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’re assuming that these approaches don’t work. As someone who has worked on shitty growth engineering projects for many years, I can tell you they do work very, very well.
I hear people say the same about ads: “why show ads when everyone hates them!”. They fucking work. Big biz doesn’t care about love or hate, it cares about profits. These methods turn profits.
It’s the power of defaults.
1 person will hate the change but 100 others will be affected by the default and not care. The net result is more as revenue even if the first user cancels their account.
Bingo. Everyone thinks it’s about retention but it’s not. Lifetime value of a user is a much more complicated than it was ten years ago when Silicon Valley was joking about DAU and such.
If you ever want to fuck your LTV for a company, just phone their customer services a few time and make sure you waste as much time as possible. Your value as a user will drop significantly as you plummet into negative value due to the high cost of human-led support
Yep. “We want more people to watch Shorts” -> A/B test cramming more into the home screen -> “More people watched Shorts with X change, roll it out to everyone” -> “What’s the next idea to get more people to watch Shorts?”
Someone gets the idea that more views on Shorts is what they need and start optimizing for it. On and on until another metric becomes more important and they optimize for that.
Well I remember seeing a study that ads actually have a pretty bad return on money on average, so the problem is that selling ads is quite profitable. Platforms drown us in ads because it makes them money, and it doesn’t matter if the ads themselves are effective or not.
I’d have to see the study, but most of what I’ve seen from articles in the same vein is that they have a very low conversion rate… But they’re still worth it.
A single conversion’s LTV can offset the cost of an ad by many thousands or tens of thousands of unconverted impressions. Then you factor in referral campaigns, social share incentives, etc. you get converted users that convert other users, which also factors into the overall balance of your campaign and … In short you can see why targeted ads are so popular.