But what if I want a faster horse?

All the result of A/B tests. Everything will converge to give you an engaging experience for most people. The only not too bad student is reddit which lets you keep using their older UI if you want to. But everything else is pushing new driven by A/B tests UI optimized for engagement.

With the onslaught of Javascript-parsing bots and crawlers, how useful are A/B testing results any more?

"Engaging experience" being actually a weasel word for "sucking your brains out to make you watch ads and valueless nonsense".

My hunch is these algos are also optimized for hiding the long tail of content that's more expensive to serve as it's not edge-cached. And it was the long tail that drew many of us to these services in the first place. At least that's my feeling using Youtube and Netflix these days.

Not just A/B test but all happening while cost optimizations happen.

The key metric seems to be no longer how many users you can make sign up, but how can I keep an subscription running at lowest cost to serve possible.

The UHD price is not worth it for a long term subscription, and the HD quality is subpar.

I think it's very likely this kind of optimization is giving people want they "will" want, instead of what they "do" want.

If you ask a heroine user if they want to use, I suspect most will say no.

But if you A/B test their behavior and build a product based on what they actually do, you're going to start selling more heroin and encourage more heroin use.

To everyone's detriment.

>But everything else is pushing new driven by A/B tests UI optimized for engagement

That really hit the nail. Advertising industry along has ruined web! Everything is for trigger what action we want user to do on the page, how can we see what user is thinking.

Very creepy indeed from a user perspective. Now days I don't care if telementary is aggregated or open or if it helps developer makes better software.

How about NO telementary!!! NO tracking!!!

This is an "old man shakes fist at clouds" opinion, but I think HD video is a huge waste of time/money for living room watching. Your eyes cannot effectively resolve that resolution at normal "couch" viewing distances for common TV sizes. This is kind of like how audio quality peaked at CDish quality. Anything better is largely inaudible.

I don't think it's about expense, it's more about hiding the fact that their catalogue is actually really small. They can't let you narrow your search at all because then they wouldn't have any content to give you.

Think how many times you've searched for a specific film and it says "Content related to <thing that you actually wanted>".

This is absolutely true. Spotify employs "ghost artists" that create the most inoffensive, royalty-free background music possible, and then they prioritize them in their auto-generated playlists.

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...

Meanwhile, a lot of this content is on places like Tubi.

> I don't think it's about expense, it's more about hiding the fact that their catalogue is actually really small.

I agree with you for Netflix.

However, Youtube's catalog is almost certainly larger today than it was a decade ago. Even if you could somehow weight by quality, I think it would be hard to argue that Youtube's content catalog has gotten worse. Maybe average quality per video has gone down, but there is so much content on Youtube nowadays, assuming you're able to find it.

I'm not sure about Spotify.

I fear old reddit is going to be killed off this year. They're getting rid of the red envelope for messages/replies, they've pushed the notification and chat with red icons into old reddit and more and more content seems to "accidentally" link to new reddit.

They left it alone for years but now they're converging them, looks like it's only a matter of time