Why Do Sites Keep Shoving Features We Don’t Want Down Our Throats?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨yarr@feddit.nl⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

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?

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Comments

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killeronthecorner@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
You’re assuming that these approaches don’t work. As someone who has worked on shitty growth engineering projects for many years, I can tell you they do work very, very well.

I hear people say the same about ads: “why show ads when everyone hates them!”. They fucking work. Big biz doesn’t care about love or hate, it cares about profits.

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- FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  It’s the power of defaults.
  
  1 person will hate the change but 100 others will be affected by the default and not care. The net result is more as revenue even if the first user cancels their account.
  
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  - killeronthecorner@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Bingo. Everyone thinks it’s about retention but it’s not. Lifetime value of a user is a much more complicated than it was ten years ago when Silicon Valley was joking about DAU and such.
    
    If you ever want to fuck your LTV for a company, just phone their customer services a few time and make sure you waste as much time as possible. Your value as a user will drop significantly as you plummet into negative value
    
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- dwemthy@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Yep. “We want more people to watch Shorts” -> A/B test cramming more into the home screen -> “More people watched Shorts with X change, roll it out to everyone” -> “What’s the next idea to get more people to watch Shorts?”
  Someone gets the idea that more views on Shorts is what they need and start optimizing for it. On and on until another metric becomes more important and they optimize for that.
  
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swordgeek@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
In a nutshell…

They’re not here for your benefit, they’re here for their own profit.

If they could make money with flashing lights they would, even if they had to deal with lawsuits from people who had seizures from it.

They don’t cate what you like. They don’t care what you want. You are nothing more than a commodity they can sell.

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- FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Exactly this.
  
  You’re not the customer. Google is an advertising company, their customers are people who buy ads.
  
  People who watch shorts watch more videos so there are more slots to put ads in. So, you’re going to watch shorts.
  
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- Cryophilia@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  You give them too much credit. They’re not even necessarily there for the company’s profit.
  
  Extra unnecessary features are often added and shoved at you purely because some executive needed a project to spruce up their resume, and for literally no other reason.
  
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ieatpwns@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The websites are for advertisers and investors now. Were officially human batteries for the capitalist engine

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- markovs_gun@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Here’s the thing -they always were. For any free service, the users are the product and the customers are the advertisers. It’s just that for most of the lives of these companies, interest rates were at historic lows and their profit requirements weren’t as high as a result. Businesses are constantly borrowing money and spending it to expand, and interest rates determine how much money they need to make to make those investments worthwhile. If you get a loan to start a business at 3% interest, you can afford to make less money on that business than if your loan was at 7%. As interest rates have gone up, so have the pressures for making more money on investments.
  
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- yarr@feddit.nl ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Lemmy isn’t! It’s like an oasis of sanity in an ocean of trash!
  
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  - Cryophilia@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Give it time.
    
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jordanlund@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Dear Microsoft - Stop trying to make Copilot happen!

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- einkorn@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I like Copilot as an auto-complete feature. Its a total waste of energy in every other regard, though.
  
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  - masterspace@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Copilot web is honestly better than Google these days.
    
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Gabadabs@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
You might be surprised how many people do watch YouTube shorts. They force then on you because they make a lot of money off them.

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- yarr@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I don’t care if people like them. I DO care that seemingly YouTube has very clear data regarding me that I do not like them (I have dismissed them countless times) and chooses to ignore this and present them over and over again. It’s especially funny because in all other areas they brag about how much they personalize the experience for you.
  
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  - Gabadabs@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    YouTube doesn’t care if you don’t care. The more they show them to you the more likely they are to finally get you to watch them and they can make money off you. It’s not like there’s many alternatives to YouTube.
    
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- shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I’m one! Honestly don’t get the hate. There was a comment the other day that made me think the haters are phone users. Shorts work fine on a 47" TV, for me. Hate that you can’t turn the giant captions off on many videos, but the people I follow usually don’t do that.
  
  For me, shorts are a thing I can scroll past once and be done. Is it painful on a phone for some reason?
  
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  - dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I wouldn’t say I hate other people for watching them, but for me it’s a personal think in that I have ADHD and shorts hack my brain. I just avoid them. But each ti their own.
    
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PP_BOY_@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Fiduciary responsibility, companies have a legal obligation to not only protect but grow their investor’s money. Part of this is chasing trends that other companies have spent R&D on and found success with.

If Google found that they could make more money selling socks door-to-door than they do with YouTube, they’d have a legal requirement to do so.

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- spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  
  Fiduciary responsibility, companies have a legal obligation to not only protect but grow their investor’s money.
  
  No they do not. The investors can toss out the leadership if they aren’t performing as desired.
  
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- resipsaloquitur@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  That’s not what fiduciary duty means, and “companies” don’t have fiduciary duties unless they are banks or investment firms.
  
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- yarr@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  
  If Google found that they could make more money selling socks door-to-door than they do with YouTube, they’d have a legal requirement to do so.
  
  This is not correct. There is a such a thing as being “on mission”. Otherwise every single company would be forced by law to turn into an investment bank which has the highest profit margins. There is no world in which a software company is forced to start selling socks to uphold a legal obligation to the shareholders.
  
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- shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  You have the correct term, but that’s not exactly how it works. At my last job the CEO told the board that he intended to lose money building our staff, skills and core software products. They applauded him. (Oops, we made a profit on those years anyway, but the point stands.)
  
  Fiduciary responsibility mainly means they have to make a good faith effort to protect and grow company finances. They have no obligation to drive the line up quarterly.
  
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1984@lemmy.today ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Youtube shorts are like crack. Thats why they want everyone on it.

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cobysev@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

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.

🤔 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?

TikTok is insanely popular among the younger generations, so YouTube, also being a video hosting site, wanted to jump on that bandwagon and leech some of the revenue from that style of video. So they came up with YouTube Shorts, to mimic the popular short-form upright video style.

The problem is, YouTube is NOT TikTok. Most of their user base doesn’t go to YouTube for short-form videos. So getting their audience to engage with YouTube Shorts requires them to shove it in our faces until we just get used to it.

That’s the strategy; beat us with it until we give in. They know we’re not going to go away. People aren’t organized enough to properly protest against features in a way that will scare a company into fixing it. So they’re going to keep harassing us until we’re so used to seeing it, we just don’t care anymore. Or until their content attracts the TikTok generation and successfully feeds a whole new category of revenue for the company. That’s the enshittification process for you; as long as it’s profitable, it’s going to stay.

I forget how I did it, but I blocked YouTube Shorts from showing up in my feed. I use Firefox with uBlock Origin and that removes all ads on YouTube. I even blocked the YouTube app on my phone and redirected all YouTube links to Firefox.

I used to have another extension that blocked YouTube Shorts, but I don’t see it in my extensions anymore. But they still don’t show, so maybe uBlock Origin is doing it for me?

I also don’t allow YouTube to keep a history of my activity. Which makes my homepage just a blank screen. I’d been fighting them for years, trying to remove all suggested videos from my homepage, and now it’s so simple: I just don’t save my activity and they don’t recommend anything to me.

I have subscriptions that I follow and that’s it; I don’t let them suggest videos for me to watch. I don’t need to feed their algorithms or help them build a better profile on me. I’m very anti-advertisement already, and I do my best to not let companies influence my economic behavior.

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somewhiteguy@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
There are extensions that make those kinds of thing disappear permantly. Life has been hood since enabling that.

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- orbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Unhook for YouTube
  
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  - wuzzlewoggle@feddit.org ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Youtube without unhooked, UBlock Origin and sponsor block is pure torture. Can’t live without them anymore. Luckily there is revanced on mobile as well, which basically rolls all of them into one app.
    
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TomMasz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
My theory is the people making the decisions don’t actually use the products they make and have no idea what it’s like to use them. They hear that another site is using AI, for instance, and decide their own site needs to use AI. But they don’t understand what AI does or why they should/shouldn’t use it, only that they have to have it. Boom, enshittification.

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Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
YouTube does this stuff because it’s effective. The only way to avoif is to not play the game as defined by them.

Switch to other means of watching YouTube, like Grayjay, or an envious instance.

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dhork@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
They are trying to push engagement. But not just any engagement. You might think that they would prefer active engagement, when you search for a thing and watch the entire thing. But you are actually more likely to skip ads when you do that.

What they prefer is more passive engagement, when you just accept the best thing the algorithm pushes. Because then you are not only more likely to passively consume ads, but also be served content that they were paid to promote.

TikTok, Shorts, and all the things like that seem to be specifically engineered to exhaust your ability to request more things and let the algorithm take over what you watch next. That’s their endgame.

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expatriado@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
i refer firefox extensions as enshittificantion flushing tools, same with some 3rd party apps

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HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Thats just the two parts of enshitification. take away things you like and push things you don't. I still can't believe how bank sites can be so limited in what you can do but hey heres a useless feature we give so all good.

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WheelcharArtist@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
you can remove shorts with this greasemonkey script for example

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- yarr@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  It’s not that I don’t know how to work around it – it’s that I have to do so in the first place.
  
  Imagine going to your favorite restaurant and every week the chef says “Liver and onions? We have them on special today?” “No thanks, I’m allergic / don’t prefer them / etc.”
  
  Then two weeks later: “Hey friend, want some liver and onions?” This type of thing is basically only happening in the context of being a user of a large site.
  
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DebatableRaccoon@lemmy.ca ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Because they’re delusional enough to think if they cater to the audiences of other sites they’ll tempt that audience to scrape off to their site instead of the site that came up with the thing and do it better.

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