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buro9

The thing that bugs me about the way Google retires something is that they do this:

1) Retire a feature

2) Offer a half-arsed work-around

3) Wait an indeterminable period of time

4) Release a new feature that covers the original use-case

That's crap, as users are stuck at #2 for ages and some of them migrate away to use other tools that cover this use-case. All this method achieves is to annoy every user that used the feature (even if they seldom used it).

Surely it would be better to:

1) Release a new feature that covers the original use-case

2) Wait a declared period of time (short or long)

3) Retire a feature

Which means people can immediately start using the new way. And if the new feature fully covers the use-case of the old one, then #2 could be skipped altogether.

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> 1) Retire a feature

> 2) Offer a half-arsed work-around

Oh man, so many times.

They recently did the same thing to /my_subscriptions, which was the only proper way to keep up with a lot of subscriptions. It was a grid view where watched videos would disappear. The only option now is a "feed" view where it's a long list and watched videos are just grayed out.

It has produced quite a lot of anger[0] and two kinds of solutions have emerged - one is userscripts that restyle the new "feed" view into a grid and another one is what I'm currently working on[1] - a proper replacement page that just uses the YouTube API, stores your history locally and lets you hide videos that you don't want to watch (this was why I wanted to build this, even before they removed the original grid view).

[0] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/uVzkG... [1] http://daviddeutsch.github.io/yt-sanegrid/

This was a feature actively being abused by certain users(google "Reply Girls", potentially NSFW) to piggyback off of popular videos and sometimes even enrage communities associated.

The new planned ability of adding videos to comments doesn't address this issue at all...

But sometimes they don't care for the original use case, so there's no point in replacing it, just retiring

The original use-case was an engagement mechanism.

Their statement is:

> So, on September 12 we’re going to retire this little-used feature as we work to develop more effective fan engagement tools for creators.

They are going to replace it with a new thing to cover the engagement mechanism.

It is true that with things like Google Reader it was not being replaced. But in this case their statement declares an intention to replace the retired feature with something else that helps solve the engagement scenario.

'video responses' feature was not used a lot imo.

but for all startups this is a point of concern, after experimentation, which features to digg further and which ones to keep. user analytics definitely is a must.

Really? We must surf different parts of YouTube. I saw it quite frequently, especially around music, video-game related things, and a few different vloggers.

Edit: that said, I didn't actually click them. I just saw them.

I thought Hacker News was the home of pivoting, launch-'n-iterate, and all that.

Listen, I agree with you on this with things like Google Reader.

But 4 in a million people clicked on the video responses. On a mathematical level, it just wasn't worth it. This isn't a big deal, I don't know why everyone is getting so worked up about it. It's an extremely marginal feature, not a flagship component being eliminated tomorrow without warning.

People aren't mathematical entities. On average, you're a fool, because most people are fools. But if I start out treating you that way, you're right to be upset.

In evaluating a feature, it's important to have a global view. But it's also important to have a local view. If you choose features at random, they're generally used by a small number of people, but they get made because they're important to somebody.

In this case, you can't think just about the people trying to view the video responses. You also have to think about the people who have been making them. Content creators are a vital part of the YouTube ecosystem, and getting non-creators to cross over and become creators is an important engine for content growth.

To somebody who has been using this feature, this is a fuck-you twice over. The first time is shutting down a feature they were using. The second time is the recognition that YouTube was having them do something that didn't work well, but that YouTube doesn't really care.

Can YouTube get away with offending a bunch of people? Sure. But treating people like they only matter when they are currently useful to you? That's for sociopaths and supervillians. When you're building things for people, it's important to treat them as people. They'll remember when you don't.

That's all nice and well, but my point is, no matter what change you make, you're going to alienate users. Youtube can't make everyone happy. It isn't feasible. This change, that affects the view-flow of 0.0004% of users, is an intelligent one. The change Youtube made to subscribed videos (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) might not have been as intelligent.

Youtube has to optimize for the greatest number of users it can. When you're working with a business at scale and there are millions of users (or even a billion), you don't get a bellyache over features that have to be scrapped because they're not used enough. It's a company, not a charity. That's how it works.

No, it does not affect the view-flow of 0.0004% of users. The actual number of users affected is not stated and cannot be inferred from the data given.

My point is that sure, sometimes you must alienate users. But good product management requires you to minimize that number, and the size of the pain. That's just good business.

Your point is valid, but your opinion is out of context.

  The team is focused on enabling you to share video links in comments.

They're not removing the feature because people don't use it, but because they're planning to replace the feature with one that improves the original use-case.

Although it's true that the execution wasn't smooth, they should have removed the feature when the replacement was ready.

Right. And your last sentence shows that you are thinking of people as humans, not abstract mathematical entities who it ok to offend.

>People aren't mathematical entities. On average, you're a fool, because most people are fools. But if I start out treating you that way, you're right to be upset.

That's true, but the two cases can't really be compared. Groups of people are, very frequently, in nearly every discipline and line of work, treated as mathematical entities. It's how governments determine how to allocate resources and funding in social programs, and how advertizing and marketing work.

In a public company, one of the main goals is to make as much of a profit as possible. Reducing costs is paramount to keeping profits in the green, and when you're operating on the same scale as YouTube, even a tiny optimization like this can translate to huge savings in the long run.

I agree that people are treated as mathematical entities. And I even said that was fine if that's not all you do. The mathematician's solution to the problem of overpopulation is just to shoot people until you get below the required number.

You are also wrong about the main goals of a public company, and wrong again about how to get there. Those are central dogmas of the MBA worldview, but they're just dogmas.

A great example is cars. American car companies minimized costs and focused on profits. Toyota maximized user value and minimized waste in creating that value. Toyota has been kicking the asses of American car makers for decades. Even when Toyota teaches American car-makers their secrets, they can't adapt, because those and other items of dogma make it impossible to change: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/n...

it just wasn't worth it. Fully agree with that, but was it worth it to remove it before its replacement is ready? Since it was more or less unused it isn't like it was causing a big burden.

Nobody used that feature.

4 out of every 1 million.

Which isn't many, but it might have been critical to those 4.

And given the numbers involved when we talk about YouTube, it's not like it's really as low as 4 people, it's 4 out of 1 million views on a site that generates 1 billion unique visits each month ( https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/en-GB/statistics.html ). It's actually a large number of users then.

> Which isn't many, but it might have been critical to those 4.

http://xkcd.com/1172/

I understand it as 4 in a million are clicking on video responses. People creating video responses as self-gratification might care a lot about it..

I think the 90-9-1 rule applies.

The reach of those 1% is pretty substantial.

I have never used the feature in question, but I'd certainly think twice about removing any feature that 1% used.

If the click through rate is 0.0004%, I don't think the power users will care all that much. They're probably not getting any significant source of views from video responses. The more powerful tactic on YouTube seems to be linking to other videos at the end of your video.

Content creators on Youtube have a bootstrap problem. Once their videos become popular enough, Youtube's content discovery mechanism will direct potentially interested viewers to said videos. The problem is that if no one has seen the video, then the algorithm has no idea what its quality is, or what type of viewer would be interested. Depending on your target audience, even getting a small number of views by piggybacking a popular channel may be enough to get you onto the algorithms radar, which generates a lot more views that the click through rate would suggest.

Linking within the video works, but it requires that the creator of the original video does more work, and if it was not planned when the video was created then, while doable with annotations, it appears scammy.

I was referring to linking in the video, but you make a good point about wanting to link to videos made after the fact.

While piggybacking may be an option for garnering initial views, using it for this purpose encourages response spam. Using good 'ol search optimization should really be the first option for content creators looking to get off the ground.

'Which isn't many, but it might have been critical to those 4.'

Well yeah. But you can say that for nearly any feature of program. I don't see this as a big deal.

It's such a small number that it makes complete sense to remove that feature. Removing feature that may significantly lower user experience on 0.0004% visits while slightly improving the user experience on 99.9996% visits? Quite obviously good decision.

I used this feature. It was a great way to connect videos in the community I belong to. Just because popular videos like "Gangnam Style" or whatever don't use this feature doesn't mean that it isn't useful for other users.

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