If the author scrolls down another 5 videos and an ad will appear, etc. Shorts are designed so that they can feed more ads/hour to viewers. Both are strategies to increase monetization on the site at the cost of customer experience.
By 'content' I mean the fact that every video has a moron talking for 10 minutes at the beginning. You can search up something as simple as how to tie a shoe, find a promising video with a lot of likes, then click it. Gotta start with 2 ads first, naturally. Then the first 2 minutes will tell you they'll teach you to tie a shoe. The next 5 minutes will be a backstory on the history of the shoe and how it's impacted the creator's life and their own shoe stories. Then a 2 minute sponsored segment for some dropshipped wallet or sock nobody needs, then another youtube ad, then hurried 10 second clip of someone poorly tying a shoe.
Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't see how anyone can stand it anymore.
when you're not an old, and this is all you know, you just accept it without knowing that there was a better world back when the olds were young. not being able to accept this really shows how old man yells get off my lawn you are. YT is not trying to capture you, and probably doesn't care one bit about olds. it's the younger crowds that have been given YT as an absentee parent/babysitter that they have been able to set their hooks in from the beginning. that's the group that will be making them money for years to come
And people quit, lots of people, and the flow moved out. And people who joined had no idea it had been "better" than what it was, this was just the standard which was admittedly still better than other companies. Eventually everyone for whom this affront was to high left leaving an employee base reasonably happy with the status quo.
They continued to "downgrade" the 'lifestyle benefits' the entire time I was there and it continued to piss people off who left.
As margin pressure grew the need to monetize grew and Marissa Meyer who had been the 'brick wall' between the user experience and monetization left the company. Others who felt as she did also left for a variety of reasons. Leaving only those for whom monetization was just the cost of doing business and hey, "We're Google!" right?
This opens up the opportunity for disruption. There is a hysteresis effect though, everyone has a different tolerance for crap. More and more people I know are not "Google" users anymore, they are 'search' users and if their OS pre-loads Bing they use that, sometimes they switch to DDG or Kagi. Once that takes hold in the bulk of the addressable market, Google will go the way of every other tech company before them. I used to point out to people that the "GooglePlex" was the dead hulk of SGI. Like wasps Google was living inside the corpse of a formerly big player. Everyone would tell me, "We're different, we're always going to be around." And like the Zen quotes from "Charlie's War" I would say, "We'll see." :-)
[1] I believe that this statement is perhaps the single most destructive thing any CFO can do. In part because they don't define 'necessary.'
[2] He was not amused :-)
Of course when I was a child my parents told me how much better my childhood was than theirs...cue uphill both ways stories.
But I find myself telling my child the opposite. I'll tell her how Walmart used to answer the phone, JC Penney used to have associates that helped you in each department, Home Depot used to employ skilled workers to answer questions, stores didn't lock up items, etc. Not to even mention about how the internet wasn't an ad laden crap hole.
And without saying as much to her, I feel like my child's life is markedly worse than mine growing up.
So, what gets better these days? I find myself just thinking everything will get continually worse until I expire. But it wasn't always this way. Where was the peak? My mind wants to say late 90s. I'm just hoping that's a local peak, and things will get better again in some fashion.
If I had to point to a single thing that is most indicative to the change-over from 'child' to 'adult' it would be the thought behind this question.
The answer is "it always gets different." Which is dissatisfying to the child who yearns for a parent to make things better, and engaging for an adult that realizes that nothing is forever and things change but they can be an agent for change.
That last bit, owning ones own agency, is where "it gets better" comes from. When you are a child it got better because your parents worked to make it better, their vision of what better was meant they were willing to invest their time, effort, and resources into changing things for the better. When you are the parent, then its on you.
They key difference between nostalgia and maturity is that the former works to recreate what had been before, where the latter works to change what is into something better. One of the services you can do for your child is to show them how "adults" make things better.
So it's interesting to look at "What gets better these days?"
Modern video games are way better than the video games of the 90's.
Putting together a complete computer you can learn to program on can be done for < $100 if you're willing to use used keyboards/monitors/mice.
Making things out of plastic is accessible to everyone either by owning a 3D printer or borrowing one at the library or social club.
On line resources for learning any topic including taking college courses are free and easy to find.
Keeping in touch with your friends in "real time" is both trivial and multi-media.
Shopping is different with much of it online rather than in person. Is that better? Is that worse? Kind of a bit of both, but definitely different. The Internet is full of crap ads, which is different, but its a lot faster than it used to be, is that better? Is that worse? A bit of both and definitely different.
I was joking at a conference I attended last week that I remember when grown-ass men could make a living wage developing database software written in BASIC on what was essentially a giant Arduino with an 8 bit processor. Definitely different, and it was fun for them, but it wasn't necessarily different then grown people getting paid to write code in Javascript to make web pages look nice.
Here is the bottom line: Things get better because you, as the adult, work to make them better. The more effective your efforts, the more people will join you in helping you make things better. Conversely, if you do nothing, then things getting worse is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Change is endemic, without effort and maintenance, change tends toward decay.