Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.
This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.
This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.
Eh, kinda. Tbh youtube didn’t use to be that way, it was just a place to upload your videos and search for other videos. Over time they grew it into a creator focused site much to the detriment of the quality of content imo. Like sure, creators are producing 4k videos with great lighting and yada yada yada, but they have to create so much content constantly that the videos favored by youtube’s algorithm are fairly soulless, low effort mass produced crap that looks shinier. Classic youtube was some dude with a heavy accent recording on a nokia potato a 25 second video that immediately showed you how to do exactly what you entered into the search bar.
It was like that in an age that no longer exists, and can no longer exist. Things were generally decentralised as everyone was doing and hosting their own shit. And people were fine and accustomed to finding weird holes with a collection of strange content. The average user is now focused on convenience rather than exploring, especially as web content has come to supplant other forms of entertainment.
Yeah everyone talking about how many additional TB of data you need to host every hour - if content had to justify it’s existence on it’s own merits a lot less of it would exist and it’s quality would be dramatically superior.
