"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."
"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."
An interrupted podcast ad prompted a search for an ad blocker and revealed YouTube Premium as a paid ad-free option. Enshittification describes platforms decaying as they shift value away from users toward themselves and business customers. The decay often unfolds through deliberate, incremental ad rollouts and design decisions that prioritize profit over user experience. Major players in this dynamic include Google, Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, with particular attention on YouTube due to heavy personal use. A related concept, carcinisation, was mentioned as a metaphor for how platforms evolve toward similar degraded forms.
Read at Medium
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]