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What's up with software becoming less powerful (useful) over time? This is a wider trend that has presumably been accelerated by the shift to mobile apps (it's

What's up with software becoming less powerful (useful) over time? This is a wider trend that has presumably been accelerated by the shift to mobile apps (it's crazy to me that you would need different features based on the platform you use, but this belief seems to be wide spread). "you don't need that" is being taken to the extreme. Designers with simple needs, not imagining that somebody would need more?

solarkraft 3y ago
I have to switch to the desktop view to use date selectors on mobile. It feels like almost inevitably at some point someone will go "of our entire user base almost nobody uses it, so we should remove it!". Recommendation algorithms are another field. Presumably they have tons of parameters. And how many do they expose? 0. Leading the algorithm to be mis-tuned for how I feel at a given moment ("give me new stuff" vs "show me something familiar"). YouTube's "related videos" have recently completely gone down the drain too. They've always mixed not actually relevant videos in there, but now they're ONLY showing them, leaving me without a way to actually find related videos. Am I just an old man lamenting the world changing or does this type of stuff seriously feel inhibiting to anyone else? This trend is one of the major reasons I prefer free software - some kind of respect for users' needs and the theoretical option to change these things.
- mrkramer 3y ago
  At least somebody at YouTube figured out that only being able to sort channels' videos by "Latest" and "Popular" is silly so couple of days ago they introduced or reintroduced sorting of channels' videos by "Oldest". Also few months ago or more, they were experimenting with being able to sort videos' comments by "Timestamped comments", which is actually quite smart because people timestamp videos in comments a lot and viewers are indeed interested in clicking timestamps when they see them in comments.

solarkraft 3y ago

I have to switch to the desktop view to use date selectors on mobile. It feels like almost inevitably at some point someone will go "of our entire user base almost nobody uses it, so we should remove it!". Recommendation algorithms are another field. Presumably they have tons of parameters. And how many do they expose? 0. Leading the algorithm to be mis-tuned for how I feel at a given moment ("give me new stuff" vs "show me something familiar"). YouTube's "related videos" have recently completely gone down the drain too. They've always mixed not actually relevant videos in there, but now they're ONLY showing them, leaving me without a way to actually find related videos. Am I just an old man lamenting the world changing or does this type of stuff seriously feel inhibiting to anyone else? This trend is one of the major reasons I prefer free software - some kind of respect for users' needs and the theoretical option to change these things.

mrkramer 3y ago
At least somebody at YouTube figured out that only being able to sort channels' videos by "Latest" and "Popular" is silly so couple of days ago they introduced or reintroduced sorting of channels' videos by "Oldest". Also few months ago or more, they were experimenting with being able to sort videos' comments by "Timestamped comments", which is actually quite smart because people timestamp videos in comments a lot and viewers are indeed interested in clicking timestamps when they see them in comments.