caveat -- this post is long and will not be of interest to everyone. I thought a few people might be curious about what prompted the recent changes at youtube, and what to expect in the future. If not...coo, and I did label it OT

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hi, don't know whether anyone has noticed the youtube redesign that rolled out a few weeks ago.

As some of you know I'm an interaction designer who works on large complex web and mobile "experiences." Although I didn't work on the youtube redesign I know people who did.

Until the past 18 months or 2 years, people in my profession have had baked into our DNA that we're supposed to be thinking first about the people who use our systems; designing and creating for people, experiences that are hopefully meaningful, engaging, smart, usable--as well as meeting the company's various business goals. As you know from all the shitty web experiences and software you've interacted with how successful my profession is. Sometimes very much so; sometimes not at all. It's a constant never-ending challenge, for various reasons, many of them political and many more of them related to short-term $$ goals of companies.

That user-centered design "ethos" is changing rapidly as many businesses (local to global) shift their business models to optimize monetization and their bottom line (i.e., make money by whatever means necessary) online, through advertising mostly. Rather than relying on traditional channels, like brick and mortar stores or mass media advertising--like the commercials that used to be lucrative on TV, or ads in those large white paper objects (newspapers?) that people used to read. It's also shifting because a lot of people entering my field aren't zealots for "users" the way us veterans are---and are pretty much the newer generation's version of the same people who worked in advertising in the last century (sorry Chris and other good smart creative people who work in advertising, no offense--it's just a radical shift in priorities for the internet, which is a little hard for me to see, as cool as it also is at th same time).

Anyway---youtube's recent redesign is discussed somewhat in my profession, tho not as much as it would have been 2 years ago. Two to three years ago people would have been engaged in armed ideological combat over this redesign. But now for many it's a given that companies like youtune/Google aren't in it for the users, but for the $$. And the users are seen--not as an end in themselves--but as a means to an end. A way to make money. However, there has been some discussion going on among designers around these recent changes.

The changes to comments--too many too list, but at a high level include: not revealing redundant comments (hiding simple lol or loved it or Keef!); getting rid of visual stacking/threading...so you can't eyeball which comments relate to one another; hiding thumbs up/down ratings as well as date comment-added, unless you mouse over a comment; elevation of "popular" and positive comments to top of list, pushing negative or "unpopular" comments down; shortening list of comments to only 10, so you must scroll and scroll to see past comments or when looking for an originating comment that others are responding to (and the interaction "behavior" when you scroll isn't clear--since you can't see dates on the comments unless you mouse over each one individually, you can't see where you are chronologically in the comments list, or how many comments you're advancing when you scroll). As well as other changes to comments.

As well as hiding the description in a "dresser drawer" that you have to open and close to read---and it is no longer possible, because of its new placement below the video (rather than to the side, where more ads will be appearing) to read the description if the video, it description is long AND watch the video simultaneously.

Ratings have been changed from stars to thumbs up/down---and there's lots of discussion about this---but basically youtube wants to force people to make a choice of totally positive or totally negative, knowing (from cognitive psych and ethnography studies, which my field does draw on) that people, if given the choice of GREAT vs. TERRIBLE are not usually likely to select the equivalent of "terrible" (thumbs down)---most people will usually not "vote" at all, or will vote GREAT. The business driver for this decision is when more "sponsored" content (meaning paid videos) are added, they and their advertisers do not want their content to be rated low because people won't watch it and the ads won't be seen.

And finally, you cannot see how others have rated a video. UNTIL you rate the video yourself. So, in the olden days, if you saw a Parachute Woman video was rated by 70,000 with 2 stars, you knew something was wrong with it. NOW you have to watch the video, and counting eyeballs becomes increasingly important when it's a metric for advertising. So you have to rate a video first, and THEN you can see how others have "voted." That's another research finding---that people are less likely to go out on a limb and deem something TERRIBLE if they don't know what others think of it.

The higher a video is rated the higher in the search results it will appear. Rememeber: youtube is owned by Google, the master's of search. So what that means is paid content that gets high ratings will trump all but the most outrageously successful viral videos, and most homegrown vidoes will be very difficult to find, buried beneath content that's being paid for.

As a designer from Israel said to me this week "For youtube the user isn't king, the VIDEO is king." Meaning, youtube is not to be a playground for people to connect and participate in learning and discussion, futzing around, watching videos and talking/arguing about them--it is media outlet for passively VIEWING videos, the way you watch TV. The soon-to-appear feature of greying out everything but the screen to lessen distraction from anything else on the page further shifts the focus on dumbing down, tuning out, and drinking in content (further helped along by playlisting and "related" content served up video after video so that people consume more ads, and don't "abandon" prematurely).

There's lots more to come. And it's not youtube being evil---it's just part of a seismic shift that started taking place in earnest over the past 2-3 years. It appeared that this might be the trajectory, but it wsn't a forgone conclusion. It was solidified by the recession and the end of real estate boom, as companies stopped speaking whimsically about social networking and started panicking their asses off about how to survive--and when megaloinvestors needed someplace lucrative and low-risk to invest in order to make a killing. This ethos really started solidifying the past 2 years. When it first started, with only the very largest internet media companies (like Google, Time Warner, Disney, etc), social networking, and 2.0 companies. I was doing projects for various of these in 2006-2008 and no one outside these companies and professional realms knew what the fock I was talking about. It's amazing to see it spread...like California brushfires.

In a year, you won't really recognize it anymore. Since it will be a lot more like hulu, showing reruns of Gilligan's Island, but with more ads.

Fortunately, there's always a frontier that some of us like to live, work, and play on...so I'll most likely light out to find that, because this current and future direction of the internet, while quite lucrative, is almost solely about monetization--making money---which has its merits, for sure, but isn't the kind of creativity that resonates with me, and has too many restrictions for what's possible.

- swiss

Thanks for posting. I found it interesting, especially because I have uploaded some videos and follow the statistics, reactions, removals etc. from time to time with interest and try to draw more general conclusions from all those data.

Thanks Swiss for the post. Informative and insightful reading about the changes going on at "youtube". Much appreciative.

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kleermaker
Thanks for posting. I found it interesting, especially because I have uploaded some videos and follow the statistics, reactions, removals etc. from time to time with interest and try to draw more general conclusions from all those data.

kleermaker, thanks for your comment. I'm subscribed to you excellent youtube channel, as it appears are a number of other iorrers.

youtube is being slammed with lawsuits...$1 billion by Viacom alone. When that much money is floating around it's rare something can keep its original organic vision or integrity for long. Since we do have copyright laws, and since the entertainment industry does need to pay its artists and make a profit, it's not surprising that this heyday of posting and watching stuff on youtube (as we know it) will eventually come to an end.

I'll enjoy your channel while it's up - thanks for the great vids!

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RSbestbandever
Thanks Swiss for the post. Informative and insightful reading about the changes going on at "youtube". Much appreciative.

Thanks, RSbestbandever. Even if I weren't an interaction designer I think I'd be interested in this particular shift in the internet as wild west frontier to internet as increasingly established channel for commerce. Glad you found it useful