Literally one of the smartest things that Capital could do is to pool a tiny amount of their resources and make Netflix and Youtube free for the masses. These are incredible tools for keeping the masses placated.
one of the only good things about the stage of capitalism that we’re in right now is that the capitalists are complete fucking idiots with no instincts for the preservation of their class. the competence has been fully bred out of them Habsburg-style at this point
Death to America
Conversely, they’ve realized the general population is even more servile and neutered then they expected and they are doing this to constantly reinforce there’s nothing we can do and they’ll make things as shitty as they want and nobody’s gonna do anything about it. They’re trying to soft sell us on being back in a feudal society and they’re about 60% of the way there.
Working in exchange for housing with no pay is gonna be a thing again in our lifetimes.
“Now watch this drive” but about the inherent contradictions of capitalism.
Honestly if they take us back to feudal relationships it makes it easier to do revolution because it completely decomplicates who the oppressors are to the average person. It makes the enemy easy to see. One of the biggest factors of capitalism that helps them prevent revs is how the enemy is less identifiable.
I think it’s arguably that they are beginning to see the end of the window of profitability and so they are gutting things on the way out. Obviously there are true failsons fucking things up like Elon, but a lot of it I think is actually them acting reasonably from the standpoint of quarterly gains and perhaps even medium-term profit-maximizing, because how intrusive Netflix ads are during a nuclear war doesn’t really make a difference (meaning short-term gain is the only thing to optimize).
That’s assuming Capital exists as a single centrally planned homogenate, rather than a set of competing factions all warring over the stream of revenue that media consumers produce. We did once try something akin to this, with the Public Broadcasting Service. And it was very successful, at least for a little while, in its effort to command a large audience and manipulate public opinion along a liberal ideological view.
But now we have a much more Anarcho-Capitalist approach to infotainment. We’ve implemented a tiered and tranched distribution of media services, from Talk Radio on the bottom-of-the-barrel free feed to Pay-Per-View streaming services on the high end. They all serve the same fundamental role as Netflix/Youtube, but the lower tiers tend to have a more vulgar and poorly produced advertising methodology.
And people still consume these channels voraciously. No shortage of folks who will suffer through five minute YouTube ads or who eventually buckle to the “Please Pay Me!!” pop-ups that soft gate the service. Similarly, Netflix has no trouble maintaining a subscriber pool of a quarter billion registered accounts (with households averaging north of 2 viewers).
The payment model serves two purposes. It forces people to register their participation - through an online account - and allows digital tagging and tracking of consumption habits. It also provides a threat of deprivation to disobedient proles. If you don’t clock in, you won’t have enough money to pay your bills. That includes entertainment. The cost isn’t particularly prohibitive, even to the poorest economic cohorts. But you are required to buy in and sign up and maintain the account, which puts an onus on people to keep in the good graces of the capitalist managers.
As a wise man once said, if you’re good at something never do it for free.
what is happening? Is big tech profitability collapsing? It seems like every big website is trying very hard to cut costs and find new sources of revenue right now
i firmly believe it’s the interest rate hike. the fed rate has been set to “free money” since the GFC in 2007.
[aside from a little blip between 2016 and COVID when rates were gradually increased up to a whopping 2% over 4 years before being flattened to “free money” when COVID hit].
now, in less than 1.5 years, it’s gone from “free money” to 5.5%. that’s enough to make “investors” [aka, people who negotiate giant loans from investment banks to invest in companies] squeamish about negotiating additional operating loans and pressuring executives to find money under the couch cushions, so to speak…
to be fair, i think the enshittification process of trying to squeeze a buck out of everything was inevitable to capitalism, but the rise of interest rates so high over such a short window set a fire under it.
i think the enshittification process of trying to squeeze a buck out of everything was inevitable to capitalism
you could even call it enclosure
Digital enclosure is exactly what it is. Reddit did it to forums but the squeeze right now is to fully enclose the attention economy itself.
my guess is that gulf state monarchy investors (Saudi, Qatar, UAE etc) haven’t been satisfied with the profit margins and are demanding more control over the companies, whereas American/European investors are possibly more focused on market share
could be rising competition from Chinese tech companies as well
It could also be a collapsing bubble where everyone’s realizing personal data sold to advertising companies isn’t as valuable as everyone assumed it was 15 years ago. They ran out of people to scoop data from. Everyone’s already got every possible type of targeted ad pointed directly at their eyeballs 24/7. The market is cornered and there’s nothing left to speculate on
it was never profitable. Its all sort of been a big scam from the beginning
the tech industry now is a lot like the 1800s rail industry in that it’s changing society and hype drives investment but profitability just isn’t there
the metaverse is the 21st century equivalent of plots of land next to planned railway developments
Death to America
Apparently Google does not reveal YouTube profitability: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/google-still-isnt-telling-us-about-youtube-and-cloud-profits.html
I go out of my way to follow the rules, like watching a sport even on the NBC website with their commercials, and then after ten minutes they say “you must sign in to your tv provider”.
So I get aboard my ship, put on my eyepatch and find the game in an Iranian server farm. I don’t want to be a pirate, they make me.
Trying to find the seasons of the One Piece anime that haven’t been uploaded to Netflix yet (and were taken down from Crunchyroll and Funimation) turned me into the King of the Pirates.
A VPN and a decent sized hard drive with Jellyfin is way cheaper than 12 different streaming services that either all have the same shit, don’t have the shit I want, or has ok original content that gets canceled after 2 seasons.
Kinda off topic but I’m actually mad that one piece (live-action) is good because i know Netflix will ruin it somehow. I’m still about the Witcher
As long as they don’t fire the current showrunners, the show will stay good. At the most they’ll cancel it early.
If they fire Matt Owens or Steven Maeda, that’s when to bail.
At $17M/episode, I imagine they’re just going to drop the series in another year or two.
I dont understand how there isnt a mass exodus from youtube already, whats keeping people there? If they pulled this shit in 2005 itd be done for.
massive backlog of content, only place creators can easily make money from uploading vids I’m pretty sure, so the big creators will never switch, and a lot of smaller creators have at least a fantasy of making it big if their vids go viral, if not a goal. Honestly a government would have to step in a break up YT at this point, it’s got a monopoly on vids and I don’t think any platform will ever be able to break it tbh.
Boomer take
With the attention span of Zoomers and younger generations, TikToks will be everything that anybody needs as nobody can watch videos longer than 3 minutes anyways
There are two types of videos. 3 minute ticktoks and 2 hour video essays about “Hegelian philosophy hidden in the Adventures of the Gummi Bears”
People keep saying this but it really doesn’t hold up. Moistcritikal videos get viewed like crazy and the guy posts 2-3 videos of himself rambling at a camera every day, each 10-20 minutes long, no jumpcuts or loud noises either. The daily Hasanabi videos are all easily 30 minutes long. Hell, MrBeast videos are all well over 10 minutes long as well. Wendigoon has seen a meteoric rise over the past year and his videos are all hour long stories about creeypasta stuff etc. Iceberg videos have been a huge trend and those are all really long as well.
The theory that people’s attention spans keep getting shorter and people can’t watch longer videos anymore doesn’t match up with the trends on Youtube. Videos are not getting shorter, not at all.
Absolute horseshit, the kids watch long form content at 2x speed. They still want it, they just want it ‘faster’. This will also continue to change when they get old and everything slows down for them.
back in my day, we watched 5 hour video essays about Goof Troop
Youtube has that fake tiktok “shorts” feature, but I’m pretty sure it’s just people reposting content from tiktok and other short-form video sites.
Social media changes incredibly quickly. Think of how recently TikTok came onto the scene, and how it changed every other site. Reddit made the worst video player ever to try to copy TikTok.
That is the only example in the last 10 years and they only ‘succeeded’ because bytedance was willing to burn tens of billions of dollars.
Whats stopping them? A couple things, is my guess.
How many hours of garbage are uploaded there, every minute? The bar for entry is nonexistent. All you need is a webcam.
YouTube will lose its crown eventually but there is nothing waiting in the wings as a replacement. Yet.
Patiently waiting for China’s video service to show up and be much better.
People did try to leave in the late 2000s/early 2010s
I remember when all the big critics (which were popular style of video at the time) movied to Blip.TV
i tried to switch to vimeo back in 2011 and they deleted my shit (gameplay videos) because it wasn’t “artistic” enough. instantly went walk of shaming back to youtube
WTF? Vimeo is for finding full episodes ofbshows that get deleted from youtube instantly. When did they get so pretentious?
There isn’t a competing video platform.
Video data is really really big. Not many have the resources to store it forever and send it globally on demand. And also pay money back to the creators who upload the videos in the first place.
Vidme tried and failed, not profitable.
Vimeo is not comparable, it’s for corporate/work/advertising videos. Not for consumers.
What the fuck is Dailymotion?
Netflix is curated shows, not comparable.
Sky is paid sports on TV, not comparable.
Nebula only works because viewers have to pay, not to mention that uploading to Nebula is extremely exclusive due to their high standards for creators. It makes sense that Nebula exists - but it isn’t a YouTube competitor.
The only other free consumer video platform right now is TikTok, which is only suited for short vertical videos.
A competitor to YouTube that does the same thing is not possible. Only a megacorp like Google has the money to throw away.
ByteDance could probably afford to make a western-facing youtube clone, but there’s presumably enough competition in China that they wouldn’t bother doing something just for the west.
This is making me wonder, what are the Chinese youtube equivalents? IIRC Weibo’s more of a twitter. Is it just BiliBili?
They want you to give them money or die
