HACKER Q&A
📣 gtirloni

Product managers, why is a feature not customizable?


YouTube a while ago introduced mixes and you can't say you're not interested or disable that completely.

Why do seemingly simple customizations aren't allowed? This seems to be a long trend now in product management that shows in various places.

In this example, what could possibly be lost by allowing the user to hide a panel they don't want to see anymore? What's being gained by the product team when it forces a feature onto users like that?

This is a serious question because I don't think the product managers behind YouTube are dumb, so there must be a good reason and I'd like to learn more about this reality.

Any product managers out there could take a guess?

  👤 tlb Accepted Answer ✓
They do it because it makes more money. They've measured the amount of time spent (and ads served) to people with and without the feature, and they found that, averaged across the user base, the feature increases revenue. So everyone gets it.

At least, that's what every ad-supported platform thinks they're doing. There can be other factors, especially in large process-oriented companies like Google. Like, an ambitious PM wants to be able to point to a feature they added in their annual performance review, so they do some sloppy measurements to show that their dumb feature increases revenue even if the change is just noise. You can see why such a PM might not want there to be a way for people to disable the feature, since that metric could clearly show how unpopular it is.

👤 efortis
In general, customizable widgets are more complex to develop and learn.

BTW, an extension for blocking that feature is not difficult. Perhaps you’ll just need to block the api request for the mixes.

For example, that’s how I skip the Upgrade prompt in Amazon Music with this extension:

https://github.com/ericfortis/amazon-music-skip-upgrade-prom...

👤 repelsteeltje
Not saying the feature you mention isn't worth the fuzz. But making choices on what features to add is just as important as deciding which to remove. If any feature is kept indefinitely, your product gets bloated.

That's a problem to users as well as those maintaining the code base. A thousand paper cuts, barnacles showing you down, those kinds of metaphors.

👤 ungreased0675
For YouTube specifically, you are not the customer. Viewers are the product. If they do something that annoys you, but you don’t leave, that change is a success.
👤 paulcole
> Why do seemingly simple customizations aren't allowed

1. They’re not as simple as they seem from the outside.

2. Don’t want to put time/resources into that specific feature.

3. To spite the dorks who yell about how they are power users and as such have the right to customize every little thing to fit their workflow — when the reality is that 99% of users have no interest in customizing these things.