Has YouTube experienced enshittification?
this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
666 points (98.8% liked)
Enshittification
1527 readers
206 users here now
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.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So I just installed Linux on a new computer and during the short install I went to YouTube for something but it didn't even give me a list of videos to watch instead it told me I had to search so it can build a list of videos to recommend.
I'm not sure if this is a new change or what but along with this and taking away information I'm ready to just drop YouTube altogether probably better for my health... There is one service that was created by the people who do jetlag I might give them a try at this point.
I've had watch history off since like 2015 and sometime in 2021(?) they blanked the home page on me and said I had to turn history back on. It got fixed for a bit in 2022 (based on my discord chat logs) but then got cleared again later. Now it's just a blank page; they don't even tell me to turn history back on, but that could be my revert layout extension cause the giant thumbnails suck ass. Still salty they removed day markers on the subscription page since that's how I kept track of what I still hadn't watched.
Anyway, when they cleared it again for me in 2022/2023 is probably when they stopped giving signed-out new sessions a feed.
Nebula is pretty good, and has a lot of creators on it, but I personally have had issues with videos buffering or not being playable until 5-10 seconds after clicking on them. It might just be my browser (I use Firefox with a ton of various extensions and settings changes that affect rendering and content loading), but it's something to note depending on how much you care about the user experience.
I think they let you view a video or two for free though, so you can test that out beforehand if you wanted to.