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To the far more experienced HN audience, is there a viable technical reason for this to not stick past 30 days? I would cynically assume it's a solely dark pat

To the far more experienced HN audience, is there a viable technical reason for this to not stick past 30 days? I would cynically assume it's a solely dark pattern, but I have never built at such a scale as youtube.

charcircuit 3y ago
Shorts is a growing format on YouTube. The inventory of videos is increasing over time. If someone clicks the X button indicating the recommended shorts are not relevant after 30 days there will be many more new videos. Potentially some of these new videos will now be relevant enough to show the user. Additionally the X button is not labelled unless you o haver over it after which it says "Not interested." If it were permanent people may accidently click this button and then they will never be recommended shorts even if they enjoy them. People's opinions about shorts way change over time. After a month they may actually want to engage with the format. Having to go search through some menu buried somewhere to enable shorts on the home page again is not user friendly. Being able to do exploration is an important part of recommendation systems. Allowing a user to do just exploitation is going to lead to a worse experience in them long term.
- shultays 3y ago
  How many times users has to click "don't recommend shorts" before youtube decides it is not for them? By that logic, no user setting should be permanent. Growing format Hard for it not to considering youtube tries its best to mark videos as short. Some of my older videos are now shorts and I can't convert them
briga 3y ago
Tiktok makes big money and is a direct competitor to YouTube, so YouTube is pushing the format to capture that audience back. It’s a far more engaging pattern that what existed before. Remember when YouTube forced autoplay on everyone? Doesn’t make for a better experience, but if users are more engaged that’s all that counts for execs at YouTube
- jondwillis 3y ago
  Personally, I think it is primarily a way to sneak a Tiktok-esque experience to further addict the children that use YouTube, without their parents realizing their kids are watching neurodegenerative content.
junon 3y ago
No there's no reason that would arise from a systems architecture standpoint. This most definitely was an additive thing, that requires more code than less, in order to reactivate after 30 days (not much more code, but it's not some side effect of some system). The only reason I could think it's like this for a technical reason is if they put the opt-out "ticket" into some high availability cache system that was hard coded to eject old entries after 30 days, but that would make no sense given YouTube has infra for persistent user configuration already.

charcircuit 3y ago

Shorts is a growing format on YouTube. The inventory of videos is increasing over time. If someone clicks the X button indicating the recommended shorts are not relevant after 30 days there will be many more new videos. Potentially some of these new videos will now be relevant enough to show the user. Additionally the X button is not labelled unless you o haver over it after which it says "Not interested." If it were permanent people may accidently click this button and then they will never be recommended shorts even if they enjoy them. People's opinions about shorts way change over time. After a month they may actually want to engage with the format. Having to go search through some menu buried somewhere to enable shorts on the home page again is not user friendly. Being able to do exploration is an important part of recommendation systems. Allowing a user to do just exploitation is going to lead to a worse experience in them long term.

shultays 3y ago
How many times users has to click "don't recommend shorts" before youtube decides it is not for them? By that logic, no user setting should be permanent. Growing format Hard for it not to considering youtube tries its best to mark videos as short. Some of my older videos are now shorts and I can't convert them

briga 3y ago

Tiktok makes big money and is a direct competitor to YouTube, so YouTube is pushing the format to capture that audience back. It’s a far more engaging pattern that what existed before. Remember when YouTube forced autoplay on everyone? Doesn’t make for a better experience, but if users are more engaged that’s all that counts for execs at YouTube

jondwillis 3y ago
Personally, I think it is primarily a way to sneak a Tiktok-esque experience to further addict the children that use YouTube, without their parents realizing their kids are watching neurodegenerative content.

junon 3y ago

No there's no reason that would arise from a systems architecture standpoint. This most definitely was an additive thing, that requires more code than less, in order to reactivate after 30 days (not much more code, but it's not some side effect of some system). The only reason I could think it's like this for a technical reason is if they put the opt-out "ticket" into some high availability cache system that was hard coded to eject old entries after 30 days, but that would make no sense given YouTube has infra for persistent user configuration already.