I strongly believe A/B testing users without their knowledge and enthusiastic consent is unethical. If you don't have enough confidence in your changes to make them carte blanche, then don't make them at all. Users don't want their shit changing all the time.

I'm not a fan of the new approach, which is, basically "We don't need to be creative, up front. We'll just shove some crap out quickly, and work on the friction points."

But it's not that simple. We definitely need to "pave the bare spots" (desire paths); It's just that we need to start off, at what we sincerely believe to be an optimal place, knowing that it isn't, in fact, optimal.

In most cases the A and the B in an A/B test really should otherwise mostly identical, but one thing is different.

If almost everything is different, it’s hard to learn for next time what exactly what led to a change in which ever dependent variable your observating.

Welcome to a world where commenting on a YouTube video is the same as writing a product review on Amazon. Now you need to include enough details that future readers will be able to tell that you are talking about a different product/video.

> The skill of being a “creator” is not about maximizing views, retention, etc. It’s about finding creative ways to share stories, teach concepts, explore ideas, etc. Views, retention, etc. are all downstream of that.

this seems wildly naive

I've seen this argument a few times and honestly I don't get it - how do people propose we otherwise measure relative success of particular interventions -- Vibes? I've found that people who complain about how everything needs to be measured and how measurements are imperfect are often just bad at devising measurable quantities as proxies of real-world benefit. Sure it can take a bit of time to devise such measurements, and they're not inherently valuable, but if I can prove that a given variant performs better, why not pursue the preferable alternative?

It seems easy enough to say "keep the youtube we love" but how do you think this variant came about in the first place? I can assure you there have been numerous A/B tests that have led to the current feature set. And even if its a local rather than global maximum, at least there are measurable qualities by which it is preferable. Also - do you believe that everyone who says this is harkening back to the same historical reality? This is quickly approaching "make youtube great again" territory - when exactly was it great again? and why? This statement is easy to agree with and hard to prove.

It also seems easy to handle links to different variants; just supply a URL parameter. This is a non-issue.

If someone out there has a non-tea leaf divination style alternative to measuring things as a way to determine success, I'm all ears, but I don't believe in fortune tellers, and people who make software shouldn't either.