The subscribe button on Youtube is a trap. And I say this as somebody who knows exactly what a channel is, why channels exist, why that subscribe button is there, and many of the reasons for fine little details in how they work; who could, if necessary, code Youtube from scratch, from the bare metal right up to all of the UI bloat; and who participated in building the technology base that Youtube relies on.
For that matter, spreadsheets are kind of a cognitive trap, and it’s not necessarily a good idea to invest a lot in learning to use them… let alone to invest time and effort in learning a cloud version.
Sure, I’ll bite, why is the youtube subscribe button a trap? I anticipate that we will agree about what the subscribe button is and what it does, which means that this is fundamentally going to be a disagreement about what the definition of a trap is. I’m not interested in litigating that, so mostly I am curious about any information you have about how subscribing works that you expect I don’t already know.
The subscribe button is there to take advantage of your cognitive and motivational structure and keep you “engaged” with YouTube. Having subscriptions gives you a “reason” to return to Youtube on a regular basis, and gives Youtube an excuse to send you “reminders” about content in your subscribed channels.
Your subscriptions may also help Youtube to feed you content that keeps you there once you show up, although Youtube has access to other, often more effective ways of doing that, and having to “honor” subscriptions may actually interefere with those, so I don’t think it really counts.
Anyway, the bottom line is that, if you are like most people, subscriptions will contribute to you spending more time on Youtube than you “should”, in the sense that your Youtube time will interfere with goals that you would, if asked, say were more important. The intent is to have “watching Youtube” be an activity in itself, rather than having Youtube be a tool that you use to get information relevant to some outside purpose.
The subscription system is also used to motivate people to give content to Youtube. Although some mega-channels make economic sense, the “gamification” of subscription numbers helps to motivate marginal creators to spend more time and effort than they can really afford.
Subscriptions may occasionally help to meet a “user goal” like learning or staying informed about a specific topic… but their design and usual effect is to advance the “Youtube goal” of keeping the user staring at, or possibly producing, Youtube content and advertising, more than the user otherwise would and regardless of the user’s own interests (in any sense of the word “interests”...).
Some people will say that the trap has to do with tracking your activities, but that’s basically not true. Subscriptions don’t track you any more than just visiting any major Web site will track you. It’s more about controlling your activities. Your subscriptions do help a little with analyzing you as an advertising target, but I don’t think that’s a really major purpose or effect.
Spreadsheets make it really easy to set up a simple “mathematical model”. It really doesn’t take more than about 5 minutes to learn enough about spreadsheets to get something useful going, and actually starting a spreadsheet has very low overhead, both in terms of what you have to do and of how much thought you have to put into it.
The problem with that is that it’s easy to start using them for everything, including things that are really too complicated to be safely done in a spreadsheet. It’s also possible to have something that started out as a reasonable spreadsheet application grow from that into an unreliable, unmaintainable monstosity.
If you view a spreadsheet as a program, it’s written in a “write only language”. It’s really hard to come into a big spreadsheet and understand how everything works, or know how to safely make a change, or meaningfully review it for correctness, or even apply revision control to it. There’s no global view; you have to interact with the whole thing one cell at a time. And you’re not exactly encouraged to give things meaningful names, either.
… but it’s SO EASY to start with a spreadsheet that people are often lulled into making one, and then adding more and more to it. When your spreadsheet reaches a certain complexity level, you may then find yourself investing time into learning more and more arcane features so you can extend what it does… which means that, for you, a spreadsheet will become even more the default tool the next time you want to do something. But it’ll still be a bad programming language.
You can end up with “spreadsheet experts” who use them for everything. If I had a nickel for every spreadsheet I’ve seen that should have been a database, for example...
It’s sort of like writing shell scripts; it’s trivial to write a script to automate a few commands you do all the time, but if you keep adding features, then a year later you have a monstrosity that you wish you’d written in a regular, maintainable language.
And by a “cloud version”, I mean Google Sheets (or Office 365, for that matter). The data are controlled entirely by the host; it may or may not be feasible to extract all of the information you put in, and it’s definitely not going to be trivial if your spreadsheet has any complexity. The program that does the calculations is controlled entirely by the host, and may be changed at any time, including in ways that alter the results. The feature set is controlled entirely by the host; features you rely on may be changed or completely removed at any moment. Not really attractive as a long-term investment.
On edit: what I use instead is usually a real programming language. I won’t say which ones I favor, because it would be impolite to start even more of a language war. :-)
I would love a web-based tool that allowed me to enter data in a spreadsheet-like way, present it in a spreadsheet-like way, but use code to bridge the two.
Subtracting out the “web-based” part as a first class requirement, while focusing on the bridge made of code as a “middle” from which to work “outwards” towards raw inputs and final results...
...I tend to do the first ~20 data entry actions as variable constants in my code that I tweak by hand, then switch to the CSV format for the next 10^2 to 10^5 data entry tasks that my data labelers work on, based on how I think it might work best (while giving them space for positive creativity).
A semi-common transitional pattern during the CSV stage involves using cloud spreadsheets (with multiple people logged in who can edit together and watch each other edit (which makes it sorta web-based, and also lets you use data labelers anywhere on the planet)) and ends with a copypasta out of the cloud and into a CSV that can be checked into git. Data entry… leads to crashes… which leads to validation code… which leads to automated tooling to correct common human errors <3
If the label team does more than ~10^4 data entry actions, and the team is still using CSV, then I feel guilty about having failed to upgrade a step in the full pipeline (including the human parts) whose path of desire calls out for an infrastructure upgrade if it is being used that much. If they get to 10^5 labeling actions with that system and those resources then upper management is confused somehow (maybe headcount maxxing instead of result maxxing?) and fixing that confusion is… complicated.
This CSV growth stage is not perfect, but it is highly re-usable during exploratory sketch work on blue water projects because most of the components can be accomplished with a variety of non-trivial tools.
If you know of something better for these growth stages, I’d love to hear about your workflows, my own standard methods are mostly self constructed.
On edit: what I use instead is usually a real programming language. I won’t say which ones I favor, because it would be impolite to start even more of a language war. :-)
Different programming languages are for different things.
‘I use this instead of spreadsheet’ - that’s a use case I haven’t heard a war over. (‘I use this note taking app’ - that I have read a lot of different sides on.)
I believe the reason the author mentioned their credentials was not to establish themselves as an authority, but to indicate that it’s possible to see the subscribe button as a trap even if one is tech savvy and knows it has nothing to do with e.g. subscription billing. (In contrast to where the article implied people avoided the subscribe button due to not understanding it.)
This is a good example of a situation where I believe the principle of charity is being applied too strongly. The author’s claim was that it is a trap, not that it is possible to see it as a trap. The structure of that first paragraph is “Claim that it is a trap. Points about being an authority figure on the topic.” (FWIW I don’t mean any of this contentiously, just constructive criticism.)
In agreement: It is literally an argument from authority because there is no other proof given. Readers of the original comment are asked to assume the commenter is correct based on their authority and reputation.
Like pjeby, I think you missed his point. He was not arguing from authority, he was presenting himself as evidence that someone tech-savvy could still see it as a trap. His actual reason for believing it is a trap is in his reply to GWS.
The subscribe button on Youtube is a trap. And I say this as somebody who knows exactly what a channel is, why channels exist, why that subscribe button is there, and many of the reasons for fine little details in how they work; who could, if necessary, code Youtube from scratch, from the bare metal right up to all of the UI bloat; and who participated in building the technology base that Youtube relies on.
For that matter, spreadsheets are kind of a cognitive trap, and it’s not necessarily a good idea to invest a lot in learning to use them… let alone to invest time and effort in learning a cloud version.
Sure, I’ll bite, why is the youtube subscribe button a trap? I anticipate that we will agree about what the subscribe button is and what it does, which means that this is fundamentally going to be a disagreement about what the definition of a trap is. I’m not interested in litigating that, so mostly I am curious about any information you have about how subscribing works that you expect I don’t already know.
The subscribe button is there to take advantage of your cognitive and motivational structure and keep you “engaged” with YouTube. Having subscriptions gives you a “reason” to return to Youtube on a regular basis, and gives Youtube an excuse to send you “reminders” about content in your subscribed channels.
Your subscriptions may also help Youtube to feed you content that keeps you there once you show up, although Youtube has access to other, often more effective ways of doing that, and having to “honor” subscriptions may actually interefere with those, so I don’t think it really counts.
Anyway, the bottom line is that, if you are like most people, subscriptions will contribute to you spending more time on Youtube than you “should”, in the sense that your Youtube time will interfere with goals that you would, if asked, say were more important. The intent is to have “watching Youtube” be an activity in itself, rather than having Youtube be a tool that you use to get information relevant to some outside purpose.
The subscription system is also used to motivate people to give content to Youtube. Although some mega-channels make economic sense, the “gamification” of subscription numbers helps to motivate marginal creators to spend more time and effort than they can really afford.
Subscriptions may occasionally help to meet a “user goal” like learning or staying informed about a specific topic… but their design and usual effect is to advance the “Youtube goal” of keeping the user staring at, or possibly producing, Youtube content and advertising, more than the user otherwise would and regardless of the user’s own interests (in any sense of the word “interests”...).
Some people will say that the trap has to do with tracking your activities, but that’s basically not true. Subscriptions don’t track you any more than just visiting any major Web site will track you. It’s more about controlling your activities. Your subscriptions do help a little with analyzing you as an advertising target, but I don’t think that’s a really major purpose or effect.
I appreciate that you took the time to explain your position. I think this is indeed a difference in the definition of “trap”, so I’ll leave it here.
Why are spreadsheets a trap, and what do you use instead? (What do you mean by a ‘cloud version’, Google’s spreadsheets?)
Spreadsheets make it really easy to set up a simple “mathematical model”. It really doesn’t take more than about 5 minutes to learn enough about spreadsheets to get something useful going, and actually starting a spreadsheet has very low overhead, both in terms of what you have to do and of how much thought you have to put into it.
The problem with that is that it’s easy to start using them for everything, including things that are really too complicated to be safely done in a spreadsheet. It’s also possible to have something that started out as a reasonable spreadsheet application grow from that into an unreliable, unmaintainable monstosity.
If you view a spreadsheet as a program, it’s written in a “write only language”. It’s really hard to come into a big spreadsheet and understand how everything works, or know how to safely make a change, or meaningfully review it for correctness, or even apply revision control to it. There’s no global view; you have to interact with the whole thing one cell at a time. And you’re not exactly encouraged to give things meaningful names, either.
… but it’s SO EASY to start with a spreadsheet that people are often lulled into making one, and then adding more and more to it. When your spreadsheet reaches a certain complexity level, you may then find yourself investing time into learning more and more arcane features so you can extend what it does… which means that, for you, a spreadsheet will become even more the default tool the next time you want to do something. But it’ll still be a bad programming language.
You can end up with “spreadsheet experts” who use them for everything. If I had a nickel for every spreadsheet I’ve seen that should have been a database, for example...
It’s sort of like writing shell scripts; it’s trivial to write a script to automate a few commands you do all the time, but if you keep adding features, then a year later you have a monstrosity that you wish you’d written in a regular, maintainable language.
And by a “cloud version”, I mean Google Sheets (or Office 365, for that matter). The data are controlled entirely by the host; it may or may not be feasible to extract all of the information you put in, and it’s definitely not going to be trivial if your spreadsheet has any complexity. The program that does the calculations is controlled entirely by the host, and may be changed at any time, including in ways that alter the results. The feature set is controlled entirely by the host; features you rely on may be changed or completely removed at any moment. Not really attractive as a long-term investment.
On edit: what I use instead is usually a real programming language. I won’t say which ones I favor, because it would be impolite to start even more of a language war. :-)
I would love a web-based tool that allowed me to enter data in a spreadsheet-like way, present it in a spreadsheet-like way, but use code to bridge the two.
Subtracting out the “web-based” part as a first class requirement, while focusing on the bridge made of code as a “middle” from which to work “outwards” towards raw inputs and final results...
...I tend to do the first ~20 data entry actions as variable constants in my code that I tweak by hand, then switch to the CSV format for the next 10^2 to 10^5 data entry tasks that my data labelers work on, based on how I think it might work best (while giving them space for positive creativity).
A semi-common transitional pattern during the CSV stage involves using cloud spreadsheets (with multiple people logged in who can edit together and watch each other edit (which makes it sorta web-based, and also lets you use data labelers anywhere on the planet)) and ends with a copypasta out of the cloud and into a CSV that can be checked into git. Data entry… leads to crashes… which leads to validation code… which leads to automated tooling to correct common human errors <3
If the label team does more than ~10^4 data entry actions, and the team is still using CSV, then I feel guilty about having failed to upgrade a step in the full pipeline (including the human parts) whose path of desire calls out for an infrastructure upgrade if it is being used that much. If they get to 10^5 labeling actions with that system and those resources then upper management is confused somehow (maybe headcount maxxing instead of result maxxing?) and fixing that confusion is… complicated.
This CSV growth stage is not perfect, but it is highly re-usable during exploratory sketch work on blue water projects because most of the components can be accomplished with a variety of non-trivial tools.
If you know of something better for these growth stages, I’d love to hear about your workflows, my own standard methods are mostly self constructed.
There are tools that let you do that. There is a whole unit testing paradigm called fixtures for it. A prominent example is Fitnesse: http://fitnesse.org/FitNesse.UserGuide.WritingAcceptanceTests
I’m not sure I see how this resembles what I described?
Maybe I misunderstand what you have in mind? The idea is to
enter data in a spreadsheet,
that is interpreted as row-wise input to function in a program (typically a unit test), and
the result of the function is added back into additional columns in the spreadsheet.
The idea is that I can do all this from my browser, including writing the code.
That would be cool. I think it should be relatively easy to set up with replit (online IDE).
Sounds a bit like AlphaSheets (RIP).
Different programming languages are for different things.
‘I use this instead of spreadsheet’ - that’s a use case I haven’t heard a war over. (‘I use this note taking app’ - that I have read a lot of different sides on.)
Downvoted for being purely an argument from authority.
I believe the reason the author mentioned their credentials was not to establish themselves as an authority, but to indicate that it’s possible to see the subscribe button as a trap even if one is tech savvy and knows it has nothing to do with e.g. subscription billing. (In contrast to where the article implied people avoided the subscribe button due to not understanding it.)
This is a good example of a situation where I believe the principle of charity is being applied too strongly. The author’s claim was that it is a trap, not that it is possible to see it as a trap. The structure of that first paragraph is “Claim that it is a trap. Points about being an authority figure on the topic.” (FWIW I don’t mean any of this contentiously, just constructive criticism.)
In agreement: It is literally an argument from authority because there is no other proof given. Readers of the original comment are asked to assume the commenter is correct based on their authority and reputation.
Like pjeby, I think you missed his point. He was not arguing from authority, he was presenting himself as evidence that someone tech-savvy could still see it as a trap. His actual reason for believing it is a trap is in his reply to GWS.