also, you now are required to log in to view twitter. I don't care that much, but sometimes people would link to tweets and now I won't be able to view them when they do.

I was just thinking the exact same thing. Things seems to have accelerated lately, but I don't know if this is something regular users even notice or care about and it just feels significant to us because of the recent twitter and reddit idiocy.

I am super excited about all the attention the fediverse is getting. There are still a ton issues to be solved here, but decentralization feels like the next evolutionary step of the web.

One of the issues is "who's gonna pay for it"? And I think the answer is something like "most users are", in the sense that you'd pay your local instance, the same way you used to pay for newsgroups. Thus keeping it out of the hands of venture capitalists, hedge funds and billionaires in general, because hopefully we've learned that that's a bad thing.

"The 2030's are going to be a reckoning for how much of the 21st century was built on the back of low interest rates." See Adam Conover's interview with Dan Olson of Folding Ideas.

I think companies have seen what happened with Twitter and it has convinced them that they can try more drastic revenue generation strategies with little repercussion. They have all become strong monopolies in their respective domains and users who have grown up with the current offerings are not willing to put up with lesser alternatives.

The internet is basically ~10 websites for most people, only occasionally veering off the path to find some one off information. The casual user sees no reason to put up with the growing pains of alternatives and will put up with a lot from Google and friends if it means not having to create a new account on another website with no content.

How can you possibly replace YouTube and Reddit? Their value is in their user base and it's impossible to replicate that type of "success" overnight.

The corporatization of the world feels like it's coming to a head. You're not allowed to own anything anymore. Everything is a subscription and it's impossible to afford property. You just rent everything putting you on constant edge until you die.

This is the fallout from the technology industry shrinking and coming to terms with itself. See the crash of the Silicon Bank recently as an example. Basically as the positive outlook toward these kind of businesses and pursuits continues to mellow out we'll see these companies look inward to squeeze as much money out of their products as possible.

They can go to extreme lengths to make it work, such as not playing the video if not adds are detected or embedding the ad directly into the video. Not even Firefox can escape those things.

It’s a lot harder to federate a YouTube competitor because storing all that video costs a lot more than text and links.

I wish they’d just insert the adverts into the videos so we could fast forward them if we wish. Why do we have to be locked into watching the same handful of adverts over and over.

They used to let us skip after 2 seconds and then it went from one advert to two. Now it’s two unskippable adverts. No wonder people want to block them.

Into exile, ads must go

If this is true, it seems like a condolence of what YouTube is doing here. If hosting all those videos costs more than they receive, eventually YouTube will end.

I always imagined that YouTube was quite profitable?

I have Premium plus I use uBlock and have never had a problem.

SponsorBlock does a good job skipping the sponsored ads that the uploaders put in their videos.

Not... So... Fast.... We shall counter with our ad blocker blocker blocker blockers!

Yeah, I kind of agree on this. The real question is: is YouTube currently profitable, and they're trying to squeeze even more out of users?

It would be nice if companies could look at a tidy profit and just say "that's enough" and leave it be. Alas, that's not how capitalism operates…

There are plenty of viewers who don't want/need/care about the resolution. Especially not 8K, probably not even 4K. People who watch on their phone, probably won't even notice if the content doesn't go above 720p.

Anyway, if YT wishes to charge for their service, they should try having more reasonable fees, and making sure fees actually remove all ads from the service, and actually reward creators fairly - they get much less than they should as a proportion of fees paid.

As it stands, it is much better to subscribe to the likes of Nebula or to individual creators through Patreon (if they host their videos there). The bill might end up adding up to something similar or even more than YouTube Premium, but at least you get what you paid for and the money goes to the creators, not to line Google's executive's pockets, which in the end means better content, better platforms and a better viewing experience.