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Comment by augustuspolius | Hacker News Reader

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, get 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.

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> 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.

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.

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