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YouTube puts third-party clients on notice: Show ads or get blocked
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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Technology
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The number of times I've heard "XYZ will never happen" in the area of tech from one person or another over the decades (or made the mistake of thinking so myself) is high.
Youtube will either become reasonable in their practices again (which could include a pricing adjustment for ad-free access), or will be replaced as the de facto video service. It may not happen in the short timespan we'd all like to see, but it will happen.
History would suggest that, but I'm starting to believe we're in a tech service bubble that's ready to pop. I touched on this in my comment, but it's becoming clearer than ever that the vast majority of the services we use today are not sustainable on a number of levels. Economically, they're all a mess.
Food delivery services are bleeding money constantly in the hopes that one day they'll find a way to profit. They won't. It's an insane business model. The actual cost of the service is many times the price of the food you're buying. Uber/Lyft already isn't keeping prices low enough to be a cheap option anymore because they've coasted too long on VC funding and it's time for them to start making money. But they still aren't and if they charged what it actually costs to operate, no one would use it. Many online platforms can't sustain themselves despite being major social media hubs. Streaming services spend more on buying up movies, shows, IP rights, and other streaming services than their subscriptions bring in.
The endgame of all this means everything will become unaffordably expensive for almost everyone, the services utterly nosedive in quality as companies cut costs and fire staff, or they go bankrupt and collapse. I think we've already had it as good as it's gonna get and we're going to go through a period of corporations slowly pulling back everything they've pushed into our lives with investor funding over the past decade. It's not just Lemmy's favorite buzzword "enshitification." I think a lot of what we expect from the Internet is not sustainable and it's not going to stick around in any form we would want.
While you've got some reasonable points, I'm about 14 years into using exclusively the OS everyone tried to tell me would never be viable on the desktop as my only desktop OS, and have been able to find opportunities to deploy it in my day job also. Haven't used Windows except when paid to in all that time.
And we're conversing here on Lemmy, which may be objectively "worse" than Reddit by some metrics, but not any metrics that matter to me, nor, I think, to the majority of its users.
When I'm done typing this I'm going to fire up my Jellyfin client to connect to my free and open source Jellyfin media server, and watch some content on that system which does everything I'd ever hoped a media server would do, even though I was confidently told by many people when it first forked from Emby (after Emby was enshittified) that it would be dead in two years, and certainly could never begin to compete with Plex. (I have never missed Plex for a single minute since moving to Jellyfin)
Those are just three recent examples that I could think of without much effort. As you may be thinking, all of them are far smaller in scale than youtube, and yet, all three of them are things that quite happily serve my needs without spying on me or requiring exorbitant fees to feed someone else's greed. I can (and do) support them financially, and in other ways, because I choose to.
I'm not listing more examples because I'm too lazy to, not because lots more don't exist.
More broadly, I grew up during the time when very nearly everything regarding using a personal computer really was controlled by corporations, and was exorbitantly expensive. I had a computer because I was privileged enough to have parents who could buy me one, but the only free or inexpensive things to do with it were: Piracy (via locally copying each others' games in most cases), Bulletin Board Systems, and learning to program. Shareware and Freeware existed, but with some notable exceptions tended to be not so good for various reasons, and the selection was not especially broad.
There was no free/cheap equivalent like the Raspberry Pi to play with, but if you really wanted to pinch pennies you could build a PC with a kit from Heathkit or Radio Shack, for a fee that was still out of reach for a great many people due to cost or skill. There was not a global internet where people could collaborate and teach each other, and to whatever degree things like BBSs and Quantumlink (which eventually became AOL) might have been capable of providing those sorts of interpersonal connections, the critical mass wasn't there in a way that it is today.
We have Linux. We have cheap and/or open hardware. We have a vast trove of Free (not just gratis: libre) software that anyone in the world can use to run on that hardware, and improve on their own without penalty. We can share knowledge with others at a rate unheard of for most individuals decades ago. We have numerous examples of users who keep such services and products going, and thriving, without needing to siphon money out of the public as fast as possible to appease shareholder value.
I predict that any such collapse as you describe will be transient, and it will pass far more quickly than it would have in the past. We (gesturing broadly) have the technology, the capability, and (I think) the desire to move past reliance on many of these services and corporate-controlled environments, and various individuals are already doing so. What emerges on the other side after such a paradigm shift as you predict won't be Youtube, but that won't mean it's a step backwards, either.
I'm not convinced that's a bad thing overall.
Enshittification is a concept that has a little bit more depth than just being Lemmy's favorite buzzword.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
I understand where you're coming from. I'm not personally a Linux user despite a lot of what I value overlapping with the Linux community broadly. I do think much of the technology we use today can and should be replaced by open source alternatives and I'm optimistic about growing interest globally in that regard. I'm not at all suggesting we submit to the new corporate-controlled Internet or go back to a pre-2000s lifestyle.
But I think we're talking about different things, so let me just bring it back to YouTube. A lot of what we can do is limited by inescapable expenses: server costs and labor. We can say labor is optional because a lot of open source projects are developed and maintained by volunteers. But people do need money to live, so this project becomes the side gig, not the full time job. YouTube's already a mess with moderation. Imagine a video platform with no full time staff to review illegal uploaded content, DMCA requests, comments, etc. But the bigger issue is the scale of YouTube, trying to make billions of videos play seamlessly at all times all over the world and just work. I can't fathom the infrastructure needed for that. It would cost far more than it would make in donations if that was all it was accepting. No ads means the budget is that much smaller. If the small percentage of users with YouTube Premium doesn't bring in enough to keep things running, the open source version wouldn't either. And fewer people would be willing to pay for it.
This is what I mean by services that are unsustainable. Yes, clearly the technology makes it possible. But there is a cost to it and I think we're entering a time when we don't get those things for free anymore.
I think the primary difference in our views is that I don't think Youtube needs to be replaced by something like it to be replaced. I don't claim to have a viable approach in mind, but I'm certain one exists.
I would love a federated network of video platforms as long as they can all be searched collectively. Would be great if videos could even be migrated to other instances if storage becomes too limited on one of them. Yeah, it probably isn't ideal that YouTube is all one platform, but it certainly makes it easy to find what you're looking for most of the time.