Firefox users are reporting an ‘artificial’ load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it’s part of a plan to make people who use adblockers “experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using.”
The degree in which corporations engage in psychological warfare against customers is astounding. Not surprising, just outrageous. Don’t want notifications on? We’re going to ask you to turn on notifications in the the program every single day until you do it. Don’t want to watch ads because our infinite greed has destroyed what used to be a good platform with a reasonable number of ads before we bought it? Then we’ll make the experience less pleasant until you comply. They already make multiple parts of YouTube disagree with ad blockers on purpose to break the sites features. Not that I use anything other than NewPipe and Piped anymore anyway. I’m just sick of shitty corporations acting like we’re children who can be punished.
We are in a war indeed.
I think it’s a new trend with CEOs and investors. They want infinite growth so the strategy is aquire / create, grow, squeeze, throw away, while creating new products to migrate fed up customers. Rinse and repeat.
Investors goal: maximize ROI this year.
CEO goal: infinite growth and/or increase share price to keep funds flowing.
I believe the current economic behavior isn’t sustainable. Some day things will go south.
I actually think they are currently all going south. This increase in ads is just one part of the fall I think.
The idea that the only real duty of corporate leadership is to drive shareholder profit is apocalyptically naive and ultimately nihilistic, and it has been since the words dribbled from Milton Friedman into the NYT magazine back in 1970.
short term. The problem is driving short term profit. In the short term, you profit by abusing your customers. If you considered long term profit, you need to also consider customer satisfaction
Infinite growth in a finite world is impossible.
Do we need to start requiring all C-suite managers to learn thermodynamics?
I think it’s a new trend with CEOs and investors. They want infinite growth so the strategy is aquire / create, grow, squeeze, throw away, while creating new products to migrate fed up customers. Rinse and repeat.
This is it and there’s another wrinkle driving it IMO which is the end of QE. When rates were at sub-inflation (so basically negative) and investor capital was everywhere, none of these companies really cared about milking the customers because they were already fat and happy milking the government indirectly. Now the government cheese machine has dried up and so now we’ve gotta get the stock price up a quarter of a point by any means necessary instead.
It’s literally like that shit from Ready Player One where the guy suggests that you can fill up the VR screen with like 80% ads before the user gets sick from it. That’s what they are doing now, they will push ads until people either stop watching or not enough people subscribe to Premium. The fact that you can’t even skip ahead in a video without getting more ads, even if you just got the pre-roll ads. It’s completely unacceptable and I think that there should be laws that would prevent that type of consumer abuse.
Don’t you just love being fed plausible deniability BS over and over and over again. I’ve lost friends over this bs. People who always argue in bad faith, always invoke plausible deniability, always min/max each interaction with hidden motives - should be given no attention and credibility. Unfortunately, those people strives in corporate environments, and as you would expect, they’re often responsible for marketing, PR, sales, and corporate strategies. Corporations are the annoying lying friends you don’t want around.
YouTube didn’t have ads before it got bought IIRC, not that it would have lasted that way even if it was not bought
It’s been many years, but I remember a small banner ad below the video and maybe one to the side. It was so reasonable though it’s hard to remember for sure.
