"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."
"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."
"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."
An ad interrupted a podcast and prompted a hurried skip to avoid losing the listening moment. A YouTube Premium popup revealed that an ad-free experience had become a paid feature rather than a default. Enshittification is defined as platforms decaying by shifting value away from users toward themselves and their business customers. Google, Meta, TikTok, and YouTube are identified as principal actors in this ad-driven decline. Incremental ad rollouts function as deliberate design choices that erode usability and prioritize profit. The account links personal frustration to broader platform incentives and design patterns.
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