To the YouTube apologists in this thread, where were you when there were no ads?
For years YouTube allowed content creators to post videos without any ability to monetize, and they harvested your data and sold it while they did.
Where were you then you hypocrites?
Now, YouTube provides the worst possible solution to monetisation, removes existing affordable ad free tiers, and sells your data without sharing the proceeds to creators.
You’re bootlickers. Get out of your armchair and actually help content creators instead of giving your cash to a company who syphons off most of it to further abuse you and creators you like.
For years YouTube allowed content creators to post videos without any ability to monetize, and they harvested your data and sold it while they did.
Let me preface this by saying fuck YouTube. But they were losing money on YouTube during this time on purpose. They weren’t actually making enough money to run the site by selling data alone. Their long game was to starve out any potential competition because they knew nobody else had enough capital to just give the same product away for free. The plan worked, hence their monopoly on Internet video hosting. Ever since they’ve been introducing more and more shitty limitations, ads, and anti consumer bullshit simply because they can. Google’s monopolies really need to be broken up. Let me end this by saying fuck YouTube, and fuck Google, too.
Which is what pisses me off. If Google is so money hungry here, why not raise the rates on advertisers instead? Not like these multibillion dollar companies like Coke, Pepsi, Apple, etc have anywhere else to go for advertising online with a large audience exposure. If people have to watch ads, keep it minimal on the viewer and maximize it on the advertisers.
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.
So currently we are on step 2: abusing their users. When they start abusing the business customers as you suggest, they will be on step 3 and one step closer to death.
Here’s the thing. Cory Doctorow is almost 100% spot on with the first 3 things. The last one, however, is pure copium. Those platforms died, yes, but they died in a very different era of the internet.
There was a time where people jumped ship with abandon and routinely visited cool, new websites every other week. This is the time that I like to call the “big liquid” internet. The internet was popular, yes, but every day people spent a little more time on it than on t.v. and other kinds of popular entertainment - in other words, popular but still growing. Websites like Digg, if they fucked up and just straight up ruined user experience, would die as a result of enshittification. The internet was cutthroat, and the quality of your service mattered. If people didn’t like your website, they were going to leave.
We don’t live in that era of the internet anymore. We’re in the era of the “big solid” internet. People don’t go to “new websites” anymore. They don’t jump platforms. They don’t abandon and adopt. If they’re kids, they go where their friends are - probably Twitter/X or TikTok. Maybe reddit. If they’re old users they’re on instagram and Facebook. It doesn’t really matter how bad those platforms get, because the quality of the service is not really important. It’s that they don’t have anywhere else to go or anything else to do.
There is no more exploration or adventure to the internet as we once understood it. That’s why Google has waited so fucking long to enshittify their most popular product: it’s because you’re locked in. There is no competition, because the competition died or was killed off a long time ago.
I agree with a slight caveat. You’re right that the internet of today is more forgiving of platforms that enshittify. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” -literally 1984, where the boot is advertising and the human face is consumers’ attention.
So we may be stuck at phase 3 for a while, where the consumers and the businesses are getting screwed over by internet platforms. But although the technological environment is changing more slowly, it’s still changing and “with strange aeons even death may die”. When the platforms inevitably die, enshittification will be part of the analysis why.
Of course in the meantime the internet platforms make money for one set of people, and other people’s lives are made crappier because of it.
I used to have a pixel art tut on YouTube, about 30k views. as they kept changing their terms as the time went by, in my disfavor, and in the user’s disfavor, I deleted the video. fuck them.
Good for you. You should consider moving your content to Nebula or the likes. It helps people like me support you without propping up a malicious middleman like Google.
What even is the first part of this? Where were people? They were using the service while it hemorrhaged money. Now they’ve moved past that to increasing revenue. That period was never going to last. Where’s the hypocrisy? What’s the uniform position these people have according to you?
It’s also rich how you assume everyone has enough to make meaningful contributions to every creator they watch on their own.
I would go a different direction and say that if, beyond the excessive amount, you just can’t stand that ads exist on the platform then you are entitled and think free content is your right.
I wasn’t talking about giving YouTube money, I was talking about giving creators money. Suddenly we must support the racket to give creators money according to many. I ask: where were they when there was no racket? Certainly not giving to creators. So we must only pay creators if we must also pay the content host? What nonsense.
YouTube has had ads for longer than I’ve been using it. They introduced it in 2007 from a quick google search. I started using chrome in 2009, and Adblock extensions not too long after.
I’ve been here the whole time and I’ve known that ads were a way to monetize the video, but I blocked them because I don’t like ads. For a while it just seemed like Google didn’t care. I just did it because I could and there was no alternative. When they released premium , I went that route. I use and depend on the service for a lot , so I don’t mind kicking them some funds.
But please do continue expecting something for free despite the fact you have an option to watch it for free with ads or to pay for premium because that’s how it always was 🙄
So you’re saying you refuse to watch YouTube? I’m not quite sure what you’re statement here is. If it’s “fuck youtube for the bad things it’s done, I want ad free content and I won’t pay” then we live in different ideologies for sure.
To the YouTube apologists in this thread, where were you when there were no ads?
For years YouTube allowed content creators to post videos without any ability to monetize, and they harvested your data and sold it while they did.
Where were you then you hypocrites?
Now, YouTube provides the worst possible solution to monetisation, removes existing affordable ad free tiers, and sells your data without sharing the proceeds to creators.
You’re bootlickers. Get out of your armchair and actually help content creators instead of giving your cash to a company who syphons off most of it to further abuse you and creators you like.
Let me preface this by saying fuck YouTube. But they were losing money on YouTube during this time on purpose. They weren’t actually making enough money to run the site by selling data alone. Their long game was to starve out any potential competition because they knew nobody else had enough capital to just give the same product away for free. The plan worked, hence their monopoly on Internet video hosting. Ever since they’ve been introducing more and more shitty limitations, ads, and anti consumer bullshit simply because they can. Google’s monopolies really need to be broken up. Let me end this by saying fuck YouTube, and fuck Google, too.
Which is what pisses me off. If Google is so money hungry here, why not raise the rates on advertisers instead? Not like these multibillion dollar companies like Coke, Pepsi, Apple, etc have anywhere else to go for advertising online with a large audience exposure. If people have to watch ads, keep it minimal on the viewer and maximize it on the advertisers.
According to the principle of enshittification:
So currently we are on step 2: abusing their users. When they start abusing the business customers as you suggest, they will be on step 3 and one step closer to death.
Here’s the thing. Cory Doctorow is almost 100% spot on with the first 3 things. The last one, however, is pure copium. Those platforms died, yes, but they died in a very different era of the internet.
There was a time where people jumped ship with abandon and routinely visited cool, new websites every other week. This is the time that I like to call the “big liquid” internet. The internet was popular, yes, but every day people spent a little more time on it than on t.v. and other kinds of popular entertainment - in other words, popular but still growing. Websites like Digg, if they fucked up and just straight up ruined user experience, would die as a result of enshittification. The internet was cutthroat, and the quality of your service mattered. If people didn’t like your website, they were going to leave.
We don’t live in that era of the internet anymore. We’re in the era of the “big solid” internet. People don’t go to “new websites” anymore. They don’t jump platforms. They don’t abandon and adopt. If they’re kids, they go where their friends are - probably Twitter/X or TikTok. Maybe reddit. If they’re old users they’re on instagram and Facebook. It doesn’t really matter how bad those platforms get, because the quality of the service is not really important. It’s that they don’t have anywhere else to go or anything else to do.
There is no more exploration or adventure to the internet as we once understood it. That’s why Google has waited so fucking long to enshittify their most popular product: it’s because you’re locked in. There is no competition, because the competition died or was killed off a long time ago.
I agree with a slight caveat. You’re right that the internet of today is more forgiving of platforms that enshittify. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” -literally 1984, where the boot is advertising and the human face is consumers’ attention.
So we may be stuck at phase 3 for a while, where the consumers and the businesses are getting screwed over by internet platforms. But although the technological environment is changing more slowly, it’s still changing and “with strange aeons even death may die”. When the platforms inevitably die, enshittification will be part of the analysis why.
Of course in the meantime the internet platforms make money for one set of people, and other people’s lives are made crappier because of it.
I used to have a pixel art tut on YouTube, about 30k views. as they kept changing their terms as the time went by, in my disfavor, and in the user’s disfavor, I deleted the video. fuck them.
Havent done too much research but I’d suggest uploading that tut to a YouTube alternative, be it peertube, rumble, or kick
Good for you. You should consider moving your content to Nebula or the likes. It helps people like me support you without propping up a malicious middleman like Google.
What even is the first part of this? Where were people? They were using the service while it hemorrhaged money. Now they’ve moved past that to increasing revenue. That period was never going to last. Where’s the hypocrisy? What’s the uniform position these people have according to you?
It’s also rich how you assume everyone has enough to make meaningful contributions to every creator they watch on their own.
I would go a different direction and say that if, beyond the excessive amount, you just can’t stand that ads exist on the platform then you are entitled and think free content is your right.
I wasn’t talking about giving YouTube money, I was talking about giving creators money. Suddenly we must support the racket to give creators money according to many. I ask: where were they when there was no racket? Certainly not giving to creators. So we must only pay creators if we must also pay the content host? What nonsense.
YouTube has had ads for longer than I’ve been using it. They introduced it in 2007 from a quick google search. I started using chrome in 2009, and Adblock extensions not too long after.
I’ve been here the whole time and I’ve known that ads were a way to monetize the video, but I blocked them because I don’t like ads. For a while it just seemed like Google didn’t care. I just did it because I could and there was no alternative. When they released premium , I went that route. I use and depend on the service for a lot , so I don’t mind kicking them some funds.
But please do continue expecting something for free despite the fact you have an option to watch it for free with ads or to pay for premium because that’s how it always was 🙄
So you’re saying you refuse to watch YouTube? I’m not quite sure what you’re statement here is. If it’s “fuck youtube for the bad things it’s done, I want ad free content and I won’t pay” then we live in different ideologies for sure.
I think content creators should get paid
Yes the only way to pay content creators is via YouTube. What a keen insight. We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!
For many of them, yes, the only way is via YouTube. Some of them have patreons, and I use that too. Not all do.