Not surprising. There's really not much justification for getting worked up over this. They're not sunsetting a critical component of Youtube. This isn't a Google Reader...come on.
4 people in a million? You'd get rid of the feature too. That's what you should do - it might alienate four people, but honestly, your business has to pick and choose which customers to piss off. You really can't please everyone in the world with your decisions, and this frankly wasn't useful to Youtube from a mathematical perspective.
The math pretty much proves it - this was a smart decision. People will adapt and get over it. This is barely news.
Four clicks in a million is not 4 people in a million. Unless all of your users show up exactly once per month, click one thing, and leave. Which is probably not the YouTube model.
Further, who these people are matters. The number of active editors on Wikipedia is about 0.0004% of total users. But if you kill something even a small percentage of them use, god help you.
Most importantly, people aren't mathematical entities. You may sometimes have to piss some customers off. But most of the time you don't have to piss anybody off. And that's a good choice, because unlike, say, your average integer, people have memories, and they talk with one another.
Product decisions aren't mathematical decisions; they're human decisions. Ones often helped by good math.
4 people in a million? You'd get rid of the feature too. That's what you should do - it might alienate four people, but honestly, your business has to pick and choose which customers to piss off. You really can't please everyone in the world with your decisions, and this frankly wasn't useful to Youtube from a mathematical perspective.
The math pretty much proves it - this was a smart decision. People will adapt and get over it. This is barely news.