this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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You think too much of the average person. This sort of thing might affect you, but it won't affect your friend's 8 year old brother or his parents who just want a convenient way to watch pewdiepie
Perhaps, but you can only crush so much blood from a stone and the masses are slowly becoming destitute.
Social networks don't succeed or fail on casual viewers alone. Youtube is a video sharing site, not a content producer. If they get so toxic that the content producers start finding alternatives, then the casual viewers won't all leave right away.
If it gets so bad that big creators, like pewdiepie, have alternatives that grow in relevance and youtube loses its critical market share then it will eventually lose the casual viewers too, especially if those alternatives aren't up to their eyeballs in ads.
We saw this with digg losing its place to reddit, where they sold out their content to publishers. Content got thinner and worse until the vast majority of users left for reddit.
This may not be the straw that breaks the camel's back. For reddit it was the API lockdown, for twitter it's... well I could point to any number of individual decisions but let's just call them Elon Musk. Facebook hasn't quite hit that tipping point yet I don't think.
With youtube I can easily see this being part of a string of decisions to promote publisher content over user content. They're already selling views which could really sink them in the end.
Speaking of suicide, Tumblr found out that most of its content was porn and most people were coming for it when it banned it
https://youtu.be/CtUuab1Aqg0