It'll keep continuing until you get one FPS and no audio without paying for premium.

Premium bitrate has been a thing for years.

720p is the best fight me

This is why you cannot take cries about enshittyfication seriously.

Anytime any company does something (sensible) you hear that. It almost never fits. And when it does the word has lost its efficacy

It's fine for most things... I'm trying to remember now what standard DVD definition was.

I'm not saying that it hasent... But I fairly often miss about with the quality especially if I'm just using it as background noise... This is just the first time I've seen it.

People still use YouTube?

480p or 480i

What a completely wrong comment. Wow. It’s so perfect in its wrongness. It’s almost breathtaking.

YouTube adding a higher quality feed does not degrade the service. I don't know how to put this in planer language.

Serving video is expensive. Serving high Bitrate video is extremely expensive. Storage costs have stopped scaling. Do you want them to provide a sustainable service or run at a loss to hike prices later when competition died? That's not how YT operates. They are profitability and creator revenue first.

They made bad choices with shorts, sure.

Nah, 720p is horrible in practice because of the employed bitrate in most cases. But i dont argue against a well encoded 720p file. It can be alright in theory depending on the content.

On YouTube it’s most definitely not. The quality is shit thanks to their compression.

But in this example they didn’t add a higher quality.

They added a new lower quality and took away what you already had/were paying for. Hence, you as a consumer are paying for the same level of service, but are receiving less

That’s the textbook definition - what am I missing?

As you say, it’s all about profitability. Making it worse for non-paying viewers is one of the most commonly used tactics, so I’d say the complaint is valid.

Streaming in 4K or even higher is free for everyone, that’s also more expensive for them. The fact that 1080 looks so bad to begin with on their platform is just ridiculous and unnecessary.

That's false. They didn't touch old content on high Bitrate introduction. E.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/157ksuu/is_youtube_actually_serving_at_an_enhanced/ discusses this.

You can check by looking up old but rates and using a downloader tool and checking file sizes. Apparently there is about 15% more data. Please note that compression may have changed/improved and objectively comparing products of lossy compression is non-trivial.

Yeah it’s not the best. But it never stutters, I can change cell towers on a train, WiFi in the garden, whatever, it’s done

There are no non-paying viewers. You pay in ads or you pay in dollarinios.

The high Bitrate was an add on for premium people. Streaming in 4k was discontinued due to low adoption and enormous cost. It is available for premium users today. You could argue for enshittyfication there, but are on shaky grounds for low adoption rate. A short experiment does not entitle you, in my mind.

Edit: appeartly outrage won and 4k is free once more

Meanwhile my internet that can only handle 480p

Yes, that’s true, the service itself is rather reliable and stable, but that doesn’t really necessitate the low bitrate on 1080p and lower. The resolution itself has often less of an impact on the perceived quality than the bitrate. Especially on mobile

Forgot to touch on the video bad point: I don't have points of comparison between YT bitrates and 3rd party platforms. I find 2K to be plenty sharp and serviceable. And I don't know a 3rd Party serving said content anyway.

1080p isn't a quality standard so I would expect quality to vary anyway.

Of all the problems with YouTube, this isn't one of them. It's reasonable for a free service to offer premium features such as this. If you upload in higher resolutions, people still get free access to those and even if your screen is 1080p, watching in 4K gives you higher bitrate.

Enshittification doesn't mean adding new features and charging for them. It means changing the existing service to make it worse, to encourage people to pay for subscriptions.

Well I block ads and I definitely never gave them a single coin. Besides that, I think you know what I meant with non-paying viewers.

That is not true, I often stream on 4K when I’m on my computer. Everything below 1440p is blurry and mushy (on YouTube) on screens above 10”. At least for me, I’m a bit peculiar with this.

YouTube compresses heavier and has lower bitrates on 1080p and lower, that’s why 2K and above look waaay better in comparison.

2k is 1080p.

Yes, you’re right, the naming schemes are a bit all over the place.
I meant 1440p.
1440p monitors are usually referred to as 2K, but that’s probably more of a marketing thing.

I just checked and apparently they stopped pay walling 4k and 1440p.

It's not blurry on my 4k Display so I feel like you are being dishonest. Only when very high Bitrate is needed everything goes to shit. And that's only e.g. flowing sand.

I know them as 3k. That's even worse

Not that this is a hill I particularly want to die on... But YouTube isn't free. I understand absolutely of course there are operational costs that need to be covered. Even if it is operated by one of the six companies that control the world.

But if I sit through a torrent of ads. That's my payment.
Never mind the brokering of all of the personal information it can glean from devices watched on and location etc...

They do. I know I know. I'm a basic bitch

You feel like I’m dishonest? Well, great. But I’m not.
Obviously it heavily depends on what you’re watching, I’m for example often watch “Digital Foundry” and in their videos the difference is quite huge.

Yes, but I am talking financially, as nothing is truly free as everything costs time. I thought that was pretty self-explanatory.

Them adding more ads is enshittification, not an optional higher bitrate stream. They didnt replace the existing 1080p stream.

Ahhh, sweeping camera motions in very detailed environments while comparing pixels. Yeah. That's an extremely demanding task where bit rate matters a lot.
Slide shows work well enough, such as Matt Parker's videos or well there is your problem or civ or magic the gathering.

Wow, never heard that. It's not even close to 3K! It's 2.5K if anything.

We should drop the "K" naming, honestly.
1080p or FHD
1440p or QHD
2160p or UHD

I prefer the K naming style. It is appropriately fuzzy. 1440p is so many letters and who tf remembers all the hd variants.

Lossy compression is gonna screw with the image anyway.

What drives me out of my mind is the QR codes that keep popping up over the video I'm trying to watch. If I want to buy something, I'll find it, I promise. Ugh.

A 3-year old reddit thread? I think we’re done here, this isn’t a serious discussion any longer

It's been there for like 3 years or something already.

For some reason playing at 3x speed is also a premium feature, IDK who's using that, think it only used to go to 2.

Adding new features and charging for them can absolutely be a component of enshitification.

But if I sit through a torrent of ads. That's my payment.

You do not need to live this way. I've never seen a YouTube ad.

Never mind the brokering of all of the personal information it can glean from devices watched on and location etc...

This doesn't need to be true either. I use FreeTube and never log in

The day Google once and for all successfully stops ad blocking, etc., is the day that I stop watching YouTube videos.

You are untouchable

Gladaed, defender of billion dollar companies, protector of the pedophile class.

We should be happy, there's still quite far that the enshittification can go

I hate it for the exact same reason- it's fuzzy to the point of useless and you end up breaking out actual resolution numbers anyways.

Huh? Where did you find out that they took anything away? Are you just assuming? I thought they added 1080p with a bitrate that's higher than standard, because people were just watching 4k on 1080p screens because the higher bitrate made it look better.

My issue with the actual resolution numbers is that the image isn't necessarily in said resolution due to compression, i.e. It isn't the actual resolution.

Ooooh, learning Godot? Best of luck, it is an absolutely fantastic engine.

That’s very interesting! I have just come to this opinion through trial and error o~0

I was waiting for something like this 😂

I cut my teeth on Unity so Godot is both familiar and confusing..

Nah, because if them features didnt exist, they havent affected the original service/product by being introduced, thus hasnt enshittified it. If access to the original is affected, then that would enshittification.

Fight through and it will be worth it!

I quit Unity after their price changes about 2 years ago, and have made 15 small games in Godot since then. It is like the Blender of Game Dev. A little rough at first, and then when it clicks it is a perfect little piece of software that is so much fun to use.