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The thing that bugs me about the way Google retires something is that they do this: 1) Retire a feature 2) Offer a half-arsed work-around 3) Wait an indeterm

by buro9 13y ago

The thing that bugs me about the way Google retires something is that they do this: 1) Retire a feature 2) Offer a half-arsed work-around 3) Wait an indeterminable period of time 4) Release a new feature that covers the original use-case That's crap, as users are stuck at #2 for ages and some of them migrate away to use other tools that cover this use-case. All this method achieves is to annoy every user that used the feature (even if they seldom used it). Surely it would be better to: 1) Release a new feature that covers the original use-case 2) Wait a declared period of time (short or long) 3) Retire a feature Which means people can immediately start using the new way. And if the new feature fully covers the use-case of the old one, then #2 could be skipped altogether.

raverbashing 13y ago
But sometimes they don't care for the original use case, so there's no point in replacing it, just retiring
- buro9 13y ago
  The original use-case was an engagement mechanism. Their statement is: > So, on September 12 we’re going to retire this little-used feature as we work to develop more effective fan engagement tools for creators. They are going to replace it with a new thing to cover the engagement mechanism. It is true that with things like Google Reader it was not being replaced. But in this case their statement declares an intention to replace the retired feature with something else that helps solve the engagement scenario.
RivieraKid 13y ago
Nobody used that feature.
- buro9 13y ago
  4 out of every 1 million. Which isn't many, but it might have been critical to those 4. And given the numbers involved when we talk about YouTube, it's not like it's really as low as 4 people, it's 4 out of 1 million views on a site that generates 1 billion unique visits each month ( https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/en-GB/statistics.html https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/en-GB/statistics.html ). It's actually a large number of users then.
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    > Which isn't many, but it might have been critical to those 4. http://xkcd.com/1172/ http://xkcd.com/1172/
  - skriticos2 13y ago
    I understand it as 4 in a million are clicking on video responses. People creating video responses as self-gratification might care a lot about it..
    - buro9 13y ago
      I think the 90-9-1 rule applies. The reach of those 1% is pretty substantial. I have never used the feature in question, but I'd certainly think twice about removing any feature that 1% used.
      - nrivadeneira 13y ago
        If the click through rate is 0.0004%, I don't think the power users will care all that much. They're probably not getting any significant source of views from video responses. The more powerful tactic on YouTube seems to be linking to other videos at the end of your video.
        gizmo686 13y ago
        Content creators on Youtube have a bootstrap problem. Once their videos become popular enough, Youtube's content discovery mechanism will direct potentially interested viewers to said videos. The problem is that if no one has seen the video, then the algorithm has no idea what its quality is, or what type of viewer would be interested. Depending on your target audience, even getting a small number of views by piggybacking a popular channel may be enough to get you onto the algorithms radar, which generates a lot more views that the click through rate would suggest. Linking within the video works, but it requires that the creator of the original video does more work, and if it was not planned when the video was created then, while doable with annotations, it appears scammy.
- Grue3 13y ago
  I used this feature. It was a great way to connect videos in the community I belong to. Just because popular videos like "Gangnam Style" or whatever don't use this feature doesn't mean that it isn't useful for other users.
diminish 13y ago
'video responses' feature was not used a lot imo. but for all startups this is a point of concern, after experimentation, which features to digg further and which ones to keep. user analytics definitely is a must.
- sukuriant 13y ago
  Really? We must surf different parts of YouTube. I saw it quite frequently, especially around music, video-game related things, and a few different vloggers. Edit: that said, I didn't actually click them. I just saw them.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
quaunaut 13y ago
This was a feature actively being abused by certain users(google "Reply Girls", potentially NSFW) to piggyback off of popular videos and sometimes even enrage communities associated.
- Aldo_MX 13y ago
  The new planned ability of adding videos to comments doesn't address this issue at all...
skore 13y ago
> 1) Retire a feature > 2) Offer a half-arsed work-around Oh man, so many times. They recently did the same thing to /my_subscriptions, which was the only proper way to keep up with a lot of subscriptions. It was a grid view where watched videos would disappear. The only option now is a "feed" view where it's a long list and watched videos are just grayed out. It has produced quite a lot of anger[0] and two kinds of solutions have emerged - one is userscripts that restyle the new "feed" view into a grid and another one is what I'm currently working on[1] - a proper replacement page that just uses the YouTube API, stores your history locally and lets you hide videos that you don't want to watch (this was why I wanted to build this, even before they removed the original grid view). [0] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/uVzkGUO7FKE[1-25-false] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/uVzkG... [1] http://daviddeutsch.github.io/yt-sanegrid/ http://daviddeutsch.github.io/yt-sanegrid/
dylangs1030 13y ago
Listen, I agree with you on this with things like Google Reader. But 4 in a million people clicked on the video responses. On a mathematical level, it just wasn't worth it. This isn't a big deal, I don't know why everyone is getting so worked up about it. It's an extremely marginal feature, not a flagship component being eliminated tomorrow without warning.
- wpietri 13y ago
  People aren't mathematical entities. On average, you're a fool, because most people are fools. But if I start out treating you that way, you're right to be upset. In evaluating a feature, it's important to have a global view. But it's also important to have a local view. If you choose features at random, they're generally used by a small number of people, but they get made because they're important to somebody. In this case, you can't think just about the people trying to view the video responses. You also have to think about the people who have been making them. Content creators are a vital part of the YouTube ecosystem, and getting non-creators to cross over and become creators is an important engine for content growth. To somebody who has been using this feature, this is a fuck-you twice over. The first time is shutting down a feature they were using. The second time is the recognition that YouTube was having them do something that didn't work well, but that YouTube doesn't really care. Can YouTube get away with offending a bunch of people? Sure. But treating people like they only matter when they are currently useful to you? That's for sociopaths and supervillians. When you're building things for people, it's important to treat them as people. They'll remember when you don't.
  - dylangs1030 13y ago
    That's all nice and well, but my point is, no matter what change you make, you're going to alienate users. Youtube can't make everyone happy. It isn't feasible. This change, that affects the view-flow of 0.0004% of users, is an intelligent one. The change Youtube made to subscribed videos (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) might not have been as intelligent. Youtube has to optimize for the greatest number of users it can. When you're working with a business at scale and there are millions of users (or even a billion), you don't get a bellyache over features that have to be scrapped because they're not used enough. It's a company, not a charity. That's how it works.
taopao 13y ago
I thought Hacker News was the home of pivoting, launch-'n-iterate, and all that.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

by buro9 13y ago

raverbashing 13y ago

But sometimes they don't care for the original use case, so there's no point in replacing it, just retiring

buro9 13y ago
The original use-case was an engagement mechanism. Their statement is: > So, on September 12 we’re going to retire this little-used feature as we work to develop more effective fan engagement tools for creators. They are going to replace it with a new thing to cover the engagement mechanism. It is true that with things like Google Reader it was not being replaced. But in this case their statement declares an intention to replace the retired feature with something else that helps solve the engagement scenario.

RivieraKid 13y ago

Nobody used that feature.

buro9 13y ago
4 out of every 1 million. Which isn't many, but it might have been critical to those 4. And given the numbers involved when we talk about YouTube, it's not like it's really as low as 4 people, it's 4 out of 1 million views on a site that generates 1 billion unique visits each month ( https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/en-GB/statistics.html https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/en-GB/statistics.html ). It's actually a large number of users then.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  > Which isn't many, but it might have been critical to those 4. http://xkcd.com/1172/ http://xkcd.com/1172/
- skriticos2 13y ago
  I understand it as 4 in a million are clicking on video responses. People creating video responses as self-gratification might care a lot about it..
  - buro9 13y ago
    I think the 90-9-1 rule applies. The reach of those 1% is pretty substantial. I have never used the feature in question, but I'd certainly think twice about removing any feature that 1% used.
    - nrivadeneira 13y ago
      If the click through rate is 0.0004%, I don't think the power users will care all that much. They're probably not getting any significant source of views from video responses. The more powerful tactic on YouTube seems to be linking to other videos at the end of your video.
      - gizmo686 13y ago
        Content creators on Youtube have a bootstrap problem. Once their videos become popular enough, Youtube's content discovery mechanism will direct potentially interested viewers to said videos. The problem is that if no one has seen the video, then the algorithm has no idea what its quality is, or what type of viewer would be interested. Depending on your target audience, even getting a small number of views by piggybacking a popular channel may be enough to get you onto the algorithms radar, which generates a lot more views that the click through rate would suggest. Linking within the video works, but it requires that the creator of the original video does more work, and if it was not planned when the video was created then, while doable with annotations, it appears scammy.
Grue3 13y ago
I used this feature. It was a great way to connect videos in the community I belong to. Just because popular videos like "Gangnam Style" or whatever don't use this feature doesn't mean that it isn't useful for other users.

diminish 13y ago

'video responses' feature was not used a lot imo. but for all startups this is a point of concern, after experimentation, which features to digg further and which ones to keep. user analytics definitely is a must.

sukuriant 13y ago
Really? We must surf different parts of YouTube. I saw it quite frequently, especially around music, video-game related things, and a few different vloggers. Edit: that said, I didn't actually click them. I just saw them.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

quaunaut 13y ago

This was a feature actively being abused by certain users(google "Reply Girls", potentially NSFW) to piggyback off of popular videos and sometimes even enrage communities associated.

Aldo_MX 13y ago
The new planned ability of adding videos to comments doesn't address this issue at all...

skore 13y ago

> 1) Retire a feature > 2) Offer a half-arsed work-around Oh man, so many times. They recently did the same thing to /my_subscriptions, which was the only proper way to keep up with a lot of subscriptions. It was a grid view where watched videos would disappear. The only option now is a "feed" view where it's a long list and watched videos are just grayed out. It has produced quite a lot of anger[0] and two kinds of solutions have emerged - one is userscripts that restyle the new "feed" view into a grid and another one is what I'm currently working on[1] - a proper replacement page that just uses the YouTube API, stores your history locally and lets you hide videos that you don't want to watch (this was why I wanted to build this, even before they removed the original grid view). [0] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/uVzkGUO7FKE[1-25-false] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/uVzkG... [1] http://daviddeutsch.github.io/yt-sanegrid/ http://daviddeutsch.github.io/yt-sanegrid/

dylangs1030 13y ago

Listen, I agree with you on this with things like Google Reader. But 4 in a million people clicked on the video responses. On a mathematical level, it just wasn't worth it. This isn't a big deal, I don't know why everyone is getting so worked up about it. It's an extremely marginal feature, not a flagship component being eliminated tomorrow without warning.

wpietri 13y ago
People aren't mathematical entities. On average, you're a fool, because most people are fools. But if I start out treating you that way, you're right to be upset. In evaluating a feature, it's important to have a global view. But it's also important to have a local view. If you choose features at random, they're generally used by a small number of people, but they get made because they're important to somebody. In this case, you can't think just about the people trying to view the video responses. You also have to think about the people who have been making them. Content creators are a vital part of the YouTube ecosystem, and getting non-creators to cross over and become creators is an important engine for content growth. To somebody who has been using this feature, this is a fuck-you twice over. The first time is shutting down a feature they were using. The second time is the recognition that YouTube was having them do something that didn't work well, but that YouTube doesn't really care. Can YouTube get away with offending a bunch of people? Sure. But treating people like they only matter when they are currently useful to you? That's for sociopaths and supervillians. When you're building things for people, it's important to treat them as people. They'll remember when you don't.
- dylangs1030 13y ago
  That's all nice and well, but my point is, no matter what change you make, you're going to alienate users. Youtube can't make everyone happy. It isn't feasible. This change, that affects the view-flow of 0.0004% of users, is an intelligent one. The change Youtube made to subscribed videos (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) might not have been as intelligent. Youtube has to optimize for the greatest number of users it can. When you're working with a business at scale and there are millions of users (or even a billion), you don't get a bellyache over features that have to be scrapped because they're not used enough. It's a company, not a charity. That's how it works.

taopao 13y ago

I thought Hacker News was the home of pivoting, launch-'n-iterate, and all that.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]