For about a year, I’ve gotten notes from readers asking why our YouTube embeds are broken in one very specific way: you can no longer click the title to open the video on YouTube.com or in the YouTube app. This used to work just fine, but now you can’t.
This bothers us, too, and it’s doubly frustrating because everyone assumes that we’ve chosen to disable links, which makes a certain kind of sense — after all, why on earth wouldn’t YouTube want people to click over to its app?
The short answer is money. Somewhat straightforwardly, YouTube has chosen to degrade the user experience of the embedded player publishers like Vox Media use, and the only way to get that link back is by using a slightly different player that pays us less and YouTube more.
YouTube is simply squeezing hard now.
They are big enough that 90% of the people who do look at videos do it there. So a video that is posted elsewhere simply does not get the exposure that it does on YouTube.
That gives them a lot of power. And they use it to squeeze as much money as possible from anyone they can. Now, if they would do big squeezes, people would notice and they would at least try to find other sites.
So just like abuse, it’s a slow process of tearing little barriers down of what is acceptable, until at some point users one by one start to realize it has all turned to shit.
But that is going to take a lot of time, and until that happens we are just going to see more reports about all the things YouTube does.
We will keep seeing angry nerds upset about it, and they will block ads and work around it. But nothing else will change. And that is such a small part of the userbase of YouTube that they don’t even feel it.
So I’m going to block ads, watch what I want to watch as long as the site is usuable without ads, and I will stop using the site when ads can no longer be blocked. YouTube is simply not that important to me.
Use uBlock Origin and transition to Peertube.
The classic “slow boiling frog experiment” is quintessential to the enshittification process