Why does a random content farm control youtube.com/playlists?
lincoln.swaine-moore.isBecause YT reserved /playlist and not /playlists. They also haven't reserved /watchs or /watched.
People will quickly realize that /playlists loads some random channel they don't care about and will click away.
To add: the top video only has 10k views over 2 months. YT is watched by billions of people every day, 5k people a month accidentally going to /playlists probably isn't worth the cost of kicking back their username and paying the engineers to make the commit reserving that url.
Honestly I'm surprised that YT would let users have anything like a top level path; I'd expect it to be all youtube.com/u/myuser/$FOO where FOO can be a video or playlist or whatever.
I have to imagine it's for backwards compatibility. Seems to have been a choice made in 2008[0] if not before, although new handles are primarily accessible via `/@handle`.
0: https://web.archive.org/web/20080501135434/https://www.youtu...
Because youtube hasn't siezed it from them yet?
What I'd want to know is what percentage of netizens* even know that you can just add stuff to a url willy-nilly.
* as I type this word, the cognoscenti can literally hear my bones creak
Typical people don't add stuff to a URL, but if they see a link that says "youtube.com/playlists", they will probably not expect it to be some garbage channel not affiliated with Youtube.
The typical user will never see the url because they use the YouTube app on their phone.
A related topic that probably most people don’t know about is the public suffix list. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List
it's all content farms.
Because "enshittificationj".
I realize that is horribly glib, but it's also horribly accurate.