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It'll keep continuing until you get one FPS and no audio without paying for premium.
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2026
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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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.
Very true.
Also very true.
YouTube cut the default bitrate when they added this "feature". It was incredibly obvious to my eyes the instant it was pushed out, and remains obvious everytime I come across one of these videos. If they had just charged for better bitrate, I wouldn't have cared. However, they also cut the default bitrate down, making all the videos that have this look really bad.
This is textbook inshittification, complete with the gaslighting bullshit of saying "we were always like this! Its your fault it seems worse than it was!" in every design decision involved in the process.
If they did, then that would be enshittification, yeah. But I cannot find any evidence of it being true, only testimonies from people. Which could be the player buffering, showing lower resolution due to internet connection etc, etc.
My 1080p streams have looked the same as they always have. Testing it now, they are playing at around 80,000kbps, using AV1. If people upload at 1440p/4K, then it's just a non-issue anyway as they have much higher bitrates.
They did. When I encounter such videos, I immediately think "why is it stuck in 720p" only to discover it's 1080p non premium, that is way worse than any other standard 1080p video.
This feature is limited to videos that don't have a better resolution than 1080p. It's also even more limited to videos that the uploaders choose to enable it on, or at least, se subset of 1080p videos, since I've seen new 1080p videos both with and without it. Finally, it doesn't apply to old 1080p videos.
Yup. Doesn't make it any less frustrating to see my favorite nature guy's videos turn to shit just because of it.
These two videos look identical to me and get the same bitrates. Why are they only uploading in 1080p now though? Their video could be poorly encoded in the first place which YouTube cannot magically save. It's going to look worse in these kind of videos anyway, because of all the foliage and particles from fires.
There is still no hard evidence YouTube made regular 1080p worse to sell "Enhanced Bitrate" and I don't think there is going to be. I think people got used to higher bitrates with 1440p/4K videos and now when they see a 1080p video they are surprised by the quality change, see the "Enhanced bitrate" option and make this assumption.
I have gone back to old videos and they are just the same as they were. They have been transcoded to AV1, but that codec is magic, they are probably using less bitrate now than they were when released.
Right. I haven't been able to actually do my own testing for life reasons, but I think it matters less what the actual numbers are here, and more that the guy stopped posting free 4k versions once the paid 1080p option came out; basically cutting his quality down in the name of, whatever benefit he gets from the paid 1080p thing.
In short, YouTube added a paid feature that encouraged the use of a shittier quality unpaid user experience. Worse, because it appears to be a choice on the creators side, instead of YouTube or the viewer, it shifts blame from YouTube, who created the situation in the first place, to the creator, who only took advantage of it (or used it because this is their job and they need the money to live).
He doesnt get a benefit afaik. Its automated by YouTube, some (1080p) videos get it, some dont. Thats why is might look shit, this creator just has a worse setup now and isnt encoding his videos with a good enough bitrate. If YouTube think your video will benefit from more bitrate, then it transcodes in a higher bitrate, if it doesnt, then that enhanced option doesnt even appear.
Agreed. The service needs to justify the resources it uses somehow. Personally, I even think locking 4k playback completely behind subscriptions would have been justified by the much higher bandwidth required as long as that also meant subsidizing a better experience for everyone staying free on 1080p and below. That feels like a more reasonable balance to me than them frantically trying to get enough ad revenue to make up the difference, but what do I know?
Adding new features and charging for them can absolutely be a component of enshitification.
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.
If your product stays current/modern with paid new features and the free portion is left to rot, it is enshitification. Enshitification is not a specific behavior or feature set. It is a product lifecycle of first tailoring your product to the customers to increase market share, then tailoring to advertisers to increase revenue and solidify market dominance, then tailoring to investors and squeezing your customers and advertisers for every last penny and cutting costs wherever possible as your product becomes worse and worse for the original customers. It's the shifting of target audience and abandonment of the previous that is a natural byproduct of infinite growth.
Enshitification is not simply "product becomes worse because x". Though, I'd argue that diverting resources to premium features while allowing the non-premium features to become obsolete is a tangable worsening of a product.
I disagree. If your free version isn't changing, then it isn't enshitification. This is the freemium model. It gives basic functionality to everyone in hopes of converting them to (or using them to attract) paid users. That's not enshitification. That's giving someone a free sample.
This I agree with, I just don't think it is an accurate description of the situation above.
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...
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.
You do not need to live this way. I've never seen a YouTube ad.
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.