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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Honestly, I am surprised it took them this long. This technology has existed for a while, there is even a standard for it (see: SCTE-35).
The harsh truth of the matter is that YouTube is a victim of its own success. The sheer scale of what is needed to keep the platform running at its current level of activity is something that I think most people don't give a second thought to. It requires a truly astonishing amount of technical expertise, infrastructure, monitoring, throughput capacity, not to mention sheer compute and storage, to keep it running. And that is considering the technical side alone, never mind the business that has evolved around it
All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit. And so here we are.
There are niche alternatives like PeerTube, but in practice it is currently in no state to be a drop in replacement. If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately. This won't change until the user base begins to increase, but to do so requires an incentive for people to jump over. And sadly, far too many people just don't care enough about avoiding ads to do so.
I think in the long term there will be a reckoning; no matter the size of your platform you are not invulnerable to change. Nobody back in the early 2010s could foresee Twitter falling from grace, and look how that turned out. YouTube will eventually die, the only question is who will be footing the bill for what replaces it.
In the meantime, if you're unable or unwilling to deal with YouTube's ads, or pay to skip them, then just don't engage with the platform at all. Read a book. Touch some grass. They haven't found a way to monetize that (yet).