this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
979 points (99.2% liked)

Enshittification

1629 readers
3 users here now

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.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 55 points 6 months ago (3 children)

it hurts so much that it is VERY hard to replicate youtube given the insane upkeep costs. I would leave in a fucking heartbeat but so many good creators only post there

[–] [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...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

it's hard to replicate, has high upkeep, big authors' community. it seems YouTube deserves to be paid despite all the negativity towards it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I could sit here and throw out all the bad shit YouTube's done but quite honestly the fact that its owned by google is enough justification to not give them money lmao.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago