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Sure, and I'm with you there. It sounds like your values are in the right place, but marketing affects everyone, and nearly all of our media is owned by billionaires who have repeated the same narrative until we internalize it.
Electric cars and working from home are great, but they're not a solution - they're a compromise between reality and the status quo. Just like recycling - it's a way to sell personal responsibility, but it's entirely ineffective. They don't even pretend to recycle anymore, they just throw it into the dump, because it was never a solution to single use packaging, it was marketing.
We have to stop the carbon at a system level, by realigning incentives to make companies feel the hurt for the damage they do, and then deal with the consequences.
But back to the topic at hand...I guess if I had to sum it up, it's not about being entitled to free things.
It's about the deal being altered unilaterally in a very hostile way for short term profits. These things were free because that's how the numbers worked out... This isn't about profits or revenue, it's about investors
Look at unity - they killed their own company, and damaged an entire industry. And for what? They couldn't even answer basic questions about how their wild licensing scheme change would work. A small group who knew it was coming made a lot of money, but far more value was destroyed
YouTube is the same - the numbers have been worked out. This action makes ads worth less because it'll lower conversion, makes the experience worse for everyone, and shrinks the pie for the creators that make a living on the platform.
At the end of the day, this is logging companies cutting down the whole forest and putting themselves out of business. The investors make more money at first, which they can reinvest in the next thing. Meanwhile, we have a bunch of loggers out of a job, a destroyed forest, and people still need wood. They can move on to destroy another forest with a new company, and make even more money if they own the shipping too.
From the owners perspective, it's taking the lump sum instead of the annuity.
That's the issue here - companies are destroying value. It's extremely profitable for a small number of people, but the whole pie shrinks.
In the case of a marketplace (or platform) you get enshittification, in the case of an industry you have endless acquisitions and downsizing.
The key driving force is the same - it's late stage capitalism. We have to suppress these lose-lose situations systematically, because chopping down the forest and reinvesting is always the more profitable choice so long as it's on the table.
This kind of went all over the place because to me this is all about looking at misaligned incentives in our system, but there's a Enshittification essay that is an approachable starting point to break down the YouTube and Reddit issue we started with