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this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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Stop this tantrum throwing and just buy premium.
Hosting/streaming videos is not free.
If you watch yt at least 10 hours a month then it's good deal.
No. I don’t think I will.
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YouTube used to host and stream videos for free, without ads, for years.
They operated at a loss just for this reason. Years of loss revenue to trick people into using the service and building a user base only to pull the rug out from under us and go ad crazy. They did this to themselves, we got used to being ad free so now they think we will just roll over and accept the ads. Too bad there wasn't a way to sue companies for operating at a loss on purpose to artificially create a market then fundamentally change the product after the fact but as it was a "free" service there is only one stakeholder.
"bait and switch" is the technical term.
I am not sure if this applies here as they technically kept the service the same as it was before. Bait and switch is more different and not over a long time.
You are technically correct. The term for Google was doing is "dumping."
I think, dumping is the first part of what we discussed, then there's the second part where you can set an arbitrary price or do other unfair things because you've become effectively a monopoly.
But the public opinion clearly showed me that I shouldn't interfere with this discussion 😅
Also, operating at a loss allows to throw away the contenders that have to somehow profit to survive. Well sometimes those scammy services don't get to the point of actually getting money (kind of like Reddit)
But I guess this is what to expect from any free service, very few of them are run as a form of charity, or at least I think so
People think everything online is free. But everything one does online has a cost and we don't want to pay it. So we got ads.
Happy Cake Day
I received this thing which costs money for free for years and I am entitled to continue receiving it for free.
(If yt was publicly funded or essential service I would agree. It is not.)
You do know that there were static ads on the pages, right? And the whole aggregate viewer data thing? They were never producing the service for free; they had regular old advertising and metrics to sell to fund it.
What they didn't have were garbage intrusive unskippable video ads before and during the video I wanted to watch.
And times change. No one is paying top dollar for a static ad.
What they also didn't have was positive cash flow.
And decent video quality, do we want to go back to the days of 240p?, cause that's the only resolution a static banner ad model can support.
And? You have no idea what their costs are that much video storage and bandwidth. Do they ever delete videos or just keep adding more and more.
Yeah and I don't give a shit either. Not my problem.
If it's not economical for them they can shut it off whenever they like.
That’s what they’re doing right now. What is your point?
I wouldn't piss on Google if it was on fire. They will never get another cent from me. They are a charter member of the Tech Axis of Evil.
Took me less than a minute of googling to find "hey, I'm paying for premium, why am I seeing adverts?" and it turns out there are a whole pile of exceptions that means YT can show you ads even when you're paying them not to.
I personally have had premium for ~3 years and I’ve never seen an ad. Sounds like FUD to me. I can’t believe I’m defending Google of all companies, I no longer use any of their products including Gmail, Search & Maps.
But nothing comes close to YouTube, it’s just them and a bunch of also-rans, and it’s literally the only streaming service I pay for because it simply cannot be replicated in any other way.
They're not getting a penny from me while they host hate on their platform, for one.
Second, fuck em. Am I supposed to care about Google? The company that routinely ruins everything good in every product they've ever had? Am I to assume their bullshit ends once they get my credit card?
I paid good money for Google Play Music for years only for them to destroy it. I paid for Google Drive for years only for them to break the desktop syncing functions. I've been paying for Android since it started, and they have routinely broken my ability to use my own phone the way I please, and now they actively punish me for it.
And you want me to keep paying them?
Nah. I'm not helping them. If they can't afford to host it for free, fine. Let it burn.
Apparently this was a compromise with music publishers, which is why YouTube Music is force bundled with it. They insisted that if YouTube was going to have a premium service it had to pay out music licensing because so much music is already on YouTube.
Youtube is already being paid in my data and I support the creators I watch already. So no thanks.
Thing is, ads are fine, ads that are mandatory and break the experience are antithetical to the very notion of user centric media. This is not a linear broadcast medium.
it is not about the money. i refuse to watch youtube while logged in, because google is a company that doesn't respect people's privacy
If google was taking like ten or twenty percent off the top after creators collected their money, I would do this in a heartbeat. The simple fact is I don’t want to give every cent of my money to google while legitimate artists don’t get paid. Especially when they do everything they can to NOT pay those artists now.
What are you talking about? YouTube pays out more than any other platform. You can hate on them for lots of stuff, but creator support isn’t one of them.
I’ll be real I didn’t know they paid better than others. But what does the number look like? Are they taking ten percent? Twenty? Or is it more like they pay out what’s equivalent to like one percent? If the numbers aren’t largely in the artist’s favor, it’s still exploitation and not ok.
Also don’t tell me I can’t hate them for any reason. Without researching I am VERY confident they are exploiting artists. It’s what companies like this do to artists.
It all begins with a compromise.
I'm old, old enough to remember YouTube before it had ads. Hell, old enough to remember it before Google bought it out.
The first compromise was banner ads, they were the first and they were the norm.
Banner ads got too invasive, so we blocked them. YouTube came a-crying.
We compromised, we allowed an advert on the first video we watched. It was skippable of course.
We compromised again, we allowed more ads to creep in, all skippable.
Again, with unskippable ads we compromised and allowed short 5 or 10 seconds ones.
And here we are, "pay premium or deal with an unwatchable ad infested mess". We block the ads because they are enshittification - they denigrate the service we signed up for, and if Google didn't have the power to keep altering the deal, they'd have voided their contract with us years ago.
So no, I'm not going to pay you for wonders made by dedicated people - you harvested and sold my data years ago, and my Hotmail inbox's unending wall of spam is testament to your unrelenting greed.
I did my time, got shafted in the deal, no more compromises.
Neither is creating content. Argue all you want on how Google is evil and doesn't deserve the money, 50% of the revenue is still going to creators and ad-blockers do cut into there paychecks.
Also doesn't make sense longing for the days of ad-free YouTube. Besides the fact it was unsustainable and would've gone the way of vine after a few years, it was just worse. It was full of 2 minute compilations of guys getting hit in the balls at 240p, not the 1080p 10 minute video essays with research that people have become accustomed to. That kind of quality costs money.
Yes, and a lot of creators I follow said they wouldn’t be able to do the stuff they do if it wasn’t for Patreon, because Youtube pays shit.
If a creator whose main audience is on your platform earns more from an external donation site than from what you’re paying them, there’s something deeply wrong with your system and no one should support it.
premium just removes the ads. I would pay for and use google services that removed the tracking and spying too, or only. that will never happen because the spying is the point. good luck paying to the people that also spies on you and gaslight you about it.
Stfu. Google tracked us across websites for years without our consent. We don't owe anything to Google.
Oh Yea, Premium. Bro then pay for me too.
Man, if Google wasn't aggressively trying to make the experience of using their site for free as painful as possible, then I'd probably be happy to pay. But as long as their business model is making things as shit as possible for people who don't pay instead of trying to actually provide some real value for those who do, they can fuck themselves.