Evil Is Itinerant on Nostr: So I'm willing to be wrong about this, but it seems like in cases where one wants to ...
So I'm willing to be wrong about this, but it seems like in cases where one wants to cause the most harm to a platform, be it social media, YouTube, whatever, the best thing to do is to create content that gets no interaction. So on Twitter, for example, it costs Elon Musk money to host your tweets, and if no one looks at them he doesn't get any value return. Or on YouTube, it costs them money to host your video, but if no one looks at the video they get no ad revenue from it. This would explain why Twitter is so angsty about "bots" these days (though I know Elon is also just angsty about them in general).
So it stands to reason that to protest the actions of these sites, be it enshittification or platforming Nazis or whatever, one should create useless content. On YouTube this seems trivially easy: create long, pointless videos that no one will watch. You don't need to engage with YouTube's money-making apparatus much at all to do this.
Twitter is a harder case. By being an active user of Twitter, you inflate their user metrics which they can then use to prove to advertisers that Twitter is a worthwhile platform to spend money on. Plus, text doesn't take up that much storage space. One could, I suppose, post videos. But there's still more interaction and value gained by Twitter when users do anything.
Facebook is another interesting case. Yes, you can post lots of pointless video statuses, but Facebook doesn't really care. Their algorithm is such that you don't have to provide value to them in any way other than existing. At least that's how it seems to me.
So it feels like YouTube is the vector for posting costly garbage. And yes, one person can't cost YouTube more than a rounding error, but if enough people did this, would it work? Can one mass-bully YouTube?
So it stands to reason that to protest the actions of these sites, be it enshittification or platforming Nazis or whatever, one should create useless content. On YouTube this seems trivially easy: create long, pointless videos that no one will watch. You don't need to engage with YouTube's money-making apparatus much at all to do this.
Twitter is a harder case. By being an active user of Twitter, you inflate their user metrics which they can then use to prove to advertisers that Twitter is a worthwhile platform to spend money on. Plus, text doesn't take up that much storage space. One could, I suppose, post videos. But there's still more interaction and value gained by Twitter when users do anything.
Facebook is another interesting case. Yes, you can post lots of pointless video statuses, but Facebook doesn't really care. Their algorithm is such that you don't have to provide value to them in any way other than existing. At least that's how it seems to me.
So it feels like YouTube is the vector for posting costly garbage. And yes, one person can't cost YouTube more than a rounding error, but if enough people did this, would it work? Can one mass-bully YouTube?