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This is a clear example of penny-wise but pound-foolish. At no point in a product's lifetime does should machine learning obviate the need for good taste.

I'm not going to argue that, but that ship sailed back in ~2014. All the FAANGs do live A/B testing like this.

2014 lines up with my memory of when YT recommendations, among many things, started to change for the worse.

On a side note, wow. I can’t believe that 8 years have already passed. It feels like yesterday that people were actively debating these topics here on HN.

Patrick McKenzie (aka patio11 here) had a post/talk about how when he was working with FogBugz they realized that people LOVE to watch Joel Spolsky talk.

In fact, A/B testing showed that the longer the video they put on the home page, the higher the conversion rate.

Gawd those haunting eyes... I wonder how many people donated just to make them stop.