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Comment by nnf | Hacker News Reader

I would much rather wait a few hundred milliseconds for a video to start during the few times I decide to watch an embedded video than to wait for the full video player to load every single time I visit a page with an embedded video that I'm never going to watch. Similarly, I would much rather have every stoplight I approach be green for me rather than having every light be red but for not very long.

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These things are not optimized for what we prefer but for what leads us to behave in a way that maximizes a particular metric, for youtube it's global watch time.

Global watch time isn’t something non Google website owners care about. Remember, Google benefits from making the web worse.

Do they? They have the biggest browser, an online office suite, a cloud, and a giant ad network. They want to maximize internet use, or they should want to.

Unfortunately no, Google wants to maximize their profit, and they'll enshittify the web in that pursuit until it collapses. They have Android, they don't need the web to exist.

> They have Android, they don't need the web to exist.

If not for apple, I'd agree.

Apple sells expensive solutions to cash-rich consumers (some of whom are also time-poor) who are willing to throw money at a technical problem (setting up a device with an OS) to make it go away (ie, buying an iPhone, iPad, and Mac).

Why would you ever want to advertise to anyone else?

No internet = no Google.

> They have Android, they don't need the web to exist.

In 2023 77% of Google's money came from online advertising. While the percentage is lower than in 2017 when it was 86%, Google is fully dependent on the web.

Google makes the web better for itself. Which is not the same as making it better for everyone else. After all, 77% of their revenue comes from online ads.

No users = no clicks = no Google. Their incentive is to strike a balance between profiting off users and driving all the users away. I'm not commenting on whether they're getting it right.

The issue is them getting it right is finding a balance point which is maximizing their profits at the expense of the general public. They are willing to make a Web Browser and Android to limit how much people can avoid being tracked etc.

How is it at the expense of the public?

We get a free search engine, map, office suite, email, the best browser, and video platform.

And while some here will say it’s enshittified beyond hope, it’s just not. Their products are great, I use them every day, and every now and then I click on an ad for something I like.

If you clicked on an ad ever you're a different sort.

> How is it at the expense of the public?

"According to the 160-page report, the employees found evidence that Mountain View was demoting its competitors and placing its own services on top of search results lists, even if they weren't as helpful." https://www.engadget.com/2015-03-20-ftc-report-google-search...

Then there's search results which are mostly ads and sponsored listings, not actual search results, and that's deliberate: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

And search results from content farms are prioritized at the expense of actual results: https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/02/google-promotes-sketchy-pr...

Ands a decade of AMP hurt the web, and publishers, and sites, and... https://wptavern.com/amp-has-irreparably-damaged-publishers-...

Also, ads. I guess the shorter the time is between clicking the play button and the ad starting, the more people will have "seen" more of the ad before deciding that the video isn't worth watching the ad.

How will Google collect data about every page load then?

Did you even try the example? Obviously not. It's closer to 4 seconds difference, PLENTY of time for me and a lot of people to click away.

It doesn't help a discussion to ignore the topic at hand, create a straw man just to easily vanquish him. Who are you even talking to here, just yourself?

Sounds like a bug that could most likely be fixed. I don't see any noticeable difference, maybe one or more spins of the throbber, practically instant on all versions.

What could possibly youtube be preloading in that 1.2MB that could genuinely and legitimately speed up video play by 4 seconds, and that can't be cached? It just stretches credulity.

Caching on the web has gotten worse/more difficult recently since browsers (including Chrome and Edge) have started to partition the cache by top level site. This was necessary to keep trackers from using the cache status of a resource for tracking users, but had the side effect of making common resources much less likely to be cached.

Which is to say that if it's the first time you load a resource on a page, it most likely is not in cache. Sorry for inconvenience.

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