Wow, this blew up. This was a silly post i made before i'd had my coffee or meds but its a sentiment i've been thinking about a lot recently. ive been reading through the notes and theres way too many to reply to. but they mostly fall into these categories:
apollo dodgeball / if you knock on enough doors asking for the devil:
I think thats actually a big part of why i made this. Youtube (or any corporation) will do everything it can to make more money. they would implement this in a second if it were both technologically feasible and socially acceptable (or at least, acceptable enough to not cause too much of a backlash). a decade ago, this concept met neither criteria. now its dangerously close to meeting both.
The web was built on a model where the website sends you content and a suggestion of how to render it - to give users the freedom to interact with it however they choose. Since then, there's been a battle between corporations and this principle as they use every trick they can come up with to force you to render the content the way they want you to.
The most effective way that corporations have achieved this is with apps. Paraphrasing Cory Doctorow[1], an app is just a website that its illegal to mess with. So many of the notes are people saying "i wish i could block youtube ads on my phone/smart tv/game console". this is a problem, and a bad sign of what to come.
another thing that makes this concept technologically feasible and socially acceptable in my opinion is face id. Having a camera scan your face automatically before letting you progress has become normal. Its common to put tape over your webcam, but nobody puts tape over their phone camera. Somehow, we've been trained to view it differently.
more broadly, I dont think the web is meant to be profitable. The old internet was full of small forums run at a loss fueled by the passion of their creators. When corporations moved in down the road with enough money to drive the forums away and take over, those corporations still didnt turn a profit. and they havent for a decade. Now they're getting desperate and they're going to extract as much as they can from their users to try and recoup those costs.
Your outrage over the concept of this is important. Visible backlash to hostile practices works. its important that we all say Fuck That loudly and often.
Youtube is adding a five second delay for firefox users:
I read about this immediately after making the original post. this is such a brazen move by google. I hope they get in some serious shit for leveraging one monopoly to bolster another but im not familiar enough with international law to know if thats likely.
Regardless, google has been showing their hand lately with so many hostile decisions. Their only leverage is their user base. Don't help them. Switch to firefox. if you need to, you can make firefox pretend to be chrome for specific websites
Ads are getting worse / loud ads in asmr videos / pragerU and other evil ads:
Ad blocking still works! please use an ad block! install ublock origin! Youtube is working hard break ad blockers but the ublock devs are working harder to keep them working. you just need to update the filter lists every now and then. here's a guide
I still want to support creators:
Find a way to support them directly! youtube is a notoriously unreliable income source. Check how the creator you want to support would prefer you support them. Chucking them a few bucks once will go a lot further than watching ads.
Piss kink references:
Thank you tumblr for being tumblr. A lot of the replies have been pretty heavy so these silly responses have been surprisingly refreshing.
I highly recommend Cory doctorow's defcon talk about the state of the web and how we can fix it. it put words to things i'd been feeling for a long time and introduced me to new ways of thinking about some of this stuff. Its linked at the bottom.
Its been wild having this post break containment like this. Tumblr is my place for shouting into the void and im used to most of my original posts not getting much traction (which is fine, or maybe even the point). the concept of over thirty thousand people reading something i wrote is hard to even conceptualize. I wasn't at all prepared for this but its touching that so many people resonated with my anger and frustration.
Okay, i'm going to go outside and remind myself that there is still so much good in the world. Fighting corporations is important but don't forget to also marvel at a cool bug or something to balance it out
[1] - DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification - Cory Doctorow [Invidious link] [yt]
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