Comment by sundarurfriend
7 months ago
The only explanation I can imagine is that the risk of turning someone off YouTube by showing them the "wrong" vidoes is worse than the views or attention capture lost this way.
I can imagine my mom opening YouTube (hypothetically) for the first time and seeing an anime video, or my younger cousin being shown a Top Gear video, and them deciding that YouTube is "that app with the weird videos" that's not for them. It's not a carefully thought out conclusion, but in the era of a hundred competitors, it's plausible that superficial decisions like that have a lot of impact on the app usage.
Or it could just be that someone with a forceful personality on the YouTube team decided this is how we're going to do it and nobody could oppose them, not every decision is scientifically planned and executed like it's often assumed from the outside!
Normies expect platforms to have a vibe that it's full of their kind of person, regardless of how many thousand/million/billion users it has.
It's a fundamentally broken understanding of internet communication, but catering to it is possible and profitable. (I've done it in moderating smaller communities. We've handed out undeserved and unjust bans because getting rid of a high profile nuisance is easy compared to convincing someone to stop getting one-guyed. We also kept the most toxic users around when they're crowd favorites.)
You're spot on. YouTube knows they're the boring old video platform, the bland safe-for-tv default homepage that would be shown to someone with no surveillance profile would only confirm it's not the platform for someone with their taste in TikTok slop.