My real worry with Google’s voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.
Through YT, for the past 15 years, the world has basically entrusted Google to be the custodian of pretty much our entire global video archive.
There’s countless hours of archived footage — news reports, political speeches, historical events, documentaries, indie films, academic lectures, conference presentations, rare recordings, concert footage, obscure music — where the best or only copy is now held by Google through YouTube.
So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?
#tech #technology #Google #enshittification #youtube #video @technology #capitalism #film #television #cinema #art #arts #SocialMedia #business #economics
@ajsadauskas @pluralistic @technology
“So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?”
Things improve.
Youtube does not have a monopoly because it’s the only video app installed on your computer, but because it’s the one everyone uses.
Plenty of people have tried to compete, but Youtube was good enough. Others had good reasons to try but concluded that Youtube was good enough.
When Youtube is no longer good enough, they get to show they can do it better.
Google search is worse, because it hasn’t been good enough for a long time, but somehow every competitor has decided to be worse. Altavista 25 years ago beat what Google search is today, I can’t imagine Microsoft being unable to afford to bring Bing up to Altavista levels.
It is not a natural law that things will eventually improve. It takes deliberate effort and money and an environment where this improvement is possible. Especially a video hosting site takes a lot of capital. And if powerful actors has a literal stranglehold on the market, then it can be virtually impossible even for obviously better alternatives to gain a foothold.
@uienia
I was answering a question about what happens when it becomes unprofitable for “powerful actors that have a literal stranglehold on the market” to keep pumping money into maintaining that strangehold.
I expected it to be obvious that the first thing that happens is that they stop doing so. THEN there is room for others to improve things.
I mean you’ve described entropy. It takes great effort to prevent accumulated order from falling back into the chaos from whence it came.