Probably not but one can hope… to the Fediverse lemmings!
It’s clear that something is going on. At least for Reddit and Twitter, they need to make money. They’ve made that pretty obvious but it is curious why now. Facebook and others didn’t seem to have this issue. YouTube sounds like google just Google
I’m not sure how Lemmy will last if it grows massively. But I’m here for a good time not a long
Wikipedia has done well for itself using donation runs and grassroots support, so if there are ways for instances to do similar the decentralized nature of this will work out ok.
Elsewhere the issue is many of these large services have grown to the size of effectively being a public good, but good luck maintaining a public good in a profit generating way as a private company seeking the next quarter’s growth.
That’s a good point. Wikipedia isn’t a for-profit company so they don’t have to show insane profit every quarter in order to calm shareholders. I donate to Wikipedia all the time cause I appreciate what they provide.
Don’t forget YouTube disabling the video player all together if they catch you using an adblocked
I don’t get that though, it’s not possible to block YouTube ads, so the adblocker, ublock etc, is only blocking ads on other websites unrelated to YouTube. It’s got nothing to do with them.
So… What gives?
They work great on desktop browsers, maybe yours isn’t configured right?
And on Android there are alternatives…
I watch a lot of YouTube though (mostly science channels) so I will probably be forced to start paying. I don’t like it.
Use VPN, switch country to turkey, pay 20 bucks for a year of youtube premium. It sucks, but 20 bucks is more affordable than the 10 per month they are asking.
I suspect these changes come from very different motivations. My guesses are ① Reddit needs money, and ② Twitter engineering has been brain-drained.
Reddit’s changes are a desperate attempt to please investors. This is a standard tactic for tech startups that are having trouble showing a profit: figure out what the company has been giving out for free, and start charging for it. They looked at API traffic and said “what do we have to do to monetize this?” and the current situation followed directly from that.
This is not just a vague appeal to “the market”; there are specific big-money investors involved, and they will have been communicating directly with Reddit management on what they want to see from the platform. CEO Huffman is probably listening to specific advice (or demands!) from those investors, and making policy changes to appeal to them.
Twitter’s situation is quite different. The goal of Musk’s takeover was political: to reverse Twitter’s user conduct policies, which had led to Donald Trump and other fascists being banned from the platform for shitty behavior.
Twitter is falling apart on a technological level right now because most of its skilled engineers have quit, leaving the company no longer capable of responding effectively to technical problems.
(As an aside, it turns out that being rabidly anti-trans is not an effective way to retain skilled engineering staff in the Bay Area tech scene.)
And invidious seems to be under legal threat from google as well.
