

Youtube retires video responses - mxfh
http://youtubecreator.blogspot.com/2013/08/so-long-video-responsesnext-up-better.html

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buro9
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.

~~~
dylangs1030
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
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.

~~~
verandaguy
>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.

That's true, but the two cases can't really be compared. Groups of people are,
very frequently, in nearly every discipline and line of work, treated as
mathematical entities. It's how governments determine how to allocate
resources and funding in social programs, and how advertizing and marketing
work.

In a public company, one of the main goals is to make as much of a profit as
possible. Reducing costs is paramount to keeping profits in the green, and
when you're operating on the same scale as YouTube, even a tiny optimization
like this can translate to huge savings in the long run.

~~~
wpietri
I agree that people are treated as mathematical entities. And I even said that
was fine if that's not all you do. The mathematician's solution to the problem
of overpopulation is just to shoot people until you get below the required
number.

You are also wrong about the main goals of a public company, and wrong again
about how to get there. Those are central dogmas of the MBA worldview, but
they're just dogmas.

A great example is cars. American car companies minimized costs and focused on
profits. Toyota maximized user value and minimized waste in creating that
value. Toyota has been kicking the asses of American car makers for decades.
Even when Toyota teaches American car-makers their secrets, they can't adapt,
because those and other items of dogma make it impossible to change:
[http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/403/n...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/403/nummi)

------
MartinMond
I wonder what the reverse click-through rate was.

When you watched a video that was a response to another video, YouTube showed
"This is a video response to ______"

I personally used that a few times, unlike video responses which I don't
remember ever using.

~~~
javindo
I had a small video on my channel a while ago which originally procured a few
thousand hits but when someone made a much more popular video response (made
popular due to virality through reddit/digg) my viewings for that video shot
up due to, as you described, "reverse click-through".

------
epaga
At first I thought this meant video _comments_ had been retired. For a split
second there I thought the world had been suddenly healed of a great evil and
had great joy. Alas, it passed.

~~~
rossjudson
Exactly. Video is so bloody inefficient for anything other than how-to. Video
is _lazy_ journalism for those unwilling to subject themselves to the rigors
of concision or clarity demanded by the written word. When the video/text
ratio of a site rises, I stop visiting.

~~~
iyulaev
_When the video /text ratio of a site rises_ __above zero __, _I stop
visiting._

Fixed that for you.

~~~
saraid216
DID YOU KNOW:

Hacker News has featured videos on its home page. A lot.

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CaptchaReader
I stopped clicking on video responses when I realised that almost all of them
were spam videos trying to get some views after the original video went viral.

~~~
denzil_correa
Youtube Video Response spam was pretty nasty. It did attract some attention
for unique spam detection algorithms for video responses as well [0,1].

[0] Fabricio Benevenuto, Tiago Rodrigues, Virgilio Almeida, Jussara Almeida,
Chao Zhang, and Keith Ross. 2008. Identifying video spammers in online social
networks. In Proceedings of the 4th international workshop on Adversarial
information retrieval on the web (AIRWeb '08), Carlos Castillo, Kumar
Chellapilla, and Dennis Fetterly (Eds.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 45-52.
DOI=10.1145/1451983.1451996
[http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1451983.1451996](http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1451983.1451996)

[1]
[http://www.iiitd.edu.in/~ashish/PST-2013.pdf](http://www.iiitd.edu.in/~ashish/PST-2013.pdf)

------
JoshTriplett
I've only ever seen one useful thing done with video responses: a kind of
pseudo-playlist, where the next video is a response to the previous one,
making it easy to click from one to the next. With YouTube's new playlist
interface, even that's no longer useful. (And with the ten-minute length
limitations lifted, the need for multi-part videos has gone down
significantly, so only long-running series need them anymore, and those can
easily create playlists.)

Now if only they'd bring back the ability to subscribe to a playlist rather
than a channel. I still have some playlist subscriptions, but you no longer
have the option of following a playlist without seeing all the other videos
from that channel.

------
ajanuary
Video responses are often used by content creators that want people to submit
content for mashups. Wonder how they'll do it now.

~~~
morsch
Ideally, an existing or a new competitor will fill the void. I really like
YouTube and I realize there are viable alternatives, but web video often feels
like more of a monoculture than it should be.

~~~
saurik
You can't effectively compete against YouTube for this particular space (which
is why even though there are alternatives it still feels like a monoculture):
the reason that website exists is because Google has a sufficient monopoly in
search advertising that they can afford to dominate any other market they want
by operating well below cost. Supposedly they finally got YouTube profitable
(at which point you can just view YouTube as a legitimate investment), but
this was after years of running the website at a loss of hundreds of millions
of dollars a year.

------
arc_of_descent
There are lots of guitar competitions hosted on YouTube. The way to enter this
competition is by replying to the original video.

Maybe by using the title, description, etc. the competition creator can
aggregate them and create a playlist but that's more work for them. Just
browsing through the video responses is a much quicker way currently for both
the competition creator and participant.

~~~
eterm
Perhaps a _hashtag_ would be in order? ;)

~~~
arc_of_descent
Sure. But what I don't understand about the spam video responses meme in this
thread is that the video owner can currently choose to automatically accept
video responses or not.

------
codeulike
Theorem:

Features need to be trimmed now and then for a piece of software to survive in
the long term - otherwise it evolves towards infinite complexity and feature
bloat, and subsequently ossifies.

If you're one of the 1 in 100,000 youtube users that enjoyed this feature,
you're upset that it got removed.

But for the greater good you should just accept you were unlucky.

The alternative is a system (and UI) that gets more and more complex over time
to the detriment of everyone

Discuss.

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darkxanthos
There can be features with VERY poor CTR overall that are still valuable for
very specific and valuable segments of your population of users. I wonder how
much they dug into this and explored the potential systemic impact? I assume
they did... but I can't help but have some doubt.

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badman_ting
It is right and good to kill things nobody uses. Come on with the bellyaching,
on this one. Google Reader this wasn't.

~~~
lucb1e
I used it

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pliny
A lot of vitriol in the comments of that post.

I wonder how many people will stop using Google products as a result of this
design decision.

~~~
swombat
About two and a half, probably.

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RivieraKid
Why are people upvoting this submission? What's interesting about the fact
that YT removed some insignificant and unused feature?

~~~
simias
I find it notable that something that seemed so prominent on a very popular
website like youtube only had .0004% click-through rate.

~~~
VLM
I find it interesting that basically 100% of videos were from spammers (spare
me the rounding error anecdote) so the CTR for video spam is "about" two
orders of magnitude lower than the supposed (although highly gamed and faked)
CTR for banner ads which are also by definition 100% unwanted spam.

So are there really two orders of mag of fraud in the bigger industry of
banner ads, or despite popular belief is video two orders of mag less
compelling than static banner ads or email spam... Something doesn't add up.

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orblivion
.0004% of the respondees or .0004% of visitors?

------
lukio
NO! I'm afraid of change!

------
dylangs1030
Not surprising. There's really not much justification for getting worked up
over this. They're not sunsetting a critical component of Youtube. This isn't
a Google Reader...come on.

 _4 people in a million?_ You'd get rid of the feature too. That's what you
_should do_ \- it might alienate four people, but honestly, your business has
to pick and choose which customers to piss off. You really can't please
everyone in the world with your decisions, and this frankly wasn't useful to
Youtube from a mathematical perspective.

The math pretty much proves it - this was a smart decision. People will adapt
and get over it. This is barely news.

~~~
wpietri
Four clicks in a million is not 4 people in a million. Unless all of your
users show up exactly once per month, click one thing, and leave. Which is
probably not the YouTube model.

Further, who these people are matters. The number of active editors on
Wikipedia is about 0.0004% of total users. But if you kill something even a
small percentage of them use, god help you.

Most importantly, people aren't mathematical entities. You may _sometimes_
have to piss some customers off. But most of the time you don't have to piss
anybody off. And that's a good choice, because unlike, say, your average
integer, people have memories, and they talk with one another.

Product decisions aren't mathematical decisions; they're human decisions. Ones
often helped by good math.

