
Exactly this.
You’re not the customer. Google is an advertising company, their customers are people who buy ads.
People who watch shorts watch more videos so there are more slots to put ads in. So, you’re going to watch shorts.
You give them too much credit. They’re not even necessarily there for the company’s profit.
Extra unnecessary features are often added and shoved at you purely because some executive needed a project to spruce up their resume, and for literally no other reason.
The websites are for advertisers and investors now. Were officially human batteries for the capitalist engine
Here’s the thing -they always were. For any free service, the users are the product and the customers are the advertisers. It’s just that for most of the lives of these companies, interest rates were at historic lows and their profit requirements weren’t as high as a result. Businesses are constantly borrowing money and spending it to expand, and interest rates determine how much money they need to make to make those investments worthwhile. If you get a loan to start a business at 3% interest, you can afford to make less money on that business than if your loan was at 7%. As interest rates have gone up, so have the pressures for making more money on investments.
Lemmy isn’t! It’s like an oasis of sanity in an ocean of trash!
Give it time.
TBH, federation is a huge part of this. If any given instance starts to put in ads (or whatever) just swap instances.
You might be surprised how many people do watch YouTube shorts. They force then on you because they make a lot of money off them.
I don’t care if people like them. I DO care that seemingly YouTube has very clear data regarding me that I do not like them (I have dismissed them countless times) and chooses to ignore this and present them over and over again. It’s especially funny because in all other areas they brag about how much they personalize the experience for you.
YouTube doesn’t care if you don’t care. The more they show them to you the more likely they are to finally get you to watch them and they can make money off you. It’s not like there’s many alternatives to YouTube.
I’m one! Honestly don’t get the hate. There was a comment the other day that made me think the haters are phone users. Shorts work fine on a 47" TV, for me. Hate that you can’t turn the giant captions off on many videos, but the people I follow usually don’t do that.
For me, shorts are a thing I can scroll past once and be done. Is it painful on a phone for some reason?
I wouldn’t say I hate other people for watching them, but for me it’s a personal think in that I have ADHD and shorts hack my brain. I just avoid them. But each ti their own.
Dear Microsoft - Stop trying to make Copilot happen!
I like Copilot as an auto-complete feature. Its a total waste of energy in every other regard, though.
Copilot web is honestly better than Google these days.
Youtube shorts are like crack. Thats why they want everyone on it.
Take YouTube Shorts for instance. I’ve made it clear I hate these things, but they keep popping up on my homepage every other week.
🤔 What’s the deal with this endless pushing of features we hate? Are they just ignoring user feedback entirely, or is there some secret strategy I’m not seeing?
TikTok is insanely popular among the younger generations, so YouTube, also being a video hosting site, wanted to jump on that bandwagon and leech some of the revenue from that style of video. So they came up with YouTube Shorts, to mimic the popular short-form upright video style.
The problem is, YouTube is NOT TikTok. Most of their user base doesn’t go to YouTube for short-form videos. So getting their audience to engage with YouTube Shorts requires them to shove it in our faces until we just get used to it.
That’s the strategy; beat us with it until we give in. They know we’re not going to go away. People aren’t organized enough to properly protest against features in a way that will scare a company into fixing it. So they’re going to keep harassing us until we’re so used to seeing it, we just don’t care anymore. Or until their content attracts the TikTok generation and successfully feeds a whole new category of revenue for the company. That’s the enshittification process for you; as long as it’s profitable, it’s going to stay.
I forget how I did it, but I blocked YouTube Shorts from showing up in my feed. I use Firefox with uBlock Origin and that removes all ads on YouTube. I even blocked the YouTube app on my phone and redirected all YouTube links to Firefox.
I used to have another extension that blocked YouTube Shorts, but I don’t see it in my extensions anymore. But they still don’t show, so maybe uBlock Origin is doing it for me?
I also don’t allow YouTube to keep a history of my activity. Which makes my homepage just a blank screen. I’d been fighting them for years, trying to remove all suggested videos from my homepage, and now it’s so simple: I just don’t save my activity and they don’t recommend anything to me.
I have subscriptions that I follow and that’s it; I don’t let them suggest videos for me to watch. I don’t need to feed their algorithms or help them build a better profile on me. I’m very anti-advertisement already, and I do my best to not let companies influence my economic behavior.
There are extensions that make those kinds of thing disappear permantly. Life has been hood since enabling that.
Unhook for YouTube
Youtube without unhooked, UBlock Origin and sponsor block is pure torture. Can’t live without them anymore. Luckily there is revanced on mobile as well, which basically rolls all of them into one app.
My theory is the people making the decisions don’t actually use the products they make and have no idea what it’s like to use them. They hear that another site is using AI, for instance, and decide their own site needs to use AI. But they don’t understand what AI does or why they should/shouldn’t use it, only that they have to have it. Boom, enshittification.
YouTube does this stuff because it’s effective. The only way to avoif is to not play the game as defined by them.
Switch to other means of watching YouTube, like Grayjay, or an envious instance.
i refer firefox extensions as enshittificantion flushing tools, same with some 3rd party apps, some turds are harder to flush, like the eBay layout that shows mostly stuff I don’t need and hides what i need to know for an informed purchase
Thats just the two parts of enshitification. take away things you like and push things you don’t. I still can’t believe how bank sites can be so limited in what you can do but hey heres a useless feature we give so all good.
They are trying to push engagement. But not just any engagement. You might think that they would prefer active engagement, when you search for a thing and watch the entire thing. But you are actually more likely to skip ads when you do that.
What they prefer is more passive engagement, when you just accept the best thing the algorithm pushes. Because then you are not only more likely to passively consume ads, but also be served content that they were paid to promote. Which may not be what you want (or may actively push disinformation and bullshit).
TikTok, Shorts, and all the things like that seem to be specifically engineered to exhaust your ability to request more things and let the algorithm take over what you watch next. That’s their endgame.
Because they’re delusional enough to think if they cater to the audiences of other sites they’ll tempt that audience to scrape off to their site instead of the site that came up with the thing and do it better.
