[mistermann]

> but I'd rather the time is spent innovating and trying many different things than spending valuable engineering time supporting projects that aren't going anywhere

Instead, they have some of their engineers do things like remove the ability to do custom grouping on youtube subscriptions. It often seems like they are seeing how badly they can treat their users and still remain the leader.

[Klathmon]

I've never even heard of that, and I would consider myself a heavy youtube user.

But i'm just one person, so that doesn't mean much, but do you really think they are just removing features to spite you?

What about the fact that every feature has a cost, and by removing it they remove that cost. How did that custom grouping work on mobile? on TV's? on youtube gaming? If it's not supported everywhere, it feels buggy and incomplete, which is bad not only for their image, but also for usability. What was it's discoverability? How important of a feature was it really to you?

It's easy to use these things as examples of "something they took away", but i'm confident that if I were put in their exact same situation, I would most likely make the same choice, and i'm sure i'm not alone here.

[mistermann]

Maybe you are a recent user like myself as the functionality was removed relatively recently, people have come up with various crap workarounds.

> do you really think they are just removing features to spite you?

Of course not, just curious why they are removing useful functionality. Your questions are valid, but considering Google's history of "improving" their products, I don't feel compelled to believe there is a good reason for it.