Why are sites forcing us to deal with features we explicitly don’t want? Take YouTube Shorts for instance. I’ve made it clear I hate these things, but they keep popping up on my homepage every other week. Every time, I have to click the “Temporarily Hide” button like a damn whiner.
I can just picture the internal YouTube meetings:
Manager: “We’re not getting enough engagement on Shorts.”
Developer: “Maybe our audience doesn’t like them?”
Manager: “I’ve got an idea! Let’s force Shorts onto everyone’s homepage for a week or two each time!”
Then, later, they celebrate like they’ve invented the internet.
Is this really how it’s supposed to work? Why else are companies shoving features down our throats we clearly don’t want? Is there no better way than to just keep throwing stuff at us and hoping we’ll stick around long enough to click “Hide This Annoying Feature” again?
🤔 What’s the deal with this endless pushing of features we hate? Are they just ignoring user feedback entirely, or is there some secret strategy I’m not seeing?
Do you remember the push to get everyone to sign up to YouTube with their real names and abandon pseudonyms when Google Plus was a thing?
They pulled the same trick there too. They’d pop up a box that said something like “Do you want to migrate your account to your real name now?” and if you said no, they said “OK, we’ll ask again later.”, which was inevitably in a couple of days.
No option to say “never ask me again” because that would be against what they wanted. I changed my then-main account to a name-like pseudonym just to get them to stop asking. Thankfully their algorithms that checked whether a name might be legit or not didn’t catch on that it wasn’t real.
As for why they do this, innovation for innovation’s sake is to prove they’re doing something and so the stakeholders think that value is being created and don’t pull their investments. Also, the more you watch, the better the profile about you is that they can then sell to advertisers, especially if your account’s under a real name.
If it was legal to install tracking devices in people’s behinds, Google would be a top manufacturer of them.