"I was halfway through doing the dishes while listening to a podcast when an ad cut through and interrupted one of the most interesting bits. My phone was a few meters away in the living room and 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."
"The key players in this enshittification race are the four major tech companies that dominate our digital lives: Google, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), TikTok, and YouTube. But for the sake of this article, I'm going to focus on one in particular, because it's where I spend the most time: YouTube. These companies' slow decay into ad infested dystopian nightmares reminded me of a conversation I had with my good friend and cofounder Charlie Gedeon."
A podcast listener was interrupted by an intrusive ad and hurried to skip it, exposing how ads break user flow. A YouTube popup offering Premium revealed that ad-free playback is now a paid privilege rather than a standard feature. Enshittification describes how platforms decay by shifting value away from users toward business customers, optimizing for profit through ad insertion. Major platforms implicated include Google, Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, with YouTube serving as a clear example of incremental, design-driven ad rollout. The account links personal frustration to broader patterns of monetization-driven design choices that harm user experience.
Read at Medium
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