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] 9 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Yeah, I keep hearing that Youtube has probably never made a net profit.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Not because they couldn't but because they willfully operated at a loss to quench potential competition. The reason there is no replacement on YT is that all the content is on YT and creators won't shift to other platforms because their whole audience is on YT as well.

YT is not a video sharing platform anymore, it's a market. And that's why it sucks so bad.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago

There's no way to know, Google doesn't report YouTube profit separately in their financial statements. The closest department is "Google services" which does have a 34% profit margin.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

And this will be more expensive to implement than regular ads, thus margins will be even thinner...