this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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There's this super frustrating trend where instead of making the paid version of things better, they just make the free version worse. Like how you used to be able to do background play on the YouTube app. It's like they know these features are good so implement them to attract people to use their service, and then later take it away to force the subscription.
Oh it was so much worse than that. Google indirectly banned every 3rd party app on the Play Store from streaming videos in the background to push that feature. Seemingly overnight every app that could do it vanished or cut the feature. Sure you can sideload a fix but your average non-savvy users got screwed into paying up.
Firefox can with a "Recommended" addon
I opted to switch to NewPipe and YMusic and haven't looked back since.
I'm glad they do that, it makes people switch to open source alternatives, like NewPipe for YouTube.
They simply have better features and privacy.
YMusic ftw. if you want to listen to music in background, it's the better alternative compared with newpipe. newpipe is the best for videos..but YMusic for music.
What do you like better about YMusic? I've been using NewPipe for a little while and it's OK, but it's kind of annoying that you can't sort by date or views. I usually end up searching Youtube and plugging the URL into Newpipe.
YMusic is specific designed to work with music so the player, loading times etc are better. in NewPipe you first need to open a video, click play (or tab and hold to play), select play in background etc.. and also create your own playlists. in YMusic you click just on a song you like and boom, it plays. also it can download quickly the music and also recommend automatic new music etc.
YMusic is just way better for music. you can even login with your yt account and use your music playlists etc. from computer.
The problem with (almost) all social media platforms is they need a LOT of users. Because each individual users brings in such a small amount of revenue.
So these companies (running on investor money) go through a deliberate early “growth” stage, where their singular goal is to get as many users as possible. They usually do this by…actually making something people want to use. Plus some addictive tricks thrown in to keep people “engaged”.
Once they have their 100 million users, or whatever number they’re targeting, then the processor of turning it to shit begins. Because now they have the users they need to extract revenue from them. The problem is that growth stage often kills off competitors as well. So now you have a near monopoly tightening the screws on users, who have to just accept it because the cost of moving to an alternative is too high.
But eventually it hits a breaking point. Users jump to something new, and the cycle repeats. The users who stick around with a shit product are the ones who ultimately pay the debts that early users got to enjoy.
This is why so many apps and services have problems monetizing their stuff when they start out as free and/or ad supported as a means to pump the usage numbers fast for that juicy investor funding and sky high stock valuations.
Free/ad supported is essentially the "bottom" of race to the bottom when it comes to how to make money on a product or service. And it is hard to climb the ladder of convincing people to pay for something when the core product that provides most of the value has always been free. You can't exactly just paywall the core product or people will likely feel ripped off and leave. So that leaves increasingly sketchy "value added" options.
It takes innovation and creativity to make the paid version better. It takes nothing but greed to make the free version worse.