Comment by binarymax
4 days ago
Why. Why are they doing this. It’s the same with Netflix. I don’t understand. What is the metric that goes up when they show a couple giant videos.
4 days ago
Why. Why are they doing this. It’s the same with Netflix. I don’t understand. What is the metric that goes up when they show a couple giant videos.
It may reduce decision paralysis and they are hoping their recommendation is good enough.
I honestly think that at some point, there will be no recommendations page. You'll open YouTube and it'll start autoplaying the video that they (or the advertisers) think you should see. You'll be able to skip to other videos from there, like on short-form content platforms. Likes and subscriptions will dictate how likely it'll be that you'll see a video by that creator in the future. Search and other "outdated" features will be tucked away and purposefully made even more useless than they already are.
Maybe you could have a couple of different feeds that you could choose from, we might call these "channels". You could perhaps assign numbers to the channels for convenient selection using the remote. Hmm, why does this remind me of something?
"Video surfing" does have a nice ring to it. You should be a Youtube PM.
Isn't this just Shorts already?
1 reply →
Madness
It's an Ad. Next quarter their revenue is up 25%. Since they need to grow 25% each quarter, by the end of 2026 YouTube will strictly display only Ads.
"Make product worse, get money"?
https://dynomight.net/worse/
I would presume the conversion rate for those specific three videos are much higher then if they're just three of twenty
I think it has to do with their CDN and edge caching? If you can get everyone to watch the same 10 videos it’s easy to serve content.
> Why. Why are they doing this.
Back in my day on the cattle ranch, the cattle had unique magnetic identifiers on their ears. They put their head in the feeder and get fed only what the rancher wants each specific one to to eat.
I find it baffling how bad Netflix's recommendation engine is. I can understand YouTube's priorities being skewed toward slop because their business model is delivering ads. It's not surprising that you have to fight the algorithm to find worthwhile content among the garbage on YouTube.
Netflix's revenue is subscription based long form videos. That should be a viable business model. Instead, they seem to be willfully heading in the direction of serving slop to an audience that's not fully engaged. This road leads them into direct competition with YouTube and TikTok.
When my son moved out of the house recently, he went on the additional household plan. What struck me was that the user interface steered heavily toward the option that includes ads. We had to search for the small print to let him pay Netflix a few dollars more for the non-ads version.
In the late 90's and early 2000's there was a sense that ads were a reasonable tradeoff for free services on the internet. If the last 20 years have taught us anything, it's that the perverse incentives are a catastrophe.
Came here to ask the same question. How do they benefit from showing less videos? I don't get it.
I assume people click on the first "video" (not realizing it's an Ad).