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Is YouTube the biggest rug pull in history? They built their monopoly by being a public, no bullshit video host. Nobody would have uploaded anything to them if it was like this 15 years ago. Not sure how many people can remember, but it would have been laughable back then to make videos and have someone put ads in the middle of them.

But now it's milking time. Eventually they'll push it too far and they might start losing viewers, but not before a few people get very rich. I feel like we're entering a dark period. YouTube showed us what it could be like, but we need to organise ourselves and host videos in a peer to peer fashion if we want to get it back and keep it.



> Eventually they'll push it too far and they might start losing viewers

To what service? Video hosting is famously super-duper expensive. And most creators are uploading for a monetary benefit ($) and ads are part of that equation.


> Video hosting is famously super-duper expensive

Is it? Many of us have been doing it from our home ISPs for as long as YouTube has been around. Centralised video hosting might be expensive (but probably not as expensive as you think), but who says it has to be centralised?


We’ve seen this so many times…

- YouTube as you describe

- Discord which did basically the same thing: was the best chat platform ever with no bullshit, then once it became used by everyone, is now turning into shit

- Facebook, Twitter…

- Countless others I don’t remember off the top of my head

Any service like this that’s actually good and is owned by a company is just a timebomb to either becoming shit or shutting down


Not necessarily a rug pull, just a really good example of Enshittification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification




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