I have held a vendetta against YouTube Premium for nearly a decade. I will never use it. I don’t give a shit how cheap it is or how many features they take away. I will stop watching YouTube entirely before I pay a single cent for Premium.
You used to be able to lock your phone on iOS and continue listening to YouTube. I always had audio playing, but I was still connected to my environment. They took that away just so they could add it back in as a feature in Premium. Maybe it seems overly petty to be this upset about it 9 years later, but I don’t care. I’m a treat addict and they fucked with the product. I let go of most things when it comes to enshitification because the alternative is to drive yourself mad. But this is a hill I will die on every time forever.
Fuck YouTube Premium.
I think you are correct. I didn’t know the exact numbers but I was aware of general reasoning. The economic forces that push unethical design decisions range from mildly annoying to horrifying depending on which decision you’re talking about. Facebook using A/B testing with neural imaging tech to minimize users’ opportunities to disengage from the platform is probably on the more extreme end. Regardless, I don’t think the decisions being objectively correct when optimizing for the continuation of capitalist firms makes them any less morally onerous.