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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YouTube is experimenting with server-side ads (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by Dju@lemmy.world to c/enshittification@lemmy.world

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[–] Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit.

It's cheaper than you think.

Some estimates put the total number of YouTube Videos around 500 million, and I'll say each video takes 200MB to store every version. That's only an extra $24 million a year. With back-end processing and other stuff I'll bump that total up to $2.0 billion a year for hosting fees, if you were to run YouTube on AWS.