Remember when Google introduced text-only ads to replace flashing animated banners and pop-up ads popular at the time? I didn’t mind those and I didn’t need an adblocker.

Nowadays YouTube is the primary reason I have to use an adblocker. It is literally unusable with all the ads.

  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
    95·
    3 days ago

    That’s because every company’s strategy aiming to monopolize is to:

    1. Make a product that’s genuinely better than what’s on the market for some role. Sometimes by undercutting competition at a loss, sometimes by making things very convenient, etc.
    2. Once you’re big enough, make sure as you keep growing that new competition can’t pop up to challenge you. Kick the ladder down behind you, and make sure to start greasing the palms of lawmakers so they can’t challenge you in step 3.
    3. Once you’re so big that you’ve monopolized the market and can’t be challenged no matter what you do (both because of ladder-kicking and because everyone uses you by default), do what you’ve been wanting to this whole time and go from “boiling frog”-pace enshittification to “welp, this sucks, but now I have nowhere else to go” enshittification.

    It’s why people who say “Oh, well I wouldn’t mind it if X had a monopoly because they’re way better than those other companies” are so painfully misguided.