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?
The websites are for advertisers and investors now. Were officially human batteries for the capitalist engine
Here’s the thing -they always were. For any free service, the users are the product and the customers are the advertisers. It’s just that for most of the lives of these companies, interest rates were at historic lows and their profit requirements weren’t as high as a result. Businesses are constantly borrowing money and spending it to expand, and interest rates determine how much money they need to make to make those investments worthwhile. If you get a loan to start a business at 3% interest, you can afford to make less money on that business than if your loan was at 7%. As interest rates have gone up, so have the pressures for making more money on investments.
Lemmy isn’t! It’s like an oasis of sanity in an ocean of trash!
Give it time.
TBH, federation is a huge part of this. If any given instance starts to put in ads (or whatever) just swap instances.