Comment on YouTube tests removing viewer counts — here’s what we know
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks agoexcept 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. There are email chains documenting this that have become part of the public record due to various court cases.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.