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…