Dear Software Makers

Marques Brownlee just released a video essay titled “Dear YouTube”.

I loved it.

He talks about how YouTube is going to start shipping this new feature where makers can essentially publish different “variants” of their videos and see which performs best (an A/B test).

Which immediately begs a lot of questions. Brownlee voices his:

• If I’m watching a video, do I know if it’s part of one of these A/B tests?
• If I’m reading the comments of a video, how do I saw the same thing as another commentor?
• How do linked timestamps work?

It’s pretty wild when you think about it. I mean, imagine sending someone a link, “Check out this cool video!” And at that point you’re basically crossing your fingers, “I hope they see the same thing I did…”

Marques says he spoke to some YouTube engineers about these questions and they didn’t really have answers. They were kind of just like, “We don’t know — yolo! This’ll ship soon.”

So his video is a kind of plea to YouTube creators everywhere: Don’t use this feature!

There’s this sort of unspoken rule of community on YouTube, that like we’re all having this same experience together — we’re all watching the same video. That is what makes it a cultural phenomenon is that we all saw the same thing […] so letting people put up two or three different videos of the same thing at the same time kind of fundamentally breaks that, which doesn't feel right.

I agree, 100%.

Brownlee goes on to make a lot of great points in the video that, I think, can be applicable to making software as well. A few that stood out:

• 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.
• Making (and finishing) something over and over and over is a better use of your time than making one thing and then trying all kinds of variants and obsessing over their varied performance.
• When you focus on optimizing, you end up trimming out all the creative (and fun) stuff because those things won’t, by definition, ladder up to metrics of efficiency. (Moby Dick was not the most efficient way to tell that story.)
• Stand by your creative choices. Learn from your wins and failures, then make the next thing. Have some conviction.

I find it interesting how Brownlee shares his opinion that YouTube spends way too much time chasing their competitors and not enough time being YouTube.

Which, when you think about it, is exactly the kind of place a feature like this would stem from: an insecurity in your own creative choices. How YouTube approaches its own insecurities is now trickling down as a feature to its users.

“Let’s let people make lots of variations on things, try all of them, and see what performs best” is exactly the kind of thinking you get in a platform that doesn’t know what it wants to be. So it’s left spending its time 1) doing what others are doing, and 2) following the fickle whims of whatever it can measure.

It’s like this adolescent attitude of, “I don’t know what I want to be, so I’m gonna imitate my peers and let others tell me what they think I should be.”

Anyway, that’s a long way of saying I liked the video. You might too. Hopefully you see the same thing I did, lol.