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Comment by hysan | Hacker News Reader

I would posit that google has determined that it’s more profitable to keep viewers on YouTube via controlling the viewing experience vs whatever additional ad revenue they’d gain by making videos more easily indexable. I’m basing this hypothesis on YouTube’s consistent trend of removing features related to controlling your own viewing experience. For example, removing subscription collections.

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Actually, letting people search video text would enable less watching and that is probably the reason they aren't interested in it.

Exactly! Google is in the attention business, the more you stay the more they make

Best case for Google is you click through and watch 10 videos without ever finding what you're after, so you try again the next day.

I get it now. It's just like some grocery stores used to operate. They purposely moved stuff around so people have to wander in order to find things. Or they put common items far away so people have to interact with other stuff. Theory is that it increases sales.

Watch 10 videos and then fall down a rabbit hole and forget what you were even there to look for - the even more best case!

So they say, attention is all you need.

> Google is in the attention business

This is probably the best description of their business model.

attention abuse would be a better one, imo.

How would making videos more indexible move people off of YouTube? Once you're there, you'd stay there, with all the current recommender algorithms still in effect; all the external indexability would do is give Google (and Bing, and everyone else) more reasons to lead you into that labyrinth.

The same way they did a few weeks ago, when they changed the interface to only show you the options "Latest" and "Popular" for a channel, instead of the drop down box that was present before. You could get a list of most recent or older videos.

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...

I don’t understand, can you explain more?

I mean this:

"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...

We seem to be locked into an ever more blatant "cycle of addiction". As with (other) drugs, the addict and the dealer are something like "two sides of the same coin".

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

Sounds like you might enjoy reading Doctorow's essay on "enshittification".

"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

I can imagine that training people to snipe the exact content they want based on external search could reduced minutes watched.

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.

If you get information by reading text on your terminal you didn't see the ads - I think the thinking stops there.

Whenever I notice an "obvious" potential feature that could improve user experience in a Google product (there are MANY), I automatically assume it's because of one of two things:

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.

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.

I despise YouTube purely for inflicting mandatory Shorts on the user.

This extension does a good job of removing them from your subscription feed. If you like me, guard your feed since you don't want to watch random stuff from the home page this is the only way to not totally clutter the feed with random shorts thumbnails. The very fact you can not disable shorts from your feed is outrageous, but obviously not surprising.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-shorts-blo...

I’ve noticed a similar problem with Tumblr’s app. Last year they added a “live” feature, apparently trying to carve out some minor slice of egirl pie, and proceeded to put it all over the UIs. Also popups asking you to pay money. Needless to say UX has dramatically devolved on their app.

Tik tok effect

I’m willing to bet that the features you’ve seen removed are taken out because their utilization is low, and there’s some associated maintenance cost. I’d also like to know what other features were removed. I had never heard of subscription collections, for example, and a search returned [this video](https://youtu.be/qGSHPhR8k8g) (I wish markdown worked on here) that says collections were a test feature (I’m guessing it didn’t do well enough to make it to prod).

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