this post was submitted on 12 Jun 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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I'm not sure I buy into the not wanting to share idea, but I do agree I find it hard to see how anyone could make the risk/reward calcs stack up in favour of taking an appreciable share the market - and they'd need to take a decent chunk to make it viable.
I kinda think it should become some supranational entity like the UN or something - somehow the govts of the world pay Google for it and have it exist independent of a corporation and not be for profit. I've not really got the words for what I think it should be, but I know there's too much worth in the media it has for it to go away.
The only entity I could think of was Amazon with their AWS, they could even use the Twitch brand and website they'd just need to build enough storage.
Probably MS and Azure too, I suspect YouTube has some serious optimisations going on on the back end too, not that I don't think MS/Amazon engineers could overcome them, but I suspect it would take quite a while for their offerings not to be a bit janky in comparison. YouTube had the advantage of scaling as the users did and overcoming the problems as they arose.
The scale of YouTube is just mind boggling to me, like I work with big data by any reasonable definition of the term, but YouTube is on another level altogether - they ingest petabytes of data every day and make that available globally basically forever. There's no stutter or latency when I load a 10 year old video, which suggests they're keeping this all reasonably live and with multiple 9s availability. It's staggering.
The other issue I have with another big corp entering the market is the sheer waste of it all, creators probably won't want to be exclusive to a platform - which means we're going to triple an already huge data platform.
The other drawback for newcomers is the history YouTube has, nobody is going to reupload an ancient video on how to tear down my washing machine to a new platform, but I'm damned if that didn't save me £100 on getting a repair man to replace a gasket, which is to say there's an awful lot of knowledge tied up in YouTube and I think that needs protecting.