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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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

This is a really strange concept to me. I’m constantly fighting against the algorithm! I subscribe to anyone I’m remotely interested in and occasionally do mass-unsubscribes to clear out the ones I’m not interested in.

I also find myself regularly checking the pages of people I subscribe to because YouTube will frequently stop putting their videos on the front page. I’ve also tried turning on notifications for certain people but that just gives me notification fatigue.

I think my biggest annoyance is that YouTube seems to take my decision not to watch a particular video right now as a signal that I’m not interested in the creator anymore, when actually I’m just prioritizing what I watch based on how long the video is and how much time I have. I’m not going to watch an hour long video when I only have 15 minutes! So YouTube is just constantly overfitting on my preferences! Really stupid and frustrating to deal with.

Perhaps I’m atypical though. Seems like a lot of people just go to YouTube and let it force feed them whatever is going viral at the time.