Has YouTube experienced enshittification?
removes dates
and that's all the news channels gone.
this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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Joke's on them, I got used to my homepage being "fuck you for disabling search history" for years
Has YouTube experienced enshittification?
Ummm???
I've been using https://freetubeapp.io/ client for a few months and am extremely happy with it. It allows me to subscribe to channels without requiring an account, it has a nice UI that doesn't shove videos I don't care about in my face, no ads, can download videos, and it's in general a way better experience. Haven't used web YT in ages.
The website doesn't allow interaction at all with my current ublock origin configuration. Not sure that's a good sign?
Holy crap, thanks for this.
Well... One more reason to ditch YouTube. As always: Reminder PeerTube exists.
I know the network effect is powerful, but YouTube won't lose until people are fed up enough to not use it.
This is the dumbest shit I've ever seen
Has YouTube experienced enshittification?
Crapperidge's law says yes
I bet that when they do this that older videos with newer thumbnails will get more clickthroughs and watch time same that of the newest uploads, but it won't be as effective with documentary / science videos (vsause, veritasium ect) because their videos are highly memorable. This will have a bad effect on the end user filtering out low effort video farms that show up in the search results, because those videos tend to have 100 views - 10k views.
I guess they really want to get rid of users huh.
I watch tech videos. If I can't see when a video is from, I'm not going to waste my time on watching it.
Conspiracy time: Google is purposely making their video platform worse because they're sacrificing it for a tax loss in 5 years when they shut it down. In those five years they're going to "ramp up" development and write off all that "work" to pay for other projects.
Their UX and design choices are amateur at best and clearly they have no interest in maintaining the product(much like all of their retired line).
No way. YouTube is such a flaghship product and a lynchpin in other businesses (like music, streaming, AI development).
I invoke Hanlon's razor.
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sacrificing it for a tax loss in 5 years when they shut it down.
Given that Tax = %rate * max(revenue-cost,0)
How can deliberately sabotaging a business make money?
They could be taking a tax write off of the development cost/efforts for increasing revenue from ad revenue.
I'm sure insurance claims are also included in that because of the efforts of ad blockers.
Overall, I doubt that they're making a profit, but I bet they're at least staying in the black.
When you take a look at the changes that they are making now, removing post dates and view counts, it could be concluded that it's an effort to stop wrappers like new pipe from displaying recent content. This could be internally tracked as improvements made to increase ad revenue, which would be tax deductible.
It's clear to me that they're willing to sabotage the entire product in order to increase ad sales, fuck their consumers in the ass, and completely obliterate any trust users will have in their platform in the future.
This is the same standard private investment strategy that's been running for the last 20 years unchecked.
About 15 years ago Microsoft had this great idea.
What if we forced everyone to use our software on the web so they can’t buy it.
Macros will no longer work, but not many people use macros so fuck those guys, they are nerds anyway.
This became the heyday of the Libre Software movement. And the reason I still occasionally use it.
Companies run on the simple automation the nerds create with Macros and companies aren’t going to hire a bunch more clerks so they can pay more for shittier software.
TL;DR, Microsoft backed down when people voted with their feet and not before.
What would removing the dates accomplish except making things more confusing and harder to find? What advantage to YouTube is there?
YouTube's goal, as was Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and TikTok and everyone else, is to get you to consume what they want you to consume, rather than what you choose to consume.
They one one goal: keep you engaged in the app.
Nothing else matters.
In their eyes, further reoving the "choice" of what to watch and shifting more of it to the algorithm optimizes that. And visible view counts/dates is a factor, as you may skip a video the algorithm thinks would keep you engaged.
For sure this has to be it. Less distractions, less info, less choice, more control for them
It is enshittification. IDK why other comments are mad about calling that out but look up the term if unfamiliar. Corey Doctorow laid out a thesis a few years ago and , the trend has continued. It seems unabated 😡😰
I just question if steering users toward old and outdated videos really keeps them engaged.
It probably does in the short term (aka next quarter or two), which is all they care about. It takes awhile to hemorrhage users when one is so entrenched.
My guess is that it makes it easier to suggest you older content that wouldn't be interesting when you can see at a glance how outdated it is.
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Well, time to install two new add-ons: Return YouTube View Counts and Return YouTube Upload Dates.
Somebody please make those.
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I can’t stand YouTube’s feed. It’s so bad. This does not help. I know many others already said it, but this is not an improvement.
The date can matter a lot. Especially, when it comes to tech learning. That world moves too fast. If you’re learning programming on YouTube, you need to be sure you have current info.
I desperately with YouTube had real competition.
So I just installed Linux on a new computer and during the short install I went to YouTube for something but it didn't even give me a list of videos to watch instead it told me I had to search so it can build a list of videos to recommend.
I'm not sure if this is a new change or what but along with this and taking away information I'm ready to just drop YouTube altogether probably better for my health... There is one service that was created by the people who do jetlag I might give them a try at this point.
I've had watch history off since like 2015 and sometime in 2021(?) they blanked the home page on me and said I had to turn history back on. It got fixed for a bit in 2022 (based on my discord chat logs) but then got cleared again later. Now it's just a blank page; they don't even tell me to turn history back on, but that could be my revert layout extension cause the giant thumbnails suck ass. Still salty they removed day markers on the subscription page since that's how I kept track of what I still hadn't watched.
Anyway, when they cleared it again for me in 2022/2023 is probably when they stopped giving signed-out new sessions a feed.
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The date can matter a lot.
The original algorithm rewarded engagement absent dates, but this resulted in old classic hits mopping up revenue while newer stuff struggled to grab anyone's attention. You'll never make a music video more popular than Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up, so why bother trying?
Then the algorithm shifted to fresh-first bias, which incentivized streamers to constantly churn out new content. But it still contended with users who stubbornly wanted to see the old content. So you got a bunch of content that tried to imitate historical hits or play on trends. This ended up producing 10,000 videos named some variation of "Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up, Explained" with a digitally edited picture of the singer with big eyes and a soy face.
Now we've got this deluge of AI generated crap that nobody wants to look at or search for, piling up in YouTube's back catalog. The only way to justify hosting it is to jam it into someone's feed. So every user is being A/B Tested once again, with a new procedurally generated wall of garbage that will eventually narrow down what any given individual is most likely to click on and watch. Then we can solve both of the problems above. Always have new content, but its technically "fresh" rather than a rehash of some prior release.
We are doing Monkeys On Typewriters because someone at YouTube HQ decided it was better than letting anyone watch the Rick Astley video one more time.
I desperately with YouTube had real competition.
There are other places to host video, but they tend to be very boutique or with an abundance of very low quality content. That, plus YouTube leveraging economies of scale and the networking effect means there's nowhere else you'd ever want to try and host a video, unless you were looking to reach a very boutique audience or you were putting out material you didn't really expect anyone to watch.
Wow, your algorithm shows the exact same videos that mine does. I've never seen that before. Every time I check out someone else's YouTube, their homepage is completely different from mine.
Now kith?
Has YouTube experienced enshittification?
Ummm, only for the past decade?
Hopefully they'll remove the length, the channel name, the thumbnail, the title and the entire video, too.
Sometimes I watch videos of The Daily Show and it drives me bonkers that they upload old episodes from a decade ago and it's impossible to tell if it's current Daily Show, or the classic one. If the whole service was like that... I'm completely gone.
Last Week Tonight does this too! I unsubbed. Not worth watching like this.
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Return YouTube dislikes will change to
Return YouTube dislikes + view count + upload date
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Isn't YT the poster child of enshittification?
Facebook set the bar high, but Google is rising to the challenge.
Has YouTube experienced enshittification?
Trollbait much, dipshit? :P
I don't even mind view count, but why would they even remove upload date? That's the only way to know whether the video is new or not.
Right? Like that’s why I click on a video most of the time when I see “X hours old”.
Always happy to see "11 years old" video randomly pops up too, and i'll know immediately it's a fine wine.
Youtube wants to own what you watch. Thats why they pivot so hard from showing you the subscriber list first and want to bank on their own algorithm to choose what you see.
Once they do, they have a captured audience of millions they get to choose what you think, buy, see ads for and become addicted too.
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It seems like some websites think that the more the users know about the quality of the content, the worse it is for the website’s profit
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It's because users are less likely to watch old videos. They do this on TikTok. You'll see videos that are years old on your feed because they have a lack of new content. You watch the new videos and then move on with your day. Now you're getting shown more videos and more likely to stay.
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The lack of upload date is the thing that already bugs me the most about YouTube Shorts. Well, maybe the second most after the entire concept.
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The optimist in me hopes this will be used to give smaller channels a push in views and attention, even years later, when they may have been skipped over or ignored previously.
The realist in me knows this will be used to push garbage that would otherwise be self-filtered by users due to the red flags of dates/views.
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Taking away information so I can't choose how best to use my time... yeah fuck that enshittification.
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