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I love this story. The moral is not that folk in Siberia could now watch video, but that a whole chunk of the distribution lying between "fast US fiber" and "si
by dmw_ng 4y ago
I love this story. The moral is not that folk in Siberia could now watch video, but that a whole chunk of the distribution lying between "fast US fiber" and "siberian 2.4kbps wet string" had their experience dramatically shifted to the left, enough so that new outliers impacted the average. Even after noting the lesson about the limitations of reliance on averages, still it skipped over this key element.
I remember the YouTube feather opt-in being spread by word of mouth at the time by folk in the tech community on fast connections. People really care about this stuff and the only reliable way to know is by engaging them directly.
- blowski 4y agoIt seems like lots of people who didn't have low bandwidth so previously used YouTube anyway, switched to using Feather because the page was smaller by being focused more narrowly on their needs. By the sounds of it, though, it was a net loss for Google, which is why the page is still so big. Much of the code might have been irrelevant (even harmful) for the end user, but was necessary for Google's business model. So a side-learning ignored by the article is that there are more types of stakeholder than just the end users, especially in applications that are free (as in beer) at the point of use. And more stakeholders means more complex solutions. And more complex solutions typically mean more code and bigger pages.