Enshittifiction is in full swing in Youtube and like the article says, creators are effectively golden-handcuffed in. In a normal world, youtube would twist the knobs until their bureaucratic momentum causes them to twist too far, and also cause them to take too long to twist back, during which time a competitor can come and steal all the advertisers and creators.
That won't happen in our world, because of www.google.com. The existence of that website guarantees that nobody can ever create a competitor to youtube, because youtube can just undercut on ad costs or pay out creators at high enough rates to run a loss for basically fucking centuries if it has to, until everyone else's funding runs out.
Imagine building just one of the datacenters needed to feed Youtube... They're what, 200 million a pop?
Within a capitalist mode of production and without any real regulatory guardrails, I just don't see Youtube going away, ever, and I don't see any real competitors, ever. Happy to be proven wrong.
I try to do my part - I host a tubearchivist instance that at this point is mirroring a couple TB of content from channels some friends and I enjoy. So, .00000000000000000000001% of Youtube. I use it to watch youtube without the stupid ads, and every once in a while buy a mug or whatever from my favorite creators. I'm not sure what else consumers can do about the situation.
That won't happen in our world, because of www.google.com. The existence of that website guarantees that nobody can ever create a competitor to youtube, because youtube can just undercut on ad costs or pay out creators at high enough rates to run a loss for basically fucking centuries if it has to, until everyone else's funding runs out.
Imagine building just one of the datacenters needed to feed Youtube... They're what, 200 million a pop?
Within a capitalist mode of production and without any real regulatory guardrails, I just don't see Youtube going away, ever, and I don't see any real competitors, ever. Happy to be proven wrong.
I try to do my part - I host a tubearchivist instance that at this point is mirroring a couple TB of content from channels some friends and I enjoy. So, .00000000000000000000001% of Youtube. I use it to watch youtube without the stupid ads, and every once in a while buy a mug or whatever from my favorite creators. I'm not sure what else consumers can do about the situation.