Why are sites forcing us to deal with features we explicitly don’t want? Take YouTube Shorts for instance. I’ve made it clear I hate these things, but they keep popping up on my homepage every other week. Every time, I have to click the “Temporarily Hide” button like a damn whiner.
I can just picture the internal YouTube meetings:
Manager: “We’re not getting enough engagement on Shorts.”
Developer: “Maybe our audience doesn’t like them?”
Manager: “I’ve got an idea! Let’s force Shorts onto everyone’s homepage for a week or two each time!”
Then, later, they celebrate like they’ve invented the internet.
Is this really how it’s supposed to work? Why else are companies shoving features down our throats we clearly don’t want? Is there no better way than to just keep throwing stuff at us and hoping we’ll stick around long enough to click “Hide This Annoying Feature” again?
🤔 What’s the deal with this endless pushing of features we hate? Are they just ignoring user feedback entirely, or is there some secret strategy I’m not seeing?
you can remove shorts with this greasemonkey script for example
It’s not that I don’t know how to work around it – it’s that I have to do so in the first place.
Imagine going to your favorite restaurant and every week the chef says “Liver and onions? We have them on special today?” “No thanks, I’m allergic / don’t prefer them / etc.”
Then two weeks later: “Hey friend, want some liver and onions?” This type of thing is basically only happening in the context of being a user of a large site.