It’s already really difficult to engage with the content you want to see, but now they’re also taking away the only immediately noticeable metric of a successful video? Genuinely just why
They removed the star system a long time ago. They removed the down votes again a few years back.
They want their algorithm to be the only thing that decides whether you watch a video or not.
That’ll work excellent for all those people trying to find tutorial videos for ‘XYZ’ when you have no verification data to determine whether it’s even a legit tutorial.
People who watch tutorial videos only get on, watch the video and then leave. How are they supposed to make tons of advertising revenue from that? No, we must sacrifice that class of video from the platform, in pursuit of the almighty dollar.
Personally I find the highest viewed videos on YT to be the absolute shittiest ones.
To hope you find new content. YouTube had been putting random low watch count videos in my feed. I never click on them because of their low view count. The thumbsnails make them look like they’re high quality videos. Without the view count I have no idea if they have 1,000 views or millions. They’re hoping I will click on them, subscribe, and spend more time in the app.
YT Exec - /rips massive line of coke off Intern’s ass/ - “Remove View Count”
YT Engineer - “But Sir, users will hate that. It will actively make the user experience worse”
YT Exec - “That’s the goddamn point!”
sounds like another job for the return youtube dislikes guy
Seems like a sure way to lose my engagement. I don’t understand what Google thinks they’re getting out of this except for flooding you with more ads between video recommendations at the cost of people actually watching anything and using the damn website.
Between removing the dislike counter, a defect search bar that shoves garbage down your throat, recommendations of decreasing quality on my end and shorts (which I hesitantly gave a try but ultimately lost all interest in because it remained mostly low effort content despite my efforts to train my algorithm), this is just another reason why I find myself spending more time enjoying other things lately.
Maybe I am just out of touch, but I smell another bubble bursting when I look at how enshittified all major web services are simultaneously becoming.
Maybe I am just out of touch, but I smell another bubble bursting when I look at how enshittified all major web services are simultaneously becoming.
It feels like something has to give, right?
We have YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, and more just racing to enshittify like I can’t even believe, Google Search is racing to destroy the internet, yet they’re also at the ‘critical mass’ of ‘too big to fail’ and shoved out all their major competitors already (other than Discord I guess).
except for flooding you with more ads between video recommendations
That’s literally it. The advertising and marketing teams within Google have politically maneuvered themselves into running the show, and the software/product engineering teams that want to maximize the quality of the system they work on (search, youtube) are overridden by insipid metrics that advertising needs more user interaction with ads.
They literally have been commanding that things be made more shitty to optimize their malformed metrics. You absolutely can get more people to click the sponsored search results… if you keep making them less distinct from the actual results. And advertising needs those good click through rates nooooow!
There are email chains documenting this sort of shit going on that have become part of the public record due to various court cases.
I think the second part of my sentence you cropped was the more important one to get across. It doesn’t matter how indistinguishable ads become from regular content when nobody is even willing to use your billboard for an excuse of a website anymore. Besides, institutions like the EU and even the FTC in the US will step in and break apart those dark patterns when they keep getting out of hand. We already grand Google way too much leeway but there’s only so much Silicon Valley giants can get away with before getting slapped with fines and bans. There are already strict rules in the EU about transparency when it comes to advertisements and not even Youtube can ignore them for a very long time.
I guess I’d rather have it than not have it, but I don’t really understand how it would make YT unusable to me if I didn’t know how many other people viewed a video. How often are you using those numbers to make important decisions between videos about what to watch? I tend to go by the topic and subscribe to creators whose videos I like. Very occasionally I might be looking for a guide to an obscure level in an obscure game and there may be 3 similar looking videos about it, but one has 200 views and the others have single digits, and I agree in that situation it means something. But otherwise I just never pay attention to it. What do I care if 2000 or 200,000 people watched a video that looks interesting to me? Some creators I subscribe to have just a couple hundred followers. I don’t care.
Next What??? Removing Title, Only Thumbnail.
It’s currently a race-to-the-bottom in big IT & tech, where they don’t look how they get you to like them but how much they can get away with, without repelling most of their userbase.
In this case YouTube can do literally anything they want due to the lack of real alternatives. Hosting videos for free, for anyone (and any number of viewers) to watch, for free, is rather predictably not a very profitable business model. If you want to see what it takes to actually be profitable with such a model, look at the average free porn site. Extremely intrusive ads everywhere. If you don’t want to pay, and ads are the only revenue, advertisers are the customer, not you.
