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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[–] [email protected] 68 points 4 months ago (3 children)

If they do that and Adblock doesn’t work anymore, the solution is quite simple - stop watching YouTube. Sure, there will be some content creators that I will miss. Maybe it will be time to move to Nebula.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Nebula is paid, you can also pay YouTube and remove ads.

Nebula is cheaper but it also has a very small fraction of the content that YouTube has. So I really don’t see why moving to another paid service with less content is a solution for anyone.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Nebula has most of the content creators I would pay money to support, and more of that money would be going back to them.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Nebula has a small fraction of creators. Admittedly a lot of good ones, but not all, or even most. It’s just not a solution for most people.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Similar reason as people moving from Spotify to Tidal. The creators get paid more per view on Nebula than on YouTube.

Besides, I imagine there's quite an overlap of people that watch the type of content that goes up on Nebula and the people that are willing to pay for the content.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Nebula is only cheaper if your currency is the USD

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

Also very true, not just USD though. CAD, GBP, AUD as well as others. But yeah in many countries YouTube has market pricing whereas Nebula doesn’t.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Nebula isn't supported by ads AFAIK though

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Neither is YouTube if you pay them. It just strikes me as odd to say “Fuck YouTube for pushing all these ads, I’m switching to Nebula” when Nebula is paid and the only reason they are getting ads on YouTube is because they refuse to pay.

It’s essentially punishing YouTube for having an ad-supported option at all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

It's about incentives. Alphabet is in the biz of serving advertisers. That's their paying customer. This is baked into their entire ecosystem of products and services. It's who they are. It shows in everything they do.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Nebula is built and run by content creators, whereas YouTube is operated by a shitty Big Tech corporation that solely wants to extract money and user data

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

It's not like I'm running out of new content from a lot of different directions. I previously said that when YT ads become unavoidable, I'll just stop going to that site. Someone accused me of trying to dunk on them by saying they'd lose me, but the real answer is that I have too much content to fit in to get to all of it already. If watching content becomes frustrating, there's other content that won't frustrate me as much. At least for now. It'll all turn to shit on a long enough timeline.

And, you know, as someone else mentioned, there're books. I like to read and currently do my reading at a park or on days when I'm asked to be in the office. If I run out of brain-rotting content to watch at home, maybe I'll start reading at home more. Though I'll probably find other ways to fuck off because I'm good at getting distracted, hence why I read away from home anyway.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

If ad block breaks I no longer consider YouTube videos to be content. They're just ads.