Dear Software Makers
Dear Software Makers 2026-09-30 Marques Brownlee just released a video essay titled “Dear YouTube”. He talks about how YouTube is going to start shipping this new feature where makers can essentially publish different “variants” of their videos and see which performs best (an A/B test). Brownlee voices his: If I’m watching a video, do I know if it’s part of one of these A/B tests?
- ▪Dear Software Makers 2026-09-30 Marques Brownlee just released a video essay titled “Dear YouTube”.
- ▪He talks about how YouTube is going to start shipping this new feature where makers can essentially publish different “variants” of their videos and see which performs best (an A/B test).
- ▪Brownlee voices his: If I’m watching a video, do I know if it’s part of one of these A/B tests?
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Record
| Original publisher | Jim-nielsen |
| Canonical URL | https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/dear-software-makers/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 30 Sep 2026 19:45:38 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-30T20:57:05.845Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-30T20:57:05.845Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | tpaeHSNB_QSu · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Dear Software Makers 2026-09-30 Marques Brownlee just released a video essay titled “Dear YouTube”. I loved it. He talks about how YouTube is going to start shipping this new feature where makers can essentially publish different “variants” of their videos and see which performs best (an A/B test). Which immediately begs a lot of questions. Brownlee voices his: If I’m watching a video, do I know if it’s part of one of these A/B tests? If I’m reading the comments of a video, how do I saw the same thing as another commentor? How do linked timestamps work? It’s pretty wild when you think about it.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Jim-nielsen.
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