They probably got it from Snow Crash. The oldest surviving globes of the known world date back to 1492 according to Wikipedia and the Greeks probably created their own variations a few millennia ago.
It was so natural and intuitive that Youtube's version STILL doesn't compare to how good, fast, seemless, and unintrusive it is done on the porn sites, years later.
Dang I saw that was a new feature but didn't know they'd actually started borrowing features from porn sites. What the heck is the youtube team doing that they're creating useful features slower than that sort of site?
I take issue with that assessment. Porn sites exist in a fiercely competitive environment AND they are profitable. These are two features that Youtube lacks and their presence on porn sites reflects (at least partially) favorably on their engineering quality/innovation.
Porn has generally been a frontrunner of tech. If anything, that has slowed down recently.
Porn was the first to adopt portable cameras. VHS. DVDs. Credit card payments for online. Chat. Webcams. VR. 4K (not the best idea). etc.
For many years, the Adult Entertainment Expo and CES were held simultaneously in Vegas. And the AES tech talks were often better as CES tended to blur the line between marketing and tech while at AES the marketing/sales and tech were ... more strongly delineated.
Oh, hey, look at that. For 2023, they're back to being on the same date. Presumably attendance at both is sufficiently off that they needed to consolidate again.
> People in thumbnails make weird facial expressions for different reasons
I’ve seen porn videos with a YT-style thumbnail (annoying person making a dumb face in front of whatever is actually interesting), but so far they are very rare.
That would seem to suggest that the obnoxious YT-style thumbnails are mainly driven by children. (Or, at least, with strictly adult-only audiences they don't appear.)
I assume this is because the YT annoying dumb face thing is simply less enticing than ... the scenes and "expressions" they can get away with on a porn site. I'd guess a large set of youtube creators would be more risque and scantily clad in their thumbnails if YT would allow it.
So... let's just be glad YT only allows mouths to be agape on the thumbnails you have to scroll past.
No, thumbnails tend to look more like actual thumbnails; a frame in the middle of a video sequence, or figures from a scientific paper, than an excerpt from a tabloid paper.