We have just gone too far with engagement maximising. A/B testing titles and thumbnails was probably too far but we just keep going. At some point society needs to say stop, tech is addictive enough. We maximised way beyond what was reasonable and we need to wind it back.

Give Google, Meta and the rest an award showing they beat human psychology and now we can encorage people to put the phone down and go outside again.

Can't be exposing people to ideas that under-radicalize them, they might go somewhere else. We are worried that AI is going to destroy society when ad companies are already well on their way. Attention at any cost.

> A/B testing users without their knowledge and enthusiastic consent is unethical.

Yep, and A/B testing as experienced by uninformed, unaware end-users is a dark pattern.

It undermines the perception of (and trust in) continuity which is necessary to make effective use of a tool. The best way I can describe it to the skeptical is: imagine the dials on your car's dashboard rearrange themselves occasionally overnight, and on some commutes to work you suddenly can't work the radio or the AC while moving at ≥35mph. Of course, since the widespread use of touchscreens, that example became very literal.

So the car manufacturer has figured out the "optimal" arrangement of dials and buttons on their dashboard for their preferred levels of user engagement. Great. How many of those users now associate their car's brand with inconsistency? "I can't trust the damn buttons to be in the same place the next time I drive."

Hmmm, I am curious about which aspect of this you find unethical.

Is it unethical to do phased rollouts (where a small percentage get the new version) as a way to do safe deploys? If the issue is that two users making requests at the same time might see different things, then this would also be unethical? Yet, these sorts of phases rollouts is the best way to release something safely. When I worked at a large CDN with 50,000 servers around the world, we ALWAYS did phased releases, to make sure we didn't take down everything all at once, and to make sure we caught any performance regressions right away.

Is your issue that the user might be getting a version that won't stick around? That seems always the case, whether you do A/B or not. You might rollback if there is an issue, and you will certainly roll forward at some point, meaning users will get a new version at some point.

Would it be an issue if the A/B test was temporal? Like all users got one version today, and a different version tomorrow?

I guess I am just confused by this statement:

> If you don't have enough confidence in your changes to make them carte blanche, then don't make them at all.

This seems contrary to so many other complaints we see all the time, that companies push changes out without taking into account what users actually want. So, do we want companies that push out changes with no user feedback because they are confident that they know what users want, or do we want companies that get feedback from users on whether new changes are helping or hurting.

If you eliminate A/B testing, you'll get "A" testing ;-)

> Users don't want their shit changing all the time.

Eliminating A/B testing won't solve this problem. Even without A/B testing, they make updates, etc.

You might as well just say "Updating an online service without asking the user first is unethical."

Oh, and how much are you paying for that service...?

I think an important distinction being missed by those relying to you is that you seem to be saying that A/B testing is unethical when it is used to optimize human resource extraction (i.e. marketing).

(I have this weird feeling that you're not upset with blue/green deployments...)

> I strongly believe A/B testing users without their knowledge and enthusiastic consent is unethical

Look I get it feels weird but in practice most A/B tests are stuff like “does this copy change if ppl use this feature”.

The reasons they don’t is the same reason RCTs for new drugs don’t tell patients either. You end up with selection bias.

> If you don't have enough confidence in your changes to make them carte blanche, then don't make them at all

This is a bit hyperbolic, empirics is something that should be used more by decision makers not just for their own sake but for people who don’t understand why they are making them, especially in government (although It’s harder because finding cases where it’s appropriate is hard).

An A/B test isn’t just about what’s better, it’s about understanding all other things being equal how does one change to X affect Y. Which is information that can be used to inform the design of yet to be build features.

A lot of ppl have bad takes on what makes a product better, and they would otherwise have a greater say in the product design. Some product managers are just really stupid and are there due to nepotism so it’s an external equaliser and allowing the thoughtful ones to have more of a say.

> Users don't want their shit changing all the time.

Yep that’s why you don’t ask them.

I get if you have a specific flow that your use to. It would annoying for me too if that changed (as I’m pretty stubborn don’t like ppl making changes on my behalf), but that doesn’t mean it’s an objective better experience for all users or users who have yet to be familiar with the apps process.

When these products operate in competitive markets and not some winner takes all market these are often about improving users experience.

If this was something more high stakes like a medial trial I’d get it, but for stuff like filling out a document or watching a piece of media. The stakes for most SASS app are really low.

Software changes before my eyes constantly via normal releases so I don’t really care if I’m part of an experiment or not.

That’s software though—I see your point for something like content. I’m already used to seeing the title or thumbnail of a YouTube video change as the result of an experiment “winning” but the content itself…that would very jarring.

Surely this is way too broad a statement?

There are small A/B tests which absolutely make sense. You often see marketing sites making small tweaks to banners and copy. It's not that one has worse UX or even that one is objectively worse, just that different users have different preferences and it's often difficult to know exactly what will work best.

Similarly you can be very confident of something, but A/B testing it still reduces risk. Any significant change should probably always be rolled out to a small fraction of the user base first in case you accidentally change something for the worse.

I agree if you're talking about some BS experiment where a company uses A/B testing as an alternative to putting the hours into product design and user research.

A corollary to the apocryphal Henry Ford quote: if I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said “a faster horse”.

Original youtube is there, it's called subscriptions tab. A curated list of high-quality content creators accumulated for over a decade.

Youtube certainly took a lot of unpopular decisions lately, but being able to stream any hi-res video ever posted in an instant and for "free" is a miracle. I will be happy with youtube for as long as content creators I care about are happy and I can get their fresh content via browser, yt-dlp, or other means.

"The algorithm" is quite powerful. Most of my view time comes from long form content, between 30 minutes and 2hrs. Sometimes it can be a struggle to get it to show me a 10 minute video I can watch over breakfast or something. What Youtube pushes people towards is not uniform

A/B testing isn't about creativity, it's retention maxxing. It's what drives youtube face in every thumbnail, loud titles that don't say much, etc. This feature will optimise the actual content itself to be the most attention holding, overstimulating slop possible to synthisise.

This was already done for a documentary on Brian Eno that came out a couple of years ago. Nobody who watched the documentary could be sure that they had seen the same as anyone else unless they watched it together in the same physical location.

That's exactly what the focus should be. It may be naive in a modern context where everyone is addicted to "number go up," but it's the only way to get an authentic, not manufactured culture.

Yeah.. Marques makes good content and puts a lot of effort into it. There are a number of Youtubers like that..

But the vast majority are engaged in attention baiting; outrage, grievance, conspiracy, FOMO.. Take your pick.

Even some oldies like GN are churning out grievance and drama.

We all get our own little mini-socities with no one else in them.

So now the average Joe has to make 3 vids instead of 1 every time - as everyone else is now min maxing their engagement?

Just sounds rubbish both for viewers (look how terrible titles and thumbnails are after a/b tests) and uploaders alike