💾 Archived View for magda.cities.yesterweb.org › gemlog › 2023-11-03.gmi captured on 2023-11-14 at 07:32:15. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Too much noise

With Twitter/X getting closer to become a subscription-only "everything service", Reddit closing itself off to raise its profits and YouTube announcing price increases shortly after rolling out its anti-adblock campaign, the obvious disillusionment among prominent and vocal users is so apparent that no one should miss this blatant repetition of a perceived "user power" that leads to nothing.

Of course, it isn't a new phenomenon in the slightest. A lot of people complained about the system requirements of Windows Vista, which was twice the amount of Windows XP, yet now largely consider the just-as-heavy Windows 7 "the best OS of all time". The very same people ultimately settled with complaining about the steady increases of system requirements for a few days, only to accept and then ignore them altogether to repeat this cycle during the next OS release.

This exact same behaviour was seen among the "terminally online" on Twitter/X and later Reddit, as well. People proudly announcing their departure, only to either come back five minutes later or getting mad on their new chosen social media site for said site either "not being like [insert their previously used site]" or "[previously used site] continung to get worse", effectively trying to bring the same garbage that made the previous site resemble a giant garbage dump in Malaysia to the remote parts of the digital equivalent of a small rural town in North Dakota. The part of the Fediverse relying on Mastodon now is crowded by people complaining about Twitter/X and its usual nonsensical drama; Tumblr was flooded by Reddit users needing to comment on every single post they come across, regardless of whether their comment makes sense – I personally received both nonsensical text AND blatant astroturfing just shortly after the Reddit exodus – or adds any value to Tumblr's odd culture. While those are prima examples of the famous "Eternal September" phenomenon dating back to the USENET era in the 90's, YouTube is an entirely different case.

YouTubers and regular users proclaim that YouTube "will not win its war against adblockers". No one is advicating for using alternatives, unlike Twitter/X and Reddit users, instead everyone engaged in this chaotic debate is merely convinced that YouTube will not lock out non-paying users. Everyone suddenly seems to have forgotten that every big tech company so far has gotten away with reckless anti-user measurements: Twitter/X barely lost any users and engagement increased since Musk took over, Reddit barely lost any users and also saw no decrease in drive-by engagements, Netflix and Disney+ killed account sharing and saw an increase in subscriptions.

The same thing now can be witnessed on YouTube. A growing number of users subscribe to YouTube Premium, only few do so begrudgingly and openly express their disagreements with Premium automatically including YouTube Music and the price categories being way out of proportion. YouTube is getting away with it, just like the other services, yet users repeat the same mistakes and cling to the idea that just because they're vocal, platforms like YouTube will change their mind. There's a complete lack of awareness that none of them are no longer dependent on American (or rather western) users, instead their largest markets are located in Asia (namely India), Africa and South America – the outcries of mainly English-speaking users doesn't reach them and thus care, on average, much less about it. Even if the majority of American users suddennly would stop using one of those services, the loss is minimal and temporary because most users have repeatedly shown to eventually accept anything they're being thrown at. May it simply be a video hoster going subscription-only or cars and bycicles that no longer can be used without an active internet connection – enough people suck it up voluntarily.

Many users overestimate the power they got over such matters and this overestimation gets worse in proportion to the user's followers count and stats like how many times their post was viewed. While it might have been funny during Trump's victory in 2016, it now is nothing but dreadful and incresidngly annoying, especially if you're amoung the extremely tiny minority that actively tries to avoid it all.

And yes, I'm aware that I'm being hypocritical by complaining about it on my gemlog hosted on a network with a handful of regular users. But unlike anyone else, I scream into the void and don't manually submit it to aggregators like Antenna to reach more people and beg for feedback. I couldn't care less about such things.