I wish we can fast forward to the part where Youtube completely destroys itself and a new platform takes its place so we can enjoy it for 10 years before the enshittification cycle restarts again.
The problem is that only conglomerates can eat the cost of running such a platform. Ads will be the end of free interne, that’s for sure.
I’m not so sure – YouTube is much larger than you might think. It’s not the video platform you grew up with anymore. No one in this world can match the backlog and content density/diversity of YouTube, not even all streaming services combined. People complaining that YouTube is dying because a few YouTubers “retire” from their main gig or that it’s not the same anymore don’t understand how YouTube works. They might not comprehend that the time of their “bubble” has come to an end. When this happens, there are already five new bubbles/niches that are even bigger, and you might not have heard of them, but they are more successful than their “predecessor.” The old bubble is still there to consume in the backlog. Someday in the future, AI will have a field day with the data accumulated via YouTube.
It is transforming, for sure, but I don’t think it will destroy itself completely. In a sense, you can say it will destroy whatever view you had of YouTube as a platform because it is not what it once was.
To my knowledge, YouTube will hit the billion-user milestone this year (Netflix currently at ~250 million paid users). If we look at other data trends from streaming services, it suggests that YouTube will grow more over the coming years. I don’t know how anyone can match YouTube as a whole. In certain niches, sure, but as a whole, it would be like fighting windmills. There’s a reason no one tries to tackle YouTube as a platform and only goes for certain niches.
And if it would be federated, there would be no cycle.
