I find it fascinating that people think 12 seconds armchair psychology is enough to definitively rule out phenomena that hinge on complex tech and complex human deliberations about policy. That works on campy monster of the week TV shows but it catastrophically underestimates real world complexity.

We've got documented cases in the wild of youtube adding 5 second timer, as well as experimenting with 3 video limits for adblock users, not to mention the cat and mouse game of breaking scraper-oriented tools like Newpipe. So it's happened before, and on-the-ground evidence of historical precedent and a straight look at incentives tell us more than assumed psychological states.

▲

crazygringo a day ago | parent [-]

Did you mean to reply to a different comment? Mine didn't say anything about psychology.

But you do seem to be strengthening my comment -- when YouTube was implementing a 3 video limit for users blocking ads, they were doing so with a big huge message: "It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Video playback will be blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled."

That makes sense as a strategy, telling the user what to change. Silently using up more CPU doesn't.

▲

glenstein a day ago | parent [-]

Musing on how a message will be subjectively experienced by users to the point of ruling out explanations based on an assumed subjective reaction, and assuming complex software development outcomes are tied to that specific strategy, is in fact about psychology on multiple levels, despite your protestation to the contrary. Specifically it's armchair psychology that underestimates complexity.

Most of my examples cut against your interpretation rather than in favor of. The 5 second delay was discovered rather than announced, and same with Newpipe breaking, and I don't even agree that the video message had anything to do with a broad principle of always tying communications to user experience. If anything the history is the opposite, rotating through various forms of obstruction all of which nudge user behavior in various ways, perfectly agnostic to any principle of how it gets communicated.

	▲	crazygringo a day ago \| parent [-]
		Not really. It's pretty common sense to say that YouTube CPU usage will not be linked to adblocking for most people. Any more than a sunny day is linked to what you ate for dinner last night. It's not psychology. It's just straightforward common sense. You seem to be trying to obfuscate something here that is really quite simple.