1. Advertising inadvertently drives the want for an infinite scroll and a better algorithm for content delivery to keep you scrolling for longer. You being on the app for longer due to infini-scroll and ‘the algorithm’ = seeing more advertisements = more money for the platforms. If you paid a monthly fee to use the app(1) the platform wouldn’t be incentivized to keep you on an infinite scroll cause they already got the money, all they would be incentivized to do is makw sure you are as satisfied with the experience as possible so you keep paying them.
2. “What google has done for the web; youtube, maps, gmail/gsuite, chromium/v8 are fantastic products that cost huge sums to develop, and the world gets to use them for free”
That is a financially “free”, sure. But the world doesn’t get to use it for free at all really, we pay by giving google our statistics and my god, first of all the amount of statistics collected would surprise most people, yeah you hear about “big businesses are collecting your data” but to see what data they can collect through like a webrequest can actually make it feel real.
The world does not get any Google product for free, not in the whole sense of the word at least. To sum it up best I’d say Google and businesses like it have you get used to a (financially) free product, to such an extent that you integrate it as one of the base pillars of your online existence and then they enshittify that ‘free’ version to such an extent that they kind of threaten to pull that pillar away unless you pay.
(1.) which I also don’t love, cause subscription models also feel like you don’t own anything but in the case of a YouTube it’s more sensible than buying individual videos if ads weren’t a thing.
2. “What google has done for the web; youtube, maps, gmail/gsuite, chromium/v8 are fantastic products that cost huge sums to develop, and the world gets to use them for free”
That is a financially “free”, sure. But the world doesn’t get to use it for free at all really, we pay by giving google our statistics and my god, first of all the amount of statistics collected would surprise most people, yeah you hear about “big businesses are collecting your data” but to see what data they can collect through like a webrequest can actually make it feel real. The world does not get any Google product for free, not in the whole sense of the word at least. To sum it up best I’d say Google and businesses like it have you get used to a (financially) free product, to such an extent that you integrate it as one of the base pillars of your online existence and then they enshittify that ‘free’ version to such an extent that they kind of threaten to pull that pillar away unless you pay.
(1.) which I also don’t love, cause subscription models also feel like you don’t own anything but in the case of a YouTube it’s more sensible than buying individual videos if ads weren’t a thing.