this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
970 points (99.2% liked)
Enshittification
1576 readers
1 users here now
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.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Honestly, I am surprised it took them this long. This technology has existed for a while, there is even a standard for it (see: SCTE-35).
The harsh truth of the matter is that YouTube is a victim of its own success. The sheer scale of what is needed to keep the platform running at its current level of activity is something that I think most people don't give a second thought to. It requires a truly astonishing amount of technical expertise, infrastructure, monitoring, throughput capacity, not to mention sheer compute and storage, to keep it running. And that is considering the technical side alone, never mind the business that has evolved around it
All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit. And so here we are.
There are niche alternatives like PeerTube, but in practice it is currently in no state to be a drop in replacement. If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately. This won't change until the user base begins to increase, but to do so requires an incentive for people to jump over. And sadly, far too many people just don't care enough about avoiding ads to do so.
I think in the long term there will be a reckoning; no matter the size of your platform you are not invulnerable to change. Nobody back in the early 2010s could foresee Twitter falling from grace, and look how that turned out. YouTube will eventually die, the only question is who will be footing the bill for what replaces it.
In the meantime, if you're unable or unwilling to deal with YouTube's ads, or pay to skip them, then just don't engage with the platform at all. Read a book. Touch some grass. They haven't found a way to monetize that (yet).
The Fediverse would be a very different place if it was hosting anything remotely close to YouTube tier traffic. FFS, how much of the Fediverse is even outside English speaking countries? None of our systems are getting bombarded with hundreds of gigabytes of Good Morning messages like Whatsapp is dealing with in India, for instance.
So much of the content on these big services is both trivial in terms of audience and enormous in terms of relative file size. My sister-in-law sent me a thirty minute compilation video from their latest summer vacation, which she hosted to YouTube. That video is going to get maybe five views, unless one of us goes back to watch it a second time. How much is it costing YouTube to host and stream? Obviously far more than what they make from any of us.
Now scale that up to millions.
The Fediverse isn't trying to do anything remotely like that.
This specific example is one thing that self hosting is arguably better for. I’ve made a few shitposting memes and the like that are five seconds long and uploaded unlisted just to share with friends that get immediately flagged and banned for DMCA that I’ve taken to just self hosting them. They’re getting like three views anyway because the world was never meant to see them.
People sharing videos with friends and family seems like a problem that’s already solved, if you really don’t want to use YouTube. Big channels that get millions of views are the real issue.
Self-hosting, certainly (to a degree anyway). But the Fediverse isn't self-hosted. I'm not keeping a catalog of comments on my computer that you lose access to when I close my laptop.
Self-hosting also tends to require dedicated hardware. Less of a big deal as the real cost of your own personal little server setup has plummeted. But still something that's predicated on always-on internet connectivity in a way that's not always practical.
The other issue with self hosting is while I'm comfortable running web services on a server in my house on my local network I know I lack the competence to harden my server sufficiently to open up a web streaming interface to the web.
It's not just file size either. Video basically has several different things going on, where improving on one aspect tends to require compromise on the others:
Over time, the standards improve, but generally benefit from specialized hardware for decoding (thus making decoding complexity a bit more complicated when serving a lot of people with different hardware).
Netflix, for example, serves a small number of very large files to many, many people on demand. That means they benefit from high encoding complexity, even if it shaves off a tiny bit of file size, because spending a few extra hours on encoding a movie that's 10mb smaller is worth it if 10 million people watch that movie, as that's 100 terabytes of traffic saved.
But YouTube/Facebook and the others with a lot of user-submitted video, they're ingesting hundreds of hours of content every minute, chopping it up into like 5 different resolutions/quality levels.
Then YouTube has a shitload of processes for determining which video gets which treatment. A random upload of a kid's birthday party might get a few hundred views at most, so YouTube cares less about file size and more about saving that computational complexity up front. But if a video hits 1000 views in a few minutes, that means it's on the cusp of going viral, and it might be worth re-encoding with the high cost encodings that save space/bandwidth.
If a service doesn't scale, it won't be necessary to have that kind of complexity in the service. But those videos will load a bit slower, use a little more battery and bandwidth to watch, be more prone to skipping/distortion, etc.
Video is hard. User submitted video is harder. Especially at scale.
Great analysis
It's cheaper than you think.
Some estimates put the total number of YouTube Videos around 500 million, and I'll say each video takes 200MB to store every version. That's only an extra $24 million a year. With back-end processing and other stuff I'll bump that total up to $2.0 billion a year for hosting fees, if you were to run YouTube on AWS.
Indeed. Yet they still add stupid features like 8K video and high-bitrate 1080p. What the heck are they doing? Who needs more then 720p anyways?
An engineer who needs a line item on their CV to get promoted.
Seriously though, 1080p is not a lot if you're on a big monitor or TV. At 720p you can start pixel counting on some displays
How about people just host videos on their own infrastructure or rented VPS? Honestly the idea that creators should get paid by YouTube/Twitch/etc confuses me. Those services if anything should be charging creators money as they are providing them computing resources.
Or that’s what we’re led to believe. Someone could say the same for an OS, but we have many open source alternatives. We need an open source alternative to YouTube, and perhaps with some innovation that may be possible. You don’t need storage, for example, if content is just streamed in a p2p manner, even with a time delay so people can watch something whenever
Edit: some context https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P2PTV
For the idiots downvoting explain why, or I’ll just believe you’re YouTube shills
Your equating the software development with the running costs.
People have made OS and people have made YouTube alternatives. But that's nothing compared to the quantity of servers, networking infrastructure, storage, power usage, and labor to maintain and update it.
P2p isn't a valid alternative because that's just shifting costs onto your users. Just because a central entity isn't taking on the burden of cost doesn't mean the cost isn't there.
Pictures and text are rather low usage, both in storage and networking but video isn't. Especially when millions are watching videos at the same time.
Maybe if we would stop expecting these sites to provide wasteful ultra-huge megaHD videos, it wouldn't be a problem. Hell, even with YouTube, maybe if they just served DVD-quality videos they wouldn't need to push tons of ads on us in the first place. Our expectation for this crazy new pointless ultra-sharp quality videos is ridiculous and is part of the problem with content delivery these days.
What you’re saying is valid in a model where the server hosts content and provides it on demand, and that’s not what I was describing.
Here’s the model I had in my head, but I am not sure if anyone has attempted this yet:
1..user uploads a video which borrows resources from p2p network
2..the shared burden is shifted around as nodes become active or inactive
3..content is always available in asynchronous, on demand fashion
I don’t work in distributed and networked systems, so I don’t expect the above model to strictly be based in reality, but it’s not that fanciful based on the wiki article I shared
I guess it’s a fair point that users maybe don’t want to be responsible for the burden. In which case, I guess why complain about ads then 🤷♀️
You are kinda describing "maidsafe"
But maidsafe isn't fully free, you technically pay access by sharing/lending hardware to the network
Cool, so I don’t understand why it has to be fully free. I think people should be comfortable taking control of their technologies otherwise they should be okay with getting what they get from the service providers
I totally agree with you, I'm happy to pay when the service is good. I was only mentioning it wasn't fully free because I know some care about that.
You're right that this is possible. But the speed and quality are going to decline considerably under this model, particularly across distant regions.
Because the average internet user (and many FOSS users, sadly) have gotten into the mindset that they deserve everything for free, the way they want it.
(For those taking offense to the bit about freeloading FOSS users, I refer you to the FOSS dev burnout trend we were discussing a month ago)
Fuck you.
Are you mad about something else? It’s okay, use your words
Storage and maintenance. OSes are miniscule in comparison to the data YouTube stores, we're in the multiple exabyte range here. Someone's got to pay for it somewhere. Floatplane might be a decent comparison as to what a FOSS YouTube might look like - they have a dedicated dev team and charge per channel to view, following more than a couple of creators would become cost prohibitive for me personally.
You absolutely need storage in a P2P network, the data doesn't just magic into existence, not only that but if there are insufficient peers in the network then you're not watching the video, smaller creators and older content would likely suffer as a result.
peertube uses webtorrents. it's viable. it works. owncast is fully self-hosted. it works. all the people downvoting are repeating a talking point, and have never implemented these projects.
They have a point about server costs and maintenance, which is why I suggested community garden type server farms.
I also didn’t need to call people idiots, but we’re all humans sigh
An OS requires significantly less resources. The only online features you need for an OS is a website to market the OS and host ISO's. Then you need a server to distribute packages to users. Packages which are significantly smaller then HD or 4K videos
We can barely keep Mastodon / Lemmy instnaces floating that host text, gifs and pictures.
That doesn't include paying the content creators.
Just because you're getting shit for free, doesn't mean that other people will want to do it for you for free.
Fuck you.
peertube exists. so does owncast
Neither pay their creators as far as I'm aware?
so? find someone to pay you.
Hmm. Maybe youtube?
don't count on it.
But I am. I know I will get paid next month, I can count on it. I couldn't count on it if I was dependent on a few donators.
lol assuming way too much about me, feel free think what you want 😂
Considering I remember some project in the past tried something like that in the past and found that because you can't control when people log off you can't guarantee files will transfer in one piece not to mention how expensive it was having everyone's computer constantly using Internet and computing stuff. For that reason I think the main problem here is that we are trying to centralize video sharing onto one platform. I instead propose we encourage people to make their own platforms. Like if you want to watch idk PewDiePie you go to PewDiePie.com and encourage people to explore the Internet instead of just sitting on one site. I suppose as a step in the right direction I propose that we get people to make online data bases using laptops/desktops that have nothing but xzamp and the videos you wish to upload to the web. Then we all collectively promote a sort of aggregation site that promotes everyones videos that way the aggregation site only has to store a bunch of hyperlinks and handle all the traffic while you the content creator just have to handle the traffic your content generates now the only challenge is making this idea profitable because if content creators can't profit few if any will make content and if the aggregation platform can't break eaven then we are back to square one of no one knowing where to look for content.
Basically old web but with aggregators, I don’t hate it. I think there needs to be a way to alleviate burden from content creators in a way. Tbh, maybe we need community server farms which are jointly supported, like community gardens in a way
Old web was awesome. Audiences were smaller, but content was far more personalized and less corporate. I could see link aggregators and relay networks coming back and people self-hosting more of their own content in the future, but it would have to take a massive shift in consumer behavior to wean themselves off of the teat of Web 2.0 spoon-feeding them their content and making content creating/sharing as frictionless as possible.
a) I downvoted you b) I am a YouTube shill c) Fuck you
that means I get money from them, right? I'm still waiting for my check. YouTube is the best.