Why all of a sudden tech companies are not being favorable to their users?
Why all of a sudden tech companies are not being favorable to their users?
YouTube disallowing adblockers, Reddit charging for API usage, Twitter blocking non-registered users. These events happen almost at the same time. Is this one of the effects of the tech bubble burst?
You're viewing a single thread.
Short answer : Enshittification.
Long and brilliant explanation here : https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
This concept is also why I’m so hopeful for federated software. The federated model means that there’s no single instance that holds all the power. Many of these instances are run by admins of their own kindness and initiative. And at worst, if any instance were to start being “enshittified,” people could easily move to another instance and continue participating in the greater network.
Between all of what we’ve seen unfold in the last few months, and even weeks, on Twitter and Reddit, it’s safe to say that “enshittification” could be reaching critical mass. That’s why I came here, after all, and I’m looking forward to seeing this community simply persist here on the web.
My fear is that even if you're correct, as the internet monoliths that have been built one the past decade fall to federated software, we will lose forever an unbeatable amount of arts and culture that has been stockpiled in these corporate spaces. Think of all the great educational YouTubers whose videos won't be able to be passed on to whatever the next thing is if YouTube collapses.
Those folks will re-upload old content onto the new platforms. I know people don't like to talk about money, especially in relation to the fediverse, but it's important. If you want someone to dedicate a large portion of their energy into making high-quality content, it's not unreasonable for them to want to make money doing it. How can we get money into the hands of content creators without allowing centralized control of the content?
I think I can understand your point. Large ‘“media” companies will horde the content and refuse to let it see the light of day because they believe they own it. I don’t think that’s how it would go down. Anything I’ve ever produced to be put on the web still exists somewhere on a hard drive that I control. I doubt the big name educational YouTubers are deleting the source material as soon as it goes up to YouTube.
Besides, a lot of the good ones have already moved to Nebula as well. If thought like educational YouTube you should check it out.
Educational YouTube was just an example. But there is a real danger of culturally important media being lost. See cases like the Operation Soda Steal video
Absolutely. I was a big part of the non professional music production side of YouTube a decade ago. Imagine getting 100+ new songs every week, from talented artists putting everything they had into their work. It was incredible! This year I got into data hoarding and looked into downloading my old favorite songs... Turns out most of them deleted their old work from YouTube when they went pro or simply closed out their channel for personal reasons. Not even the compilation channels were still around. Hundreds of thousands of songs are just gone, along with the records of that community's culture.
Those folks will re-upload old content onto the new platforms.
Unfortunately, this isn't likely to happen. Video files are huge (tens or hundreds of gigabytes) and many creators delete old videos once they are uploaded to Youtube so that they don't run out of space or keep having to buy more and more drive space. Even tech YouTubers like MKBHD pull clips from their old videos directly off YouTube because they no longer have the originals (he did a podcast talking about this)
That is stupid. I get that smaller creators it maybe lesss feasible to backup. Because they don't make enough money. But a video file, certainly if you put same compression as yt, isn't that big. Say one gb per vid, that is 30 gb a month (say times 3 for redundency) you have less than 1tb a month, of lees than 60 bucks of storage drives a month. Small price pay for someone that has a million dollar studio to not be trusting on yt for your videos. But thay also disn't talk about the risk of putting your 2fa in the cloud, so i am not that surprised
Not all of them. What about the ones who are no longer active on the platform? The ones people forgot about? The ones who have died? You think there will be 100% coverage? In the case of YouTube, many channel operators don't actually keep a local copy of all their videos, since the files would be too big. So the only copy is the one on YouTube.
What about the ones who are no longer active on the platform? The ones people forgot about? The ones who have died? You think there will be 100% coverage?
Maybe that's not that much of a bad thing. The day had the same length before YouTube was a thing, and people spent 100% of their time. Differently. Some things might have been pushed out of sight by YouTube, and a dying giant can create room for new things to grow.
The Library of Alexandria burning down wasn't a good thing. Any time human knowledge that has been collected gets scattered it's bad
I get your point, but the comparison barely holds. The Library of Alexandria had many unique works of cultural and scientific importance. YouTube is full of mundane content, mostly entertainment. Especially the scientific parts are merely re-tellings of other works which do not live on the same platform. Nobody stores their scientific findings on YouTube alone. Many creators do not upload to YouTube alone.
The more people value a specific video, the higher the chance it got copied elsewhere. So for the important parts, we probably have decent coverage.
Jesus. It's articles like this that make me both be thankful for Doctorow and his ability to put tech shit in terms is non-techies can understand.
I find it fitting that an article on enshitification is so hard to read because of enshitification on the site.
Original on Cory Doctorow's own site here