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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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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.
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.
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