Enshitification of Youtube - Or just every mainstream platform nowadays.

[Northern Blockhead]

For those who are unaware, enshitification (or platform decay) was coined by Canadian-British blogger Cory Doctorow to describe the deterioration of platforms that are two-sided markets. Think Google, Amazon, Unity, and honestly, almost the entire tech industry in general. Here's how it goes, as he describes it on his Wired article 'Enshitification of Tiktok':

"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."

It really goes into great detail of the countless examples of various companies on any of these four steps. I mention YT, in particular, because a channel called 'How Money Works', made a video titled 'Why YT NEEDS to get Worse', and he uses enshitifcation to describe the various decisions and policy changes the platform has made over the years that seem almost designed to hurt viewers and content creators. It also explains why the content seems to be so much worse and more boring nowadays, as most of the popular videos are now just essentially ripoffs of the cheapest forms of content Networks produce: Reality shows, Talk Shows, News, and Podcasts. They are also the safest for brands and advertisers. What's funny is that he made an argument at the beginning of the video that one of the core problems causing the Enshitification of Yotubue is that the platform is paying too much to their content creators.

 

[The Punished Mitch]

Enshitification perfectly encapsulates the human experience, really. When you strip away all of the cope.

 

[Your Starter for 10]

Smart people invent shit, then regular people get involved. Film at 11.

 

[Spitz]

Enshitification of Yotubue

Goddamn anime at it again!

 

[AnsemSoD1]

Fuck Youtube I WILL be keeping my ad blockers thank you very much.

 

[Michael Jacks0n]

In just this week alone, they've fucked with the Return Dislikes add-on, and then rolled out the new mandatory "Adblockers are not allowed" shame window pop-up.

At this point the Pajeets in charge of Youtube could flat out tweet the message, "Yeah, we fucking ruined the site, and what are you gonna do? Move to Vimeo or Bitchute?" and face no backlash nor mass exodus.

 

[Hathungor]

I really like this old Steve Jobs interview. Think about current-day Apple what you will, but this dude perfectly understood the business he was operating in.

This perfectly summarizes what's going wrong with big tech and large corpos in general. The wrong people are in charge of making the company money so they get promoted over those actually responsible for making good products.
So the marketing parasites keep multiplying until they alone are making the decisions to increase profits for the next quarterly report with no regards to customer experience or long-term sustainability, and that's how you get modern Google, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Blizzard, Unity etc.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

The issue with modern platforms is that it is impossible to make a mirror alternative, no matter how bad things get, due to the established media already having 99% of subscribers. Elon Musk showed it brilliantly with Twitter, where every two days journos talked how the new thing will kill it.

With youtube it's even worse since you need an insane amount of infrastructure to even begin competing.

 

[BirdUp]

youtuber complains about ads unless he's making them

 

[Whiskey]

Would it really change most people's lives if it died?

I have all of two content creators I watch and both offer superior uncensored versions of their videos off YouTube. I can't really think of anything I would overly miss about it. Its useful as backround noise music but if adblock goes I can just pirate a playlist.

Zoomers have ticktoc older people pirate. This is a hostage situation with a hostage no one seems to care about.

 

[Hathungor]

View attachment 5415455
youtuber complains about ads unless he's making them

To be fair, a single promo link on the side added by the video creator himself is not the same as 2 ads every 3 minutes that the creator has zero control over. I understand content has to be paid for somehow.
But Google is already raking in trillions from harvested user data and serving most ads on the internet today, then Youtube started advertising even on videos that the creator doesn't want to monetize, thus creating the entire copyright clusterfuck (because if no money was being made, nobody would care). And now they're doing this shit. So I'd say there's plenty of reason to complain.

 

[Kiwiballs]

Great post op.
Add to that a bunch of useless or at least long-term useless positions with people that can only justify their existence if they further drive efficiency forward. Or that is, slim down value for profit.
Someone once told me that Youtube (Alphabet) and other mega tech companies operates these small project groups that essentially compete with each other. All those fake smiles, pingpong-tables and free meals at HQ disguise a dire jungle of eat or be eaten. Anyway what happens is that these groups constantly compete with each other to prove that what ever change they made pushes up a certain metric.

So it could be like how long a user spends watching a video or how long they stay browsing other videos after finishing one or how often they click on an add. But as they improve one metric the overall dissatisfaction and function of the website as a whole could be going down. This constant iteration towards the rock-bottom of consumer satisfaction and long term stability could be a contributing factor to the enshitification as you put it.

These people can't just say "Oh, look our users are quite satisfied, the design of the website seems to be good, people are getting used to how things work and enjoy it. Let's not change anything. Maybe we can work on adding some cool feature instead?"
Why?

Because they become "expendable" and they might not even have a programmer in their project group, let alone doing something productive actually takes time and effort.

 

[BirdUp]

To be fair, a single promo link on the side added by the video creator himself is not the same as 2 ads every 3 minutes that the creator has zero control over. I understand content has to be paid for somehow.

i havent watched it so i assumed he did a four-minute ad
youtube's business model is recommending videos that attract you enough to watch ads (two steps more nuanced than TV) so nobody should be surprised at its decisions to be more advertiser-friendly

 

[TapewormSalesman]

Would it really change most people's lives if it died?

I have all of two content creators I watch and both offer superior uncensored versions of their videos off YouTube. I can't really think of anything I would overly miss about it. Its useful as backround noise music but if adblock goes I can just pirate a playlist.

Zoomers have ticktoc older people pirate. This is a hostage situation with a hostage no one seems to care about.

That's just you my dude. Youtube has been around for so long that the amount if information it holds is immense. Nowhere else can you find PSAs from the 50s, all the OG CONELRAD recordings, instructions on how to build a furnace, polish cattle auctions, or original manufacturer's video instruction for a tractor from 1986, all in one placre. The 'Pajeet/Ivan has figured out solutions for your every problem' meme is true. Of course this has been partially wrecked by the search no longer working right, but it's still manageable.
TLDR: If it dies we lose a bunch of archived footage and easy to follow instructions on shit we don't know how to do.

 

[Uranus Pink]

With youtube it's even worse since you need an insane amount of infrastructure to even begin competing.

Used to not need nearly as infrastructure back when all of the businesses and News media aka the advertisers and supposed competition had all of their video content on their own sites, bandwidth and infrastructure. However things really gone to shit when they did the mass migration to YouTube and offloading all of their infrastructure responsibilities onto them. And TPTB over at YouTube didn't charge them a single cent to help cover the costs.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Used to not need nearly as infrastructure back when all of the businesses and News media aka the advertisers and supposed competition had all of their video content on their own sites, bandwidth and infrastructure. However things really gone to shit when they did the mass migration to YouTube and offloading all of their infrastructure responsibilities onto them. And TPTB over at YouTube didn't charge them a single cent to help cover the costs.

A possible solution proposed is something like torrent hub for videos, so you just need users to locally store videos. Issue is that it's impossible to prevent spread of harmful content, and you can be sure Google will use its government connections to fuck you sideways through that angle.

 

[Flea Man Marbles]

that are two-sided markets.

I have no idea what this means and there's no explanation in your first post. How is youtube two-sided? Do you mean creaters vs consumers? Or is it a political meaning like right vs left? You're putting all these companies under an umbrella term yet not defining it.
If you're going to put something like that in the very first sentence of a thread you started you really should elaborate. Not all of us intrinsically know what you're talking about and the meaning of the terms you use.

 

[Some Dumb Faggot]

Easy money policies from the Feds that allowed venture capitalists to invest endless money into tech enabled these tech companies to be unprofitable since 2008. With inflation finally catching up and the US economy rapidly falling apart the Feds were forced to finally stop quantitative tightening. As a result money is harder to come by which has made venture capitalist money dry up.

Basically, these Tech companies are now finding themselves in an environment where they have to earn money on their own again. That's why you're seeing all these nickle and dime techniques being used. As the economy worsens these corporations will use more annoying techniques to try and make money.

 

[Northern Blockhead]

I have no idea what this means and there's no explanation in your first post. How is youtube two-sided? Do you mean creaters vs consumers? Or is it a political meaning like right vs left? You're putting all these companies under an umbrella term yet not defining it.
If you're going to put something like that in the very first sentence of a thread you started you really should elaborate. Not all of us intrinsically know what you're talking about and the meaning of the terms you use.

My bad on that. According to Wikipedia, it's an intermediary economic platform having two distinct user groups that provide eachother with network benefits, mainly buyers and sellers.

Put into context of YouTube, their two groups would be the users and corporations. Users get to watch free videos, and in exchange YT would gather data on you in the form of what you watch.

With corporations, they will get their ads featured on YT for free because YT only makes money from ads when it qualifies 1 of 3 conditions: Watch an ad for 30+ seconds, watch an entire ad that's less than 30 seconds long, or if you click on the ad. YT's algorithm of maximizing revenue also applies to advertisers, so It explains why ads have become rather attention-grabbing and insufferable, as they are the most surefire way to create revenue for YT.

 

[Hathungor]

Easy money policies from the Feds that allowed venture capitalists to invest endless money into tech enabled these tech companies to be unprofitable since 2008. With inflation finally catching up and the US economy rapidly falling apart the Feds were forced to finally stop quantitative tightening. As a result money is harder to come by which has made venture capitalist money dry up.

Basically, these Tech companies are now finding themselves in an environment where they have to earn money on their own again. That's why you're seeing all these nickle and dime techniques being used. As the economy worsens these corporations will use more annoying techniques to try and make money.

And at the same time, people are gonna be less willing to actually pay money for entertainment as they have to tighten their belts. This is why back in 2014 when Netflix had basically every movie and TV series that wasn't Anime for 7.99 a month piracy was almost nonexistent.

Now we have a dozen streaming services all clocking in at 20 bucks a month with money being worth half what it was then and you still aren't getting the same choice Netflix offered 10 years ago, and of course piracy has returned with a brutal vengeance.

Building a NAS and getting a VPN sub is much better value than paying for all these services for just 6 months. And if you don't want to go the piracy route, buying a smaller HDD and second hand Blu-Rays to put together a legal library of entertainment you actually care about is still better value. Because you actually get to keep what you watch instead of series randomly getting yeeted off the internet, changed or censored for modern sensibilities or change networks.