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.
A web site host can employ scripts to detect the use of an adblocker by the client agent. It trips a flag and shuts down access to the site. A blocker can filter ads from incoming data, but there's nothing it can do to force the server to provide data.
This is a big concern for me, I use YouTube a lot on desktop browser with uBlock Origin. It will be crushing for me when they shut that down. I have no viable alternative to YouTube. It's not just that, Google is forcing everyone to the Manifest V3 extension platform which reduces adblock capability on Chrome. So it's like a double whammy. I can move to Firefox to avoid that, but I'm in a corner with YouTube. Seriously the internet is mostly intolerable without a blocker like UBO.
To be honest, I really love YouTube and I want to support creators, so I don't mind watching ads. I'd rather pay to get rid of them, but I hate how YouTube force you to take YouTube Music as well. I'd definitely pay a fiver a month to nuke ads from just YouTube though.
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.)
I think you’re right about Reddit. I think Spez probably knows the recent changes are too heavy handed, but has been painted into a corner having tried and failed to monetise Reddit “his way” for years.
Now his investors are forcing change and he either has to see it through or quit. But now users have turned on him he really has nothing left.
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
Central banks, especially in Europe and North America, are raising the rates.
Lending money isn’t cheap anymore and running a service on debt only becomes a headache.
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.
Yes. You will gradually see all corporate centralized social media wall itself off over the next couple years into a tiny, heavily monetized little walled garden.
The free-money monetary policy that has funded the explosion of Internet companies since 2000 is over. Inflation is up and central banks are putting emergency tourniquets on the cash pipes that these companies need to burn endlessly to keep the "free to use" model operating.
Implosion of Reddit? Hell yes, there's absolutely no doubt that they've officially Digg'd themselves.
Implosion of Twitter? Nah, only the celebrities and famous journalists there can decide that. Whether a bunch of regular users leaves the platform won't threaten it, because most people join social media like Twitter and Instagram that have a concept of "following" only to... follow celebrities. You can have Fediverse alternatives like Mastodon but they won't threaten Twitter unless celebrities move there, which is very unlikely because celebrities so far simply don't care.
There's another thread where people is saying that Twitter didn't pay Google to use their cloud so they have to "shrink" their use of the service so they are limiting access.