The YouTube app for Android. It’s become my hobby to observe how it gradually becomes worse and worse. But not with dark patterns but just plain bad handling.
- all icons became bigger over time, having to scroll more if you have multiple playlists
- sorting has recently become almost impossible, you have to hit that perfect one pixel wide spot to rearrange videos
- the search, oh my… 3 results, 5 unrelated videos, twenty shorts, 5 suggestions, 3 more results, repeat
- only shows couple of playlists, have to click on “show all”
- playlists are sorted alphabetically, or by last addition, varies from update to update. Muscle memory is useless
- all the above varies from device to other device to browser to PC, there’s no consistency
- and so much more
If I want to use YouTube seriously I’m using Firefox and ublock, but I reached a point where I’m looking forward to every app update to enjoy the “improvements” they made for a “better user experience”.
And ignores what we really need.
Dark patterns and malicously coded. Its constant.
It’s to get you to accidentally click on the thing they want you to instead of what you intended.
Sometimes yes. Most of the time, I doubt it. It’s just that too many don’t consider muscle memory or anything like that when re-arranging things. I’ve seen it first hand. I’ve had to argue about some of these changes, like re-arranging ok and cancel buttons. They need to be the same order everywhere else it’s very easy to accidentally click the wrong one.
It’s also because social media companies are beholden to the hypercapitalist quarterly growth above all else, so you have to do something to appease the board, so you keep tweaking rearranging, etc to point to something when your boss says “how are you growing this quarter.”
