Comment by Root_Denied

> Your use case may be desirable, but they've determined it's not profitable.

This right here is the crux of the problem - profitability rules over any and all functionality.

Even in a scenario where a given design/layout was universally desirable, it will lose out to a design that is more optimal for revenue generation.

Ok, yes, Google is a company that needs to make money, but changes that optimize for revenue over usability have a strong chance of a domino effect down the line of a dwindling user base paying an increasing cost to use a service that is no longer worth it.

> I assume they have the resources to measure _everything_.

I don't disagree with this assessment, but I believe it just means that they know where the inflection point is between functionality (driving engagement and retention) and revenue (increased at the expense of retention and engagement) and try and ride that intersection to maximize both.

> I believe YouTube is crushing it as a content provider.

There's an argument to be made here that YouTube just doesn't have any real competition due to the infrastructural requirements being so heavy and the network effect of having so many people using the platform, and that's different than doing well enough to be able to compete in an environment that had more competition.

Put another way, the way YouTube is run works great up until you have an actual competitor operating at the same scale, at which point it falls over, as opposed to one that could effectively compete against another service.

This feeds back into the point about riding that curve of revenue vs. functionality. If you're right at the intersection of that curve you have very little flexibility with which to adjust in competition with another entity. This just points YouTube believing (not unreasonably so) that they're an effective monopoly and don't need to worry about competition, so it doesn't enter into their calculations. They may never need to worry about it.

None of that is the same thing as being a "good" or "optimal" service for users, and you can't really "crush it" when there's no one of a similar size within the space to compare against.