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It's a process known as Enshittification.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
The rest of the read is quite good.
Interest rates go up > VCs can't barrow free money and demand a return on investment > companies try to demonstrate profitability > enshitification
Part of it is the standard crisis of capitalism, the profit you get from doing the same thing always declines, so over time you have to push up revenue (increasing prices, forcing people to pay, showing more ads, gathering more data, etc) & push down costs (fire engineers, run on less hardware, etc)
Part of it is capitalisms natural tendency to create monopolies, and the lack of competition in a given field causing the company to then lose sight of what it's good at to compete in a bigger field.
Part is that interest rates mean loans are no longer cheap, so taking on debt to get customer, to at some point down the line make money, is a less viable plan. Twitter is a special case where the bad loans are because that was the original deal not interested rate related, and Musk is trying to pull all of the enshitification levers at the same time.
Part is that CEOs generally don't have a fucking clue about their products or what they are doing (it's a circuit job about who you know/blow, not what you know), so once one CEO starts firing/enshitifying, the rest just copy them so as to not be left out.
It's more like you now notice this because it have visible effects, but it's been going on for years. Restricting content, abusive rules and stupid changes have been the norm, all toward a centrally controlled experience geared toward generating internal profits on the back of users and content creators.
It's also why some prominent content creator started their own platforms, too.
It's just that now it reaches "intolerable" level for most end-users.
All of a sudden?
My dear, sweet summer child.
Because investors are tired of the model where they dump a shit load of cash into something that has no good path for monetization. So they’re forcing them all to make money which hurts users.
I'm not sure YouTube ever wanted you using adblockers.
The tech companies tend to follow the leader on unpopular actions. The first-mover bears the brunt of the backlash, allowing the copycats to implement the same policies without the same flak. Witness Twitter introducing fees and then Facebook following suit. Witness Twitter banning third party apps and Reddit... you know the rest.
Not really "all of a sudden", this has been a long process. The often repeated enshittification thing is fully valid. The short version is:
Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter are the more obvious culprits, but every big tech company does something similar, one way or another, even hardware companies like Intel or Nvidia
Because usually the greed, money and power corrupts, no matter how good you are in the beginning.
i e read this mostly because of AI…
YouTube is blocking adblockers? News to me
They've got you - you're addicted and/or locked in and the hastle of moving to alternatives is too great. The short answer is : 'They no longer need to be favorable, they have you, your data, and your friends and it's too much effort to go somewhere else'
It's all about the money, money
We are the most disposable asset they have. They need to turn a profit so we are being squeezed.
It's the end of cheap credit.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=16J5X
That graph shows the Federal Funds Effective Rate. Until recently, VCs could borrow money while effectively paying zero interest. That meant their investments weren't under any pressure to become profitable any time soon. Now, borrowing is expensive. VCs don't want to loan any more money, and want their investments to pay off. Reddit and other pre-IPO companies are scrambling to become profitable.
I assume the big companies like YouTube / Google going against people blocking ads are just taking advantage of the chaos.
As for Twitter: Elon Musk is an idiot.
Don't worry, YouTube blocking will be easily bypassed, like on Twitch.
Go on. How do you circumvent ads now on yt?
At least so far, this three strike your out style blocking doesn't seem to work unless you have an account.
I watch YouTube as embedded videos in my RSS feed.
They forget the users are their base, not their employees, or are bought by idiot billionaires who think they can turn the platform I to another money printer (or tax write-off)
Spez in particular saw Twitter and thought that would be a great idea.
I don't think he understands he's about to be CEO of Tumblr 2.0
That doesn't fix YouTube's core issues with the ads that they run, impacting every free user without an ad blocker: 1) Not 100% safe 2) Unscrupulous advertisers, sometimes running scam ads 3) Poor user experience re: ads (far too many in general, and multiple mid-roll ads per video make for a horrendous time).
I'm not going to reward them for these misbehaviors toward their user base by buying their "Premium" service. Same for any other site that does this and offers a "Premium service" to fix the problem that they, themselves, created. There are ways to have safe ads, and fair user experience even with them in play.
EDIT: This was supposed to be a reply in a post chain below, and it got stuck as a new comment. Lemmy growing pains, lol (looks like we've added about 4k or so users on .world today alone... welcome new folks!)
The bottom line is that I decide what content is received, interpreted, and rendered by my hardware. Youtube can kick and scream all they want, the nature of the internet is not in their favor. I prefer to directly support creators I follow, when and where I can.
Cheap/free money has dried up.
That and market share. Between 2007 and now, a website could reliably grow as new people got connected to the internet and as internet usage naturally grew. Up till recently, a large proportion of people either didn't use the internet at all, or had the internet, but didn't use much. Prior to 2020 I knew lots of friends and family who simply did not own a home computer or maybe had like one laptop for the whole family (and a bunch of phones).
During that era, the attention was all on getting new users in the door. Make a good, cheap/free product, and people will come, if you make the best site, people will find you.
But NOW, most people already are using the internet like 14 hours a day and have become full netizens and companies are already gigantic monopolies (Youtube does't have a viable competitor, for example). If companies want to keep growing, they can't rely on new blood, they need to pivot to harvesting more from the people they already have.
