Maybe not right now. Maybe not next year. But they’ve decided to make everybody miserable, for a “business” that still won’t cause enough misery to turn a profit.
Meanwhile creators are censored worse than broadcast TV. Nevermind the effective ban on swearing - they can’t even reference concepts without a surveillance program declaring that their latest video doesn’t count, even though they’ll still slap ads all over that bitch.
Those people have things they want to share with an audience that wants to see. Any middleman can either help, or become irrelevant. Bandwidth is cheap. Some creators are just in it for the money… but the money is bad, on Youtube, and it’s getting worse. Patreon is more direct and far less stupid. As with all these lumbering ruins of 2010s internet media, the network effect of being the default will keep them relevant for a while, no matter what they do. Twitter’s on fire and it’s still not dead. But its prospects sure aren’t getting better… and not because people changed.
People are sadly predictable. These idiot robots exploit that masterfully, to a point, and then act bewildered when more pressure stops making more money. Like they forgot we can just leave.
99% of former Facebook users didn’t block ads - but they still left. They found other shit to do. People who’ve somehow never blocked ads still complain about ads. They still recognize how advertising shapes the things they like, and they hate it.
Nobody enjoys being interrupted with repetitive corporate bullshit. Nobody’s thrilled when three-minute videos get dragged out to ten minutes and one second, or when punchy edited conversations sprawl into rambling podcasts, or when recipes start with the chef’s life story. They don’t need to know why these things happen, to know they don’t care.
Even if, god help us, Youtube remains the video-hosting site - spacing out to hours of passive content does not have to be how people spend their time.
YouTube's anti-adblock rollout has finally arrived for Firefox users (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
I’m sure many of you are already aware that YouTube has been rolling out anti-adblock detection for Chrome users for a few weeks now....