"I rushed over like I had forgotten a burning turkey in the oven to make sure that I got to the phone before the second ad started playing. I tapped that lower-right hand skip button and the tension in my body temporarily melted away as I made my way back to the chore and continued listening to my podcast, ironically about the slow decay of once useful apps, that was so rudely interrupted by a Nissan ad."
"Try YouTube premium and you'll be ad free... something that only a few years ago was standard had become a premium and I asked myself why? The term I happened to be learning about that day from Cory Doctorow was enshittification, which can be loosely defined as the process by which platforms decay as they shift value away from users and toward themselves and their business customers. In other words, things start out good for us, then get worse as the companies optimize for profit."
A listener experiences a podcast interruption by an ad and rushes to skip it, relieving tension and returning to chores. A YouTube Premium popup promotes ad-free listening, revealing a shift that makes formerly standard features paid. The listener learns the term enshittification, defined as platforms decaying by redirecting value from users to platforms and business customers. Platforms initially benefit users but gradually prioritize monetization through incremental ad rollouts. The four dominant companies — Google, Meta, TikTok, and YouTube — are central to this shift, with YouTube singled out for focus due to heavy personal use.
Read at Medium
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]