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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.
I guess I'm having trouble distinguishing the two internet memes here: what is enshittifying and how do you distinguish it from the Millenial Lifestyle Subsidy?
I didn't know what Millenial Lifestyle Subsidy was, but on looking it up it seems very different from what I see enshittifying is.
Enshittifying is when the same service becomes (subjectively of course) worse over time despite the company growing larger and the payment model not changing. More intrusive ads, algorithms changing the way search and front page works, things like that. MLS, from what I looked up, is the same service becoming more expensive, which is not the same thing.
They're the same in structure: startups lose money on early sales and expansion to build market share at the expense of established rivals, then focus on profitability once they have market share. Customers perceive the rise in prices as a betrayal, because they became used to the lower prices.
I'm not so sure that being the same in structure matters. People get used to prices getting higher easily, it's the economy and shit. What's harder to swallow is the product getting worse despite the very clear evidence that it is possible for it to not be (their memory of 1 year ago).
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