Adding four random digits to people's names was a brilliant solution to two common problems with usernames (users wanting the same username and usernames of notable personalities getting leaked), and now they're just going to the exact same system everyone else uses with all of its attendant problems? Fuck off
As somebody in the tech industry, many here suspect that it's due to the corporate promotion/performance rating system
Product managers, product designers, UX designers, are all judged by the amount of "impact" that they can make on the product they're working on. If the product works perfectly fine and nothing gets changed/added, they don't get a good rating, don't get promoted, and can even get fired because they didn't do anything
So they end up making changes, just any changes they can as long as it can move some objective metric up (active users, user session time, positive actions taken by users, etc.) so that they can point to it and say "Look, I improved the product by making X change which caused Y metric to go up Z percent"
I bet you anything the A/B experiment that YouTube launched to remove the sorting old from new improved some user watch metric or maybe even some ad revenue metric (newer videos have more relevant ads? idk) so the feature got launched
Jesus. One of the oldest IT jokes is that if your IT guy is always running around solving problems and fixing things and putting out fires and keeping the company afloat fire him immediately, and if your IT guy spends all his days fucking around in his office playing Doom give him a raise.
What drives this corporate culture? I see this every time someone gets a promotion or a new position. Let's create bullshit for bullshit's sake to say we did bullshit on our review? I mean what ever happened to keep it simple stupid and if it isn't broke don't fix it? If the product works and you're the #1 metric in the world then....keep up the good work?
It's top down. The bigger a company gets the more and more every employee and project needs to be quantified into some number that can be put on a balance sheet or quarterly earnings
Revenue and profit must keep going up every single quarter. Growth must continue to be infinite even if the market is already almost completely saturated by a monopoly. It doesn't matter if a product is perfect. It needs to make more money thus change must happen to the product one way or another
There's also, i don't know what to call, it, but I get the impression most executives, especially since Reagan when being an executive started to be a profession unto itself, don't know or care what the companies they nominally run do. The actual function of the company is to make short term profits for shareholders and they don't give a shit what the product is., So they just try to squeeze blood from a stone and that's often destructive to the company's actual product because there are basically psychopathic paperclip maximizers jerking people around to make an arbitrary number go up instead of skilled managers trying to support the product.
https://youtu.be/7j1850-qlm8
I'm willing to bet that older content gets a lower engagement rating by some internal YouTube metric. I know for a fact that they grade contributor-accounts based on the regular and frequent release of content. So you get more YouTube Points for doing a dozen 1-hour long videos a week that are crap and forgotten as soon as they're published than a single 1-hour long video that's wildly popular and heavily referenced for years on end.
Just like all the constant unnecessary UI redesigns, it's a bunch of people constantly having to justify their own employment. And what happens when you run out of obviously good things to implement (that you're actually allowed to do)? Well, you gotta go back to the drawing board and figure out problems no one is actually having. Can be fantastic to make Number Go Up but that doesn't mean it's good.