this post was submitted on 12 Jun 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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It's certainly possible (e.g. take a hash of the first few frames of the ad and you can detect it pretty much anywhere and cut the right amount out of the stream).
But it's a lot more involved than just hiding an element on a webpage or blocking the same bit of JS every time.
And while I can see ways to automate it (take two streams for different users, compare differences, etc), it will likely end up being quite intensive on resources.
The only long term solution is "stop using Youtube". We need some fediverse style P2P replacement, where we pay for the videos with our outgoing bandwidth, and we're not there yet. Being a trillion dollar corporation sure does give you a lot more options in how you host things.