this post was submitted on 29 Oct 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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Has YouTube experienced enshittification?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

sacrificing it for a tax loss in 5 years when they shut it down.

Given that Tax = %rate * max(revenue-cost,0)

How can deliberately sabotaging a business make money?

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago

They could be taking a tax write off of the development cost/efforts for increasing revenue from ad revenue.

I'm sure insurance claims are also included in that because of the efforts of ad blockers.

Overall, I doubt that they're making a profit, but I bet they're at least staying in the black.

When you take a look at the changes that they are making now, removing post dates and view counts, it could be concluded that it's an effort to stop wrappers like new pipe from displaying recent content. This could be internally tracked as improvements made to increase ad revenue, which would be tax deductible.

It's clear to me that they're willing to sabotage the entire product in order to increase ad sales, fuck their consumers in the ass, and completely obliterate any trust users will have in their platform in the future.

This is the same standard private investment strategy that's been running for the last 20 years unchecked.