I thought 15 unskippable ads were bad, but that was the tip of the iceberg. Now they’re 30-45 seconds unskippable, and they aren’t even ads anymore. I’m getting full on hour long podcasts spliced into the middle of videos now.
The Search is damn near useless now because when you look something up, you get a wall of unrelated YT shorts and “People also searched” reccs instead of what you asked for.
Israel ads are of course unskippable and even if they were, they’re quite frequent and just blasting nonsense right into your face. None of this is even getting into the use of AI to decide whether or not you’re even allowed to have an account
This is both not fucking sustainable and the soulless capitalist model isn’t going anywhere because it’s so profitable. I have no idea how this is going to end but I hope a new platform comes along soon that actually works and isn’t immediately set upon by right wing losers.
Oh yeah in 2014 or so facebook was found to be toying with their users like this. They were running psychology experiments on them by showing a portion of users mostly negative news for 2 weeks in their feed, then recording the results on these users. Another subset of users got positive news.
All done without the users’ consent or even telling them they were in an experiment of course.
It was not illegal because since they are a private company they don’t have to have an ethics board. Or at least at the time they didn’t. In any other setting this would have been shut down for gross ethical violations before it even got drafted.
I find that yeah we basically have to consciously decide not to play by their rules. I notice for example when I link tweets to discord or telegram I get more of that topic on my feed later. Even with the plugins I have the website tracks URL clipboard copy events. Even just lingering the viewport on a certain tweet even if you never click on it is probably tracked.