Comment by bilekas
10 hours ago
More and more recently with youtube, they seem to be more and more confrontational with their users, from outright blocking adblockers, which has no bearing on youtube's service, to automatically scraping creators content for AI training and now anything API related. They're very much aware that there is no real competition and so they're taking full advantage of it. At the expense of the 'users experience' but these days, large companies simply don't suffer from a bad customer experience anymore.
> At the expense of the 'users experience' but these days, large companies simply don't suffer from a bad customer experience anymore.
This is my personal opinion. They're still affected by customer satisfaction and they're still driven by market forces. It's just that you and I are not their customers. It's not even the YT premium customers. Google is and always has been an ad service company and their primary customers have always been the big advertisers. And they do care about their experience. For example, they go overboard to identity the unique views of each ad.
Meanwhile the rest of us - those of us who don't pay, those who subscribe and even the content creators - are their captive resources whose creativity and attention they sell to the advertisers. Accordingly, they treat us like cattle, with poor quality support that they can't be bothered about. This is visible across their product lineup from YouTube and gmail to workspace. You can expect to be demonetized or locked out of your account and hung out to dry without any recourse if your account gets flagged by mistake or falsely suspected of politics that they don't like. Even in the best case, you can only hope to raise a stink on social media and pray that it catches the attention of someone over there.
Their advantage is that the vast majority of us choose to be their slaves, despite this abuse. Without our work and attention, they wouldn't have anything to offer their customers. To be fair to ourselves, they did pull off the bait and switch tactic on us in the beginning by offering YouTube for free and killing off all their competition in the process. Now it's really hard to match their hosting resources. But this is not sustainable anymore. We need other solutions, not complaints. Even paid ones are fine as long as they don't pull these sort of corporate shenanigans.
I’m recently also encountering more unskippable ads, especially in kids videos. There were always two ads. Sometimes the first wasn’t shippable and the second always was. That has gradually shifted to neither being skippable.
>outright blocking adblockers, which has no bearing on youtube's service
The scale of data storage, transcoding compute, and bandwidth to run YouTube is staggering. I'm open to the idea that adblocking doesn't have much effect on a server just providing HTML and a few images, but YouTube's operating costs are (presumably, I haven't looked into it) staggering and absolutely incompatible with adblocking.
That’s fine, but YouTube has an obligation to make sure the ads they serve aren’t scams. They are falling short of that obligation.
Could you elaborate on why? It seems to me that YouTube's implicit contract with the user is "these people paid us to show you this advert", not "we vouch for the integrity and veracity of this advert". I obviously agree that it'd be nice if YouTube would put more effort into screening adverts, but I don't see why they're _obligated_ to. I'm happy to be corrected, though.
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YouTube had a $10B Q3. I cannot imagine them spending $10B on servers and staff in three months.
Making a profit doesn't mean that their costs aren't so high that adblocking isn't compatible.
Walmart has profits of $157B in 2024, but their business model isn't compatible with people just walking in and grabbing stuff without paying - and doesn't make it ethical to do so even if "they'll be just fine even if I do that"
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> (presumably, I haven't looked into it)
YouTube broke even sometime around 2010 and has been profitable ever since. The ad revenue has always been more than enough to sustain operating costs. It's just more growthism = more ads. If you want the YouTube of 2010--you know, the product we all liked and got used to--you can't have it. Welcome to enshittification.
Personally I find YouTube unusable without an adblocker. On my devices that don't have an ad blocker, it's infuriating.
You can absolutely have that. You can pay for YouTube Premium and you don't get ads. It's shockingly reasonable in my opinion* - dollars spent to hours I watch, it's my personal best value streaming service.
*Bias disclaimer: I work for Alphabet. Not for YouTube. There's no employee discount, I pay full price for YTP.
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Enshitiffication is the user experience. The passive, impassive, drooling hordes don't even notice.