Uh oh, the hangover from the decade long 0% interest rates party seems to be hitting.

@Hoss@shitpost.cloud I've wondered since 2010 how the fuck these companies continue to exist being black holes for revenue. A assumed it was just the CIA bankrolling them to broadcast propaganda since they all all say the exact same thing at the exact same time.

@rher@mugicha.club @Hoss@shitpost.cloud At the very least, they would have pulled this ad injection stuff a lot sooner. Instead they lost billions per year in order to keep it as appealing as possible to everyone. I assume if the primary motive was profit they would do like X where they've largely shut it off to public consumption and just made it a paypig club.

I'm thinkin' the reason Google is shitting up YouTube has something to do with the fact that they ruined every other Google product that was actually profitable over the past ~5 years.

@Hoss@shitpost.cloud @RustyCrab@clubcyberia.co @rher@mugicha.club the problem with social media is it's unprofitable, but it was like why Jeff Bezos bought a newspaper. It's a great mouthpiece and locus of control. When you understand that, Elon Musk buying Twitter makes sense. In a way it was also like SomethingAwful where a moderator and heavy user of the site bought the site for the forums. No really. If you go there now it redirects to the forum and the old articles are a click away and unupdated after a trolls remorse post got nuked by LowT/someone else.

@Hoss@shitpost.cloud @RustyCrab@clubcyberia.co @rher@mugicha.club The other question is, how do you monetize YouTube? It is the costliest kind of social media site to run overall, compared to every single other social media site on earth because video eats megabytes and they haven't moved to a more efficient codec yet. There's also the fact that aside from adblockers, the site payouts are poor (this is why every fucking YouTuber takes sketchy sponsorships from shit like Betterhelp, which is so tainted that merely accepting their sponsorship will cause the comments to be shitting on them, and moved to the Patreon model). As much as the mere mention of WebP starts a shitshow, WebP was designed in part to solve this issue with images and WebP images are really fucking tiny. If it wasn't for the "one implementation" issue and a company everyone hates being tied to it, people wouldn't mind it as much. Also, the streaming site competition was even worse for YouTube because the idiots at Google didn't know what people pay money for. It was bad enough for the Netflix wannabes of the world making slop TV shows nobody wants, but it was a million times worse with YouTube thinking people will pay money to watch MrBeast's reality show level competitions. Twitter is mostly text posts/images, and aside from paid users short form video.

Google was too drunk on the DEI and ESG kool-aid to realize they should've been weaponizing their legal department to bankrupt organizations of shitheels like Media Matters years before Musk started doing it because it was fucking with the money. The golden rule of business is that you never let people fuck with the money.

It's going to take at least a decade, but people will be dragged back to the model of "paying for services with money" kicking and screaming after getting used to paying for everything with their data for the past twenty years.

ESG subsidy money burn is just the holdover until R&D on "moral bioenhancement" compounds advances to the point where they can be slipped into the food and drinking water to make you the ideal consoomer cattle.

I think Google's increasingly-less-profitable products like Search played a larger role in subsidizing YouTube's operations for a long time.