Tuesday, May 04, 2021

An Open Letter to Nebula aka WatchNebula

Dear Nebula

 I don't have a smart device, I watch your service via Chrome browser on Windows 10, this is unlikely to ever change.

Your service has lots of interesting content, but it completely SUCKS and I don't watch it because it's almost impossible to discover good content in any reliable way.

You NEED a new version of the interface for the web, there are far too many user interactions missing.

  • No subscriptions, so I can't reliably discover someone I like and keep up with all their new content
  • No comments, so feedback is squashed
  • No way to share videos I like, and build a social network around them (and help advertise your site)
  • No ratings, nor watch counts, so there's no reliable way to get any hint of how good something is other than the title or thumbnail, which I've been trained to ignore.
  • No externally usable URL of any kind, as far as I can see
  • No published date, extended description, etc.

I'd love to see your service take off, but your rush to become a TV service is removing all the ways to add value to otherwise random video streams that made social media and youtube so darned useful.

Please at least make some sort of API available for your authorized users so we can build our own far better interface.  I don't want to see your service die.

Mike Warot
May 4, 2021

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