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Presumably, shops go from "self-checkout" to "hiding shit behind metal bars" because they found out that if they leave things out, they get stolen (more than the shop could absorb through raising prices). Thus, every additional thief contributes to the removal of high-trust features.
(Compare and contrast with media, where several game developers famously endorsed piracy, presumably due to the additional popularity being worth more than the loss on the unsold copies. And music gets uploaded to Youtube by the artists themselves.)
But here the transaction isn't between the developer or the musician, it's between you and the host who builds the platform and pays for it so that you can view the video. Why is youtube obligated not to turn a profit on you?
Youtube's free to choose a profit model that doesn't enshittify my experience of their service, if they find that adblock is making them struggle. They don't seem to be struggling. (Wikipedia famously makes money from donations. I wonder if Youtube could do that, even in theory.)
I find that letting people who watch ads provide Youtube's profit margin instead of me doesn't make me feel guilty. Perhaps it's because I don't believe they're watching ads out of civic duty, but rather out of indifference/ignorance of adblock.
Compare: freemium mobile games where a couple of whales make it profitable, and the rest of the players are just there to bulk the audience up. Should the f2p players feel guilty, or whales feel like chumps? (Whales should feel like chumps in my opinion, but due to vastly overpaying for pixels, not for being taken advantage of by f2p players).
And my point is what right do you have to any experience of their service without paying for it?
Because I can and there is nothing unethical about this?
I can download youtube videos and strip out ads added by creators with sponsorblock, Youtube can try blocking this actions.
And Youtube's free to choose a profit model that doesn't enshittify my experience of their service.
And I am free to not pay for Twitter and Youtube.
This is the tension I don't get. If youtube is allowed to block your actions, then what is enshittifying about it?
Massive amount of ads is enshittifying, therefore I am using workarounds banned by their terms of use, therefore they can block or ban me.
In general nearly all enshittifying is perfectly legal and can be done by companies doing this.
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The same right as I have to play a freemuim game without paying for it, or use a donation-based service without donating. There's no explicit or implicit contract that says I must pay; they simply expect me to willingly make some money for them.
Like I said, I simply don't viscerally parse it as stealing if I'm not taking any physical items away and they're clearly thriving. Whatever their contract is with their ad providers, or a game developer's contract with a publishing platform, it is beyond my inner morality. If and when it turns out that free ad-based platforms are dying out in favor of paid access only, I will consider how my actions contributed to that. Until then, it appears that my eyeballs are payment enough for Youtube.
P.S. Advertisement and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race, in general. If I watch a thousand ads for a product I don't want and would never buy, or in some cases would avoid out of spite, it appears that both me and the ad provider are worse off.
Sure but then they aren't enshittifying your experience, because your experience doesn't exist except in the form they hand it to you.
I don't find it wrong to watch something without paying for it, or even to do so while avoiding the ads. But it's obvious to me that one has no right to complain that one's ability to do so has been unjustly limited, as it had no right in it to start.
If the freemium game were suddenly moved to a pay model, I wouldn't find that a wrong action by the developer.
See, the contradiction here is that my experience is worse if I obey their profit model, rather than avoid it! It's like buying a legitimate DVD of a movie and then... having to watch 2 minutes of piracy warnings at the beginning, rather than ripping it off torrents and having none of that. It's backwards!
The key distinction here is that the service itself is worse for the honest consumer, rather than the consumer being worse off because they pay money. A waiter handing me a receipt doesn't sour the taste of steak in my mouth, but having to look at ads while I ate it probably would.
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What do you mean? Most SocMeds have an alternative open source frontend, that offers a strictly superior experience.
Which is the experience they hand to you. They're still hosting the content on their site, paid for with their money. While it is morally fine to take it on the terms they give it to you, including the potential workarounds they allow to exist, I don't see any logic other than the urge for Gibs to why it is morally wrong for them to alter the terms on which it is handed to you.
Perhaps not morally wrong, but I do think it's the textbook definition of enshittifying. By making legitimate use directly more inconvenient and bad than illegitimate use, they're making chumps of their customers much more directly than you're made a chump by the self-checkout giving you the option to steal.
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