Has YouTube experienced enshittification?
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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view counts, I'm okay with. I do want to see how old a video is and how long a video is.
I watch niche stuff on Youtube. I watched a guy copy an old ISA adapter card for the very first CD-ROM drive. That's not gonna do BeasTiePie numbers, and I don't care. It isn't information I use to select a video. I think it's useful information to have generally available, but I don't necessarily need it on the home screen. It should maybe be displayed on a channel's Videos page, where there's more screen real estate per video, and in the video's description header.
Date uploaded is pertinent information. Is this a recent entry in a series I enjoy? Is this breaking or old news? Has ANOTHER 10,000 people died in a hurricane or is this just a month old? Is this from before ThE iNcIdEnT, or after?
Why do you think they are getting rid of the date of upload? UX reasons? No, they want to be able to serve you the same video, especially for news. Generates more clicks when you need to check if something is a year old or not.
Engagement, people are probably less likely to click on an old video, especially if they are looking for relevant and up to date information.
Well, or the opposite. Why click on a new video pointing out the errors / fallacies in the old one, when you only see the old one and don't know it's outdated
I figure less text on the screen = more room for the thumbnail. If they invented Youtube today they wouldn't think to show you titles, channel names or other metadata, just the video thumbnail.
Yeah thats what they do with shorts mostly. Huge thumbnail, title, no of views. No date until you click. Which for shorts - not many people give 2 f's if the cat video they are watching is from last month or 15 years ago. Not for regular videos. But then again, youtube / google are too big to fail. They could remake youtube in an absolutely abysmal direction and people would still come on the site.
You know what I wish they would do? I wish they would invent the concept of "shows."
Like you know how on old fashioned tube television you could tune the primitive analog radio receiver to pre-selected narrow frequency bands referred to by the ancient ones as "channels" and on these "channels" one might find a collection of different, though sometimes related "shows." Like on the Discovery "Channel" might produce wildlife documentaries and space documentaries?
There hasn't been a robust way to do that on Youtube since at least the Johnson administration. I'll give the example of Linus Media Group, who operate 14.04*10^666 different channels which are generally related, made mostly by the same creative staff, on broadly the same topics, but Youtube treats them as 100% unrelated. According to Youtube's UI, TechQuickie is as related to Linus Tech Tips as RedLetterMedia is.
You can kind of get this done with playlists. But...when a stupid penis is pushed into an idiot vagina, a moron baby shall soon be born. Youtube doesn't provide a robust playlist controls, and youtubers want people to be able to access the latest episodes, so now Youtube is full of playlists that are backwards with their oldest entries at the bottom.
One account can't silo their own content by topic in a way that's meaningful to the UI. Like, if you like RedLetterMedia for Best of the Worst and Re:View but don't care for Half In the Bag...Go find the nearest anvil, hammer your dick flat and take a 2D piss up a rope for all the good it'll do you.
With a "show" system, you could subscribe to the specific shows you like. This would count as a subscriber for the creator's metrics because a viewer is engaging with them, and they could see which shows are most popular with their viewers to prioritize that content, which should boost engagement. Or, if you like the creator's personality, you could generally subscribe and get notifications on everything they publish. Interested viewers would get notified of the latest shows directly without having to navigate a playlist, and newcoming viewers who discover a creator later on could watch a show from the beginning too. If engagement is what Youtube wants, surely someone stumbling upon a long running series and then lapping up the entire back catalog is a way to achieve this. If they wanted to boost engagement surely they'd want to create a way to more easily attach "second channels" to their main ones. How many people would watch the lower production effort asides/live stream dumps that they're hosting if they lowered the UI pain in the neck?