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] 15 points 6 months ago (2 children)

YouTube's also been experimenting with built-in sponsorblock for Premium subscribers, which I find weird.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 months ago

That's one of my issues with premium, I expect no ads with it but you would still get all the sponsorship stuff which are ads.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That would be pretty outrageous given that those sponsorships are direct income for the content creators, and Google has no say in it. That feature would be Google directly harming every single content creator to increase their own profits, while the creators get absolutely nothing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Not necessarily true. Premium subscribers are worth a ton more to content creators because they get a cut of the premium price for every premium view. And it's not insignificant compared to a non-premium viewer.

For a non-premium viewers to provide value to a sponsorship they need to either use an affiliate link and purchase, or at least look. Creators often don't get paid for viewers that don't click the link. And only a small percent of the users is going to do that. And even non-premium viewers already use ad and sponsor block.

Don't be confused - content creators would likely benefit greatly from a higher percentage of premium subscribers on their videos. They are guaranteed income, and sponsors are often a lot more volatile.