this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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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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YouTube has to be profitable somehow
Not really. It's what draws a lot of people to Google's platform. Then they sell your data. It can be a loss leader. In fact, it probably has to to survive.
I'd be surprised. It's extremely expensive to store, process, and stream that much video data. Google also doesn't, as I understand, sell data to third-parties; they use it to target ads for their own ad network, and while I'm sure viewing habits contribute a lot towards making that targeting more valuable, they're still dealing with extremely high operating costs, and those have to be at least somewhat balanced with actual direct revenue.