alt Hacker NewsI mean, this goes way beyond OSes.
Look at the mobile YouTube client. The bottom navigation bar has the "+" create button stuffed right in the middle of it, larger than any other button. What % of users creates YouTube content? Probably <1%. What pp of those do it in the mobile YouTube client? Probably 0.1%. Yet the button is there, with no way to disable it.
In general, why don't apps have a "creator" toggle, off-by-default, that optimized the entire UI for viewing / consuming? Just how apps like Uber have either an entire separate app for 'partners', or toggle.
I know the reason this happens is because we aren't the real customers of an app. Nor are the creators / partners. The real customers are the shareholders. And YouTube has no competitor, so they can go buckwild with anything that synthetically increases KPIs.
I think the only app in recent memory that I have seen right the ship is Spotify. The past year they have introduced a lot of toggles for things like the shuffle algorithm, the dumb looping album art videos, audio loudness normalization being split out into normalization and compression ('volume'), etc; About the only thing that's missing is a toggle to disable podcasts, just like YouTube needs a toggle to completely disable shorts.
Any PMs reading this, be our hero. Fight the good fight.
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That's a terrible idea. The greatest thing about the Internet is that there's no segregation between creators and consumers.
TV has it. Only TV program production companies can create shows. That literally undermine ... a lot of things. We don't need that.
> I know the reason this happens is because we aren't the real customers of an app. Nor are the creators / partners. The real customers are the shareholders.
Exactly.
I am in an engineering design software developer organization bought by an investor from the founders approaching retirement (they worked 3 decades on this software helping construction engineers designing better homes). Ever since the lead up to the sell - changes were tuned to lure in investors, for the liking of investors - our organization is focusing on maximising revenue. Fast. That is THE focus. New marketing strategy, sales strategy, licensing strategy changes, reshape organization to have more informed decision making in sales (i.e. collecting and processing much more data on increasing number of contacts). Company meetings are about EBITDA, sales goals vs. actual, streamlining organization. Luncbreak discussions evolve around how to license existing features differently so it would trigger/force up/cross sales.
What is not on the agenda for maximising revenue: features and engineering. We are a "sales oriented organization", says our new CEO prodly - brought in during the sale. Addressing user needs and becoming more popular for the eventual income boost takes longer than the sales cycle of less than 5 years (the investor wants to sell the company in 5 years time). Engineering is in the way, accounting books need to look much much better much sooner for the eventual profit. Only sales tactics work here.
I see ralted pattern elsewhere, in tools I have the misfortune to use (SaaS and other subscription based products). Shameless self-promotions (cross-sale) distact your focus all the time, 'features' good for the assumed 'cutting-edge' image of the organization, privacy offensive practices (data for running sales campaigns), 'offerings' that help you with the ideas they force on you for some sizeable extra cost.
It will not end well. Takes long time to fail, but without valuable features and engineering there will be no value left for the users to buy eventually. No user wants top notch marketing, licensing, and sales strategy for the benefit of the organization.
YouTube in general is such a good example.
A while ago, they introduced the Home page with algorithmic recommendations; okay, it sucks that you can't choose whether Home or Subscriptions is the default, but at least you can choose between the algorithmic recommendations and the chronological subscriptions feed.
Then they introduced Shorts. These are algorithmic ally recommended TikToks which you can't disable, they always litter both the Subscriptions page and the Home page. This sucks.
Then, recently, they added algorithmic recommendations to Subscriptions. So if you're on Home you see only algorithmic recommendations, and if you're on Subscriptions, a lot of your screen is still taken up by algorithmically recommended videos from channels you subscribe to.
Every one of these steps is in the direction of making sure you watch what YouTube wants you to watch instead of what you want to watch.